Weaving together fiction and documentary, reality and fantasy, Angela Su’s video essays reflect on the capacity of bodies to withstand pain, to be transformed, and thereby to bear witness to injustice. In doing so they expose the invisible forces and constructed narratives that constrain individuals in society.
Lacrima is purportedly based on the life of a clairvoyant, quantum physicist, and Surrealist artist called Nina Palladino. Her story is linked to the disappearance in advance of an exhibition of the artist “Angela Su,” the construction of electromagnetic portals between worlds, and a series of unexplained events on the mysterious, mist-shrouded island of the work’s title…
Combining clips from filmmakers as varied as Georges Méliès, Hans Richter, Luis Buñuel, and the choreographer Busby Berkeley, Su builds an alternative reality out of unsettling correspondences, secret patterns, psychographic messages, and dream logics. The viewer is invited to take a “leap of faith” into worlds beyond ordinary perception that, for all their strangeness, hold up a mirror to the violence and injustice that shape our own.
