Angela Goh

Fine Arts, Sydney is presenting an exhibition of work by Angela Goh. Angela Goh is an artist who works with dance and choreography. Her work is presented in contemporary art contexts and traditional performance spaces.

Angela Goh will perform her solo dance work ‘Total’. This is the first presentation of ‘Total’ in Sydney. ‘Total’ has been performed at Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art for the 11th Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art (2024—2025), Brisbane, Australia; and at the Leeum Museum of Art as part of ‘Idea Museum’ and Ob/Scene Festival (2024), Seoul, South Korea.

This year Angela Goh will present two newly-commissioned works for the 16th Gwangju Biennale, Gwangju, South Korea, and for the 18th Lyon Biennale of Contemporary Art, Lyon, France. Her work has recently been presented at Buxton Contemporary, Melbourne; Astrup Fearnley Museet, Oslo; Haus der Kunst, Munich; Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney; National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne; Sydney Opera House, Sydney; Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Sydney; Performance Space New York; Auto Italia, London; and Taipei Performing Arts Center, Taipei. Her work ‘Body Loss’ is the first work of dance to be acquired by a museum collection of contemporary art in Australia.


“’Total’ is a solo that has more to do with dancing in the third person than speaking in the first.
On the one hand, gestures catch a ride on the body, on the other hand, the body rides the gestures. Temporal drag, kicking up dust, making a smokescreen. The closer the dance gets to the body, the further the body gets out of view.
On the one hand, it waves to you.
On the other hand, you look back.
On the other, the hand is another.

Total is a solo performance that continues on from a question that was present in the process of another work, ‘Sky Blue Mythic’. The question of, how to dance in the third person. In ‘Sky Blue Mythic’, I attempted to address this question through a process of inversion, by imagining I was a dance, personing, rather than a person, dancing, and through other technical and literal inversions of the body and the performance space. In ‘Total’, I came back to this question to try to understand how the body can speak to things other than itself, how a mode of address first has to define a distance in order to generate proximity, and how – through abstracting the visible source of a gesture – the body becomes entangled in a crisis of attribution, leading to cracks in the notion of selfhood so that other imaginations might sneak through. The category of personhood is not synonymous only with the human—rivers and mountains have been granted legal personhood in order to offer them protection under a system that is highly anthropocentric. In this split between person and human, ‘Total’ plays with the gestural in order to remake the body and its parts, and hold the other within.“
— Angela Goh


Performances will be on 15 and 22 August. Details will follow.

For further information please contact the gallery directly: +61 (0) 2 9361 6200 / email@finearts.sydney