Pythagoras

Artist and filmmaker Ho Tzu Nyen is interested in veils and ventriloquism, and in the puppeteer’s hidden hands that hold power. Perhaps as a reaction to life in a tightly-policed city state, Ho’s films and theatre productions work towards a slow unmasking of the apparatuses of power; both within the medium and outside, in the making of myth and history.

Ho’s exhibit at the Kochi-Muziris Biennale, Pythagoras (2013), is an atmospheric installation that brings together many of his video works, all threaded together by a kinetic multimedia performance called Pythagoras.

Pythagoras, the Greek philosopher, also founded a secretive religion grounded in mathematics, metaphysics and speculative cosmology (known as Pythagoreanism) in which new followers were imparted the doctrine by him from behind a veil. Taking a cue from this concealment of voice and power, Ho, in Pythagoras, uses a video of moving curtains projected onto a screen composed of layers of mechanised curtains. Hidden behind the screen is the ‘apparatus’– a sound and light installation which is revealed in the course of the performance as the curtains dance and part.

Of the other three videos in this live spectacle, two are short films: Newton (2009) and Gould (2013), both fantastical accounts that take off from the lives of the figures they are named after– physicist Isaac Newton and pianist and composer Glenn Gould. The third video, Earth, is culled from a 2009 film by the artist. It presents the site of an unnamed disaster, a landscape littered with garbage and bodies that drift between consciousness and unconsciousness.