Gabi Dao
Directing
Biography
Gabi Dao is an artist based in Canada. She completed a BFA at Emily Carr University of Art and Design in 2014. In 2016 she was a recipient of the Portfolio Prize award for emerging artists. Her work questions the condition of aesthetic experiences through installation based work, bringing together elements of sculpture, sound and lighting. Dao co-organises exhibitions, readings, musical performances, and other happenings at the studio and project space DUPLEX.
Known For
A vampiric trio facilitates the transition of a new host across a former limestone quarry and the sacred mountain grotto of Mary Magdalene, troubling the binaries of life, death, gender and parasitism. Monuments to female saints become poses of living queer memory, as skeletal remains are transformed with embellishments. A mosquito draws blood with its proboscis and hormones are drawn using a syringe, as the remnants of an extracted zone is now overgrown with lifeforms.
Resurrect Me as a Parasite
Playfully collapsing the space between Hollywood Cinema and what Dao refers to as 'Domestic Cinema', The Protagonists explores relationships between representation and reality. Motifs of a clumsy animatronic hand, colorful smoke bombs, a backyard garden and a metronome become characters – protagonists, so to speak – in the deconstruction of filmic colonisation.
The Protagonists
A bat marionette’s odyssey through colonial mythologies, echoing the xenophobic scapegoating of COVID-19. Puppetry becomes a tool to dissect the "uncharismatic fauna" of capitalism.