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• 1 2020-12-12T00:16:57+00:00 XINA XURNER 142 Young Joon Kwak and Marvin Astorga image_header 2021-03-01T23:38:16+00:00 XINA XURNER
  
  
  Through the use of sound and performance, Xina Xurner creates a space where collective healing and shapeshifting can occur. Xina Xurner is an experimental music/performance art collaboration between Marvin Astorga and Young Joon Kwak, whose cathartic performances combine DIY and power electronics, mutated vocals, and bad drag, to expand ideas about queer and trans bodies.
  
  Their music combines a variety of genres, in order to create sadical and sexperimental noise-diva-dance anthems that evoke a sense of death, decay, and transformation. Through their music and performances, Xina Xurner deals with themes of desire, rage, sexuality, pain, joy, and laughter - all feelings that accompany expressing one’s true self. When viewing Xina Xurner’s videos, one realizes that social constructs such as gender are constantly in flux; their work aims to make space for their audience to question how we categorize people. Experiencing their music is a cathartic experience; it allows the listener to dance-their-butt-off through their own transformation.
  
  Their first debut album, “DIE”, was released in 2012, followed by “Queens of the Night” in 2018. Past performance spaces and events include sCum, The Smell, the Hammer Museum, Cool World, Mustache Mondays, LACE, Smart Museum of Art (Chicago), Bath Salts (NYC), and Bitchpork (Chicago), as well as international performances in Paris, Tokyo, Seoul, and Mexico City.
  
  
  
  
  
  GENTLE
  
  
  Yellow Fish
  Yellow
  Yellow, yellow, yellow
  Sunshine, yellow
  Warm Yellow.
  
  I am perfect for you
  See, all tightly wound;
  A Christmas present,
  Beckoning to be opened.
  
  I am a little treat
  Caught fresh for you.
  Bathe me, love me,
  Set me free.
  
  My body is a cage,
  And I’m drowning inside.
  Release me from my own
  Mind,
  And let me out to sea.
  
  A fish does not question
  Why it swims that way.
  A wave does not question
  Why it crashes.
  
  Existence
  Is not a question.
  
  Written by Hannah Scott
  In response to "Gentle" by Xina Xurner
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  POPPERS.................................................................................................................
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  Director of Poppers, Lila de Magalhaes uses her aesthetic of combining the femininity of pastels and softness with the grotesque and brutal. She conjures a Dionysian, orgiastic scene emerging from a pond, waterlilies and unbundled bouquets of flowers floating on top, which is revealed, as the camera pulls back, as located in a pick-up truck’s loading area. Bubbly clear liquid is running across the tarred ground, meandering around tires; champagne in abundance or soapy water from a car wash? The scene peels out of the dark of a Los Angeles back ally slash parking lot with red brick buildings and welded fences partly emerging from the background. For a split second, we see a poster of Daryl Hannah as a mermaid from the 1984 comedy Splash cut into the scene. Young Joon Kwak, singer of Xina Xurner floats face down in underwear in the pick-up truck pond. As the hands of the participants of the ceremony turn her face-up, Swiss symbolist painter Arnold Boecklin’s ‘Isle of the Dead’ is cut in, and we know we are witnessing an awakening of some sort, a return from the dead.
  
  Marvin Astorga, Xina Xurner's instrumentalist poses as a bacchanalian figure with laurels around their head, a grey-blue toga folding around their body, dark wooden pearl necklace and other jewelry hanging and swinging form their neck as they gaze into a crystal ball. When the music finally sets in, after a preparatory overture of electronic, glitchy sounds, Young Joon's high-pitched altered voice heralds a ritual of partying and re-birth: Acupuncture needles, fingernails in close-up, an oversized Martini glass filled with a gooey orange-pink liquid, metallic-blue lips, wig-moshing and a group of bikini-wearing occultist party guests, blending into one visual stew of a clip, greeting the viewer from the very much alive nature-morte-assemblage-tray that de Magalhaes has turned the truck into in just about a minute.
  
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  Oscillating between the deeply serious, the infernal, the ridiculous and grotesque the video captures the spirit of what Xina Xurner are going for. Which is just about everything. The expression of the human experience as exemplified and amplified in the queer human experience in an improvised, provisional, powerful performance captured in one short night flashes from the YouTube window onto viewers’ retinas. The clip couldn’t be more misplaced (or better placed, depending on how you look at it) on this video platform whose logo reminds us that our world is one of administration, guided by electronic surveillance, data mining and commodity fetishism, infused with the nihilism of the capitalist system and its negligence towards any real depth. It is worth noting that this system on the surface is not negligent towards difference. It has learned to monetize everything but hardly gets on the inside of anything. This is the dance of the dead we are dancing, in disguise, not admitting to it. Xina Xurner turn this inside out, make it visible, tangible, conscious.
  
  Finding openings to the closed systems generated and protected by mainstream culture, using the power of vulnerability and a realness that employs fake and exaggeration to render truth, embracing sexuality and unapologetic difference is what Xina Xurner prescribe as the antidote to the superficiality of a soulless and soul-eating structure. This affirmative, maximalist approach that the duo is going for performatively and musically is wonderfully mirrored in de Magalhaes’ approach to the videography in which she freely mixes various ritualistic gestures and is generous with art historical references down to the Caravaggian altogether baroque-ish look of the clip.
  
  Ritual is echoed throughout the clip as is partying in its many forms. Leaning into excess is used for its cathartic and rebooting effect. Ritual is Xina Xurner’s vessel of choice to deliver the medicine that in reference to the title of the track best creates the condition to be in when inner calm in service of liberation is desired. Relaxation.
  
  
  
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  Notes from co-curators Hannah Scott and Marcus Herse
  
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  Director of Poppers Lila de Magalhaes lives and works in Los Angeles. She holds an MFA from the University of Southern California and a BA from Glasgow School of Art, Glasgow, UK. Her recent solo and two-person exhibitions include Cupid of Chaos, Ghebaly Gallery, LA; A Soft Flea, Mutt. R, LA; Remote Control, Abode, LA; Exhibition (10), SPF15, San Diego; and Motorfruit, Blood Gallery, NY. She has appeared as well in numerous group exhibitions, including Porch Gallery, Ojai; Company Gallery, NY; Freedman Fitzpatrick, LA; François Ghebaly, LA; ltd los angeles, LA; Steve Turner, LA, PANE Project, Milan; Julius Caesar, Chicago; and 356 Mission, LA. Palace of Errors in 2019 was her first solo exhibition with Deli Gallery.
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  BURN SLOW
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  Director of Burn Slow and Gentle Christopher Richmond (b. 1986) earned his MFA from the Roski School of Art and Design at USC in 2012. His video and photographic works have been widely exhibited in galleries around the world, and his work can be found in notable collections including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA). He lives and works in Los Angeles.
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  https://www.xinaxurner.com
  
  
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