Invocation for a Wandering Lake
Patty Chang
张怡
Production date
2016
Object Detail
Media
two channel video (color, sound), cardboard
Measurements
Desert: 12 min 58 sec
Water: 12 min 58 sec
Water: 12 min 58 sec
Notes
In 2009 Chang travelled to Xinjiang province, following in the footsteps of Swedish explorer Sven Hedin, who led a significant Sino-Swedish expedition between 1927 and 1933 that located hundreds of archaeologically significant sites between Manchuria and Xinjiang. In 1938 Hedin had published a book, The Wandering Lake, that recounts his search for a mysterious vanishing body of water named Lop Nur. He undertook several expeditions to locate this lake, which many years later became a Chinese Government nuclear weapons test site. Chang was fascinated by this phenomenon of the elusive migrating lake, but she was prevented from returning to Xinjiang due to tightening government control over the Uyghur Muslim population; she therefore sought out other similarly remote and damaged locations. Invocation for a Wandering Lake (2016), a video installation in two parts projected onto long, folding cardboard panels, represents alternative sites, ‘stand-ins’ for Lop Nur. The first part of the installation was filmed on the rocky shores of Fogo Island in Newfoundland, Canada. Chang stands thigh-deep in the waves and washes the partially beached, rotting body of a sperm whale. Part 2 shows the artist in Uzbekistan, scrubbing the rusted hull of a beached vessel, a boat listing on pale sand that was once the sea bed: the Aral Sea lost up to 80 percent of its volume due to the Soviet Union’s ill-conceived irrigation projects of the 1960s. Part 1 speaks of indescribable sorrow as Chang gently washes the carcass, just as human bodies are washed and anointed before funerary rites. Part 2 considers the impact of human intervention on natural cycles and systems. Chang thought the act of washing was an invocation, a devotional ritual of cleansing.
Accession number
2018.022