Whiskey Chow & Ro Robertson

Experience a screening of two filmed performances, one by Whiskey Chow, a performance artist and Chinese drag king, and the other by Ro Roberston, who explores the terrain of the Queer body, straddling sculpture, drawing, and performance for the camera in Sexuality Summer School Presents (Up) Against Nature: Whiskey Chow & Ro Robertson at Contact.

Whiskey will show ‘you must everywhere wander 你必顧盼’: a hybrid of performance, CGI animation and sound art, exploring queer body materialization and radical care; and Ro ‘birth build shift’ a performance for camera made on a beach popular with nudists on the Lands End peninsular, Cornwall.

Each artist will be present and will respond to their own work with a spoken piece, and the event will end with a dialogue between the artists and an audience Q&A, chaired by Jackie Stacey from the University of Manchester’s Sexuality Summer School.

‘you must everywhere wander 你必顧盼’ by Whiskey Chow was exhibited for On Queer Ground at Yorkshire Sculpture Park during the Summer of Love program 2022. Showcasing an imaginative queer masculine bodyscape, where the spices used in Chinese cooking grow as spectacular natural landscapes. This work combines filmed performance, CGI animation and sound art. It draws on Chinese myth and a sense of belonging from an Asian queer diasporic perspective. ‘you must everywhere wander 你必顧盼’ is a meeting point of transgressive queer desire, a dream homeland and reality.

birth build shift (2022), Ro Robertson’s performance for camera, draws on the energy of the tidal zone to traverse the terrain of the queer body. Moving from the shoreline to cliff crevice, forces of erosion, the movement of the tide and shifting of rocks dissolve the boundaries between body and landscape. birth build shift was exhibited for On Queer Ground at Yorkshire Sculpture Park during the Summer of Love program 2022.

Presented by the Sexuality Summer School, Centre for the Study of Sexuality & Culture, University of Manchester