Dumb Type

Established 1984 in Kyoto, Japan

White Bay Power Station

S/N, 1994
single channel video with sound
11 minutes

Presentation at the 24th Biennale of Sydney was made possible with generous support from the National Center for Art Research, Japan. Courtesy the artists.

On screen, members of the performance collective Dumb Type physically take on the role of noise distortion by colliding with, and trying to outpace, representations of communication transmission. With an integral member of the group (Teiji Furuhashi, 1960–95) publicly having come out as HIV positive via the original performance, Dumb Type literally and symbolically contends with the media silence that surrounded the HIV/AIDS epidemic in its first decades.

Blurring the line between personal experience and political reality, the collective was one of the most prolific performance art groups of the 1990s. Since their formation, they have combined drag, experimental theatre and installation to interrogate the impacts of burgeoning technologies and the evergrowing influence of capitalism on human, especially queer, lives. Named for the ratio of signal (desired messaging) and noise (background sound) in audio engineering, S/N questions the boundaries between communication and noise, self and society, silence and suppression.

Read more about the 24th Biennale of Sydney, Ten Thousand Suns, by purchasing the catalogue here.