Zadie Xa – Child of Magohalmi and the Echos of Creation, Performance Commission

Young Collectors Collective (YCC) invites you to join us in raising 1,500GBP to support an exciting new immersive performance commission by Zadie Xa 'Child of Magohalmi and the Echos of Creation'.

Unveiled at Art Night London (June 22 2019) in the historic Walthamstow Library, it will travel to Baku and Glasgow in 2019.

For her Art Night 2019 commission London-based, Canadian artist Zadie Xa will stage a multimedia theatrical installation in the historic reading room of Walthamstow Library. Audiences are invited to enter into an immersive, subaquatic and marine environment of spoken word and sonic interludes. The artist will present an origin story inspired loosely by Korean folkloric creation myths that centre around women and the passing down of ancestral knowledge through matrilineal social structures by way of atmospheric lighting, surround sound and large-scale video projections, interrupted by impromptu performances by dancers and musicians throughout the night.

Funds raised by YCC will go towards making this new performance commission happen, which will premiere in London and in turn travel to Baku and Glasgow.

All funders will be invited to a series of private events:

- Private party at Phillips, London (May 23) presenting Zadie Xa's performance at the 58th Venice Biennale

- Private preview of the commissioned performance with Zadie Xa in Walthamstow (June 21).

Child of Magohalmi and the Echos of Creation is developed with Benito Mayor Vallejo and Iris Chan, Jia-Yu Corti, Jihye Kim and Yumino Seki.It is funded in collaboration with Art Night London; Yarat, Baku; Tramway, Glasgow; De La Warr Pavilion, UK.

About Zadie Xa

Zadie Xa uses live performance, video, painting and textiles to question how cultures inform identities and notions of self. Her layered costume works are sites for exploring personal cultural histories that stitch together personally relevant imagery sourced from music, digital space, fashion and art history. Xa has developed a system of personalised symbols that propose entirely new images and objects, creating a personal visual language for articulating nuanced Asian identity narratives, which are frequently situated within fantastical or supernatural realms.

About Art Night London

Art Night is London’s largest free contemporary art festival. Each year the festival partners with a leading cultural institution and/or independent curator, focusing on a different area of London to explore its distinctive identity, culture and architecture through various forms of art.

Art Night 2019 is curated by Helen Nisbet and takes place in Walthamstow and King’s Cross on 22 June with a small selection of projects open for the Family Trail on 23 June. The Art Night Open is a selection of over 40 independently curated projects selected through an open call.

The historic Walthamstow Library is a Victorian Grade II* listed building, built with money donated by the Scottish-American businessman and philanthropist Andrew Carnegie, whose portrait bust can be seen on the exterior of the building.