Purring Tiger:
MUJO Installation
Kiori Kawai, Aaron Sherwood, Surabhi Sharma
MUJO is a dance and live music performance using the sandy desert as the stage, with visuals projected on a large dune in which the dance takes place. The dancers, visuals, and sounds constantly assemble and disassemble in various forms, in a cathartic struggle of emotions and change. We build and achieve some shape, but there is nothing to hold onto as everything eventually falls apart like sand. MUJO (無常 – Japanese for impermanence) is a celebration of life’s diversity, expressed through a harmonious blend of dance, sound, and visual artistry underneath the starry sky out in the desert.
MUJO Installation is a multi-channel video/sound installation that is both an extension of the live performance and its own interpretation of the performance piece. The installation seeks to deconstruct and re-imagine the body and its response to, and impact on, the elements (sand, water, wind). The multiple instances of video and sound allow the possibility of repetition, working with and against stillness/movement, creating intimacy/distance. This fractured sense of a contiguous landscape allows an intervention into Kiori Kawai’s meditative choreography.
Exhibition Hours
Tuesday through Sunday: 12-8 PM. Closed on Mondays.
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Opening Reception: Thursday, September 26, 5:30 PM
Artist Bios
Purring Tiger
Purring Tiger is a multi-cultural, multimedia, interactive installation/performance group, led by choreographer/installation artist Kiori Kawai, and composer/new media artist Aaron Sherwood. Purring Tiger’s mission is to bring people together in the context of ART, in a subtext of WONDER.
Read moreKiori Kawai
Kiori Kawai (Japanese, b. 1978) is a dance performer/choreographer/interactive installation artist. As a dance performance artist/choreographer, she started her career in New York, she has worked with Carman Moore/Skymusic Inc., Elaine Summers Dance and Film, Lincoln Center (U.S), Serralves Contemporary Museum (Portugal), Transformation Festival (Denmark/U.S), Sharjah Biennial (U.A.E), New York University Abu Dhabi Art Gallery (U.A.E), touring internationally.
Read moreSheʼs built up her own improvisatory movement vocabulary based on the techniques of meditation, Kinetic Awareness, Contact Improv, yoga, and various dance/movement training. This led her to designing interactive installations that include human body movement within kinetic sculptures. https://www.kiorikawai.com/
Aaron Sherwood
Aaron Sherwood (American, b. 1977) is an interactive media artist/musician creating large-scale multi-sensory installations and performances. Exploring consciousness, cosmopoiesis, embodiment, entropy, and semiotics, he plays with patterns of emergence in seemingly chaotic systems.
Read moreAaron Sherwood (American, b. 1977) is an interactive media artist/musician creating large-scale multi-sensory installations and performances. Exploring consciousness, cosmopoiesis, embodiment, entropy, and semiotics, he plays with patterns of emergence in seemingly chaotic systems. His pieces usually find their genesis in small building blocks, which, when scaled up in number, combine to create complex systems of interdependent ebbs and flows. People are often placed in the center of these systems, positioned in-between micro and macro worlds. People are not mere spectators, but directly influence the complex systems Sherwood creates, enabling the systems to come alive. This mutual “making/forming” allows participants to experience their relationship to Environment in new ways. Sherwood has been commissioned to perform and/or exhibit across the US as well as in Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Japan, Portugal, Spain, and The United Arab Emirates. Sherwood is an Associate Arts Professor at New York University in Abu Dhabi. He holds a masters in Interactive Telecommunications from New York University and a B.F.A. in Jazz and Contemporary Music from the New School University in New York.
Surabhi Sharma
Surabhi Sharma has been an independent filmmaker making feature-length documentaries and short films since 2000. Her documentaries, fiction, and video installations engage with cities in transition using the lens of labor, music, and migration.
Read moreSurabhi is visiting faculty at the National Institute of Design (NID), Ahmedabad; Whistling Woods International, Mumbai; Sophia Polytechnic, Mumbai and K.R. Narayanan National Institute of Visual Science and Arts, Kerala. She has conducted intensive workshops on documentary filmmaking at design and film schools in India and is a Mentor for The Documentary Resource Initiative India.
She was awarded The Motion Picture Association – Asia Pacific Screen Awards (MPA-APSA) Academy Film Fund, Brisbane, Australia for her ongoing documentary film project Music in a Village Named 1 PB. She has received grants and fellowships from Ford Foundation, Majlis Cultural Centre and the Brit-Doc Foundation. Her films have been recognized and awarded at the 8th Asia Pacific Screen Awards, Brisbane 2016; Eco-Cinema, Greece 2003 (The Ramsar-Medwet Award), Film South Asia, Kathmandu 2001; Karachi Film Festival 2002; and The Festival of Three Continents, Buenos Aires 2002.