NP
Monash University Museum of Art, Naarm/Melbourne
NP is a performance-exhibition by Australian born, Amsterdam-based artist Ivan Cheng which presents video and installation as a setting for three new performances. Using historical and contemporary performance conventions, Cheng invites the audience to be conscious of the acts of reading and interpreting. The role of memory – human and machinic – and the accumulation and caching of information underpins Cheng’s process.
In the creation of NP, Cheng responds to the context of MUMA as a museum within an education setting. The performances, which stage new and existing texts by Cheng, were developed with Year 11 visual arts students from Melbourne’s Victorian College of the Arts Secondary School. Following a period of postal correspondence, Cheng and the student collaborators undertook a development intensive, unpacking a series of ‘gifts’ from guest artists which intervened in the production of costumes and scenography. The title of the project, NP, is an abbreviation for ‘no problem’, ‘no place’ and ‘North Pole’, alluding to Santa Claus, gift economies and wish fulfillment.
The exhibition presents a selection of Cheng’s video which focus on the edit as a methodology, and which invite the audience to find resonances between the works. The videos reflect the development of Cheng’s vernacular across different contexts and conditions. Cheng approaches video as a form of entertainment and engagement rather than a faithful document of live performance.
NP draws an association between the USB (Universal Serial Bus) and the vehicular bus, which condense and transport data or groups of people respectively. The bus as it appears in NP indicates the compressed public, distinct from individual car travel or the network model of the internet. Buses and USBs appear on top of line-following robots and as a toy model referencing Jean Prouvé’s prefabricated colonial houses. Garments from past performances are presented alongside costumes by the student collaborators and Christmas decorations loaned from their families. The installation also reuses elements of previous MUMA exhibitions as scenography. In these ways, Cheng transforms MUMA into a fantasy of the North Pole as a site of production which questions the role of the authority figure.










Photographs Rudi Williams