FASTWÜRMS
DONKY@NINJA@WITCH
26 September – 9 December 2007
DONKY@NINJA@WITCH brings together new works by FASTWÜRMS with the re-staging of several key FASTWÜRMS’ Queen Street West storefront exhibitions-in their conflation of Witch and Queer cultures at Zsa Zsa and Paul Petro Contemporary Art: a mega/monster re-mix of elements from House of Bangs (1999), Blood & Swash (2002), Pirate Head (2004), Gusset Nation (2004), and Blood Clock (2005).
New work premiered for this solo exhibition includes Pink Donky, a new installation, and Witch vs. Ninja, an original FASTWÜRMS’ HD video production shot on location in Venice, Italy and Scarlet Hill, Ontario.
Witch vs. Ninja is a radical “no budget” artist cinema project, drawing from the low budget lineage of Fist of Unicorn director Tong Dik (Hong Kong 1972) and the classic independent kung fu films of director Robert Tai, Shaolin vs. Ninja (Taiwan 1983) and Mafia vs. Ninja (Taiwan 1984).
The disconnected editing, absurdist and irrational plots, and out of phase and abstract English dubbing makes these underground kung fu classics the pop culture parallax and post-modern paradigm of the conceptual shift from matrixed acting to non-matrixed performing embraced as a key conceptual strategy in the early years of artist performance and video art.
Witch vs. Ninja features exciting visual/non-martial arts non-matrixed action and the sexy collision of “Beshiki-me” radical ninja feminism, “take back the night,” with the occult relational aesthetics and black collar labour negotiations of the Witch Nation, “workers of the night, unite!”
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