Wedding of All Times
Artist – Yanyi „Sunny“ Jiang
Performance on August 21, 2015
Gorna Lipnitsa, Bulgaria
The Оld School Art Residency – Ritual art : Time and Space, 2015
As one of the oldest and most universal rituals of mankind, a wedding celebrates the union of two people. In the Wedding of All Times, however, we celebrate the marriage of two times, Past and Future.
Carrying two distinctive halves, the artist herself represents both the Past and the Future. The wedding follows the modern-day ceremony, including acts of Poem Reading, Ring Exchange, Unity Candle Lighting. In the end, the Officiant (Mayor of Gorna Lipnitsa) pronounces Past and Future married and thus completes the union of the two times.
Nonetheless, this performance is intended to be of a paradoxical nature. Despite the theme of unity, the motif of division is omnipresent, as the dress, veil, shoes, bouquet, music, and even cocktails of the wedding all mark a clear separation of the two times. This sharp contrast raises the ultimate question: by uniting the past and the future, do we achieve the present? Does the fusion of memories and predictions create the “now”?
Critical audience members may also have noticed the absence of continuous flow of time in this piece. There is neither romantic encounter before the wedding, nor honeymoon after. Everything happens at the moment and freezes at the present, awkwardly inserting a “now” into the gap of past and future. The Wedding of All Times is eventually a satire, mocking our doctrinaire perception of time as being linear and unidirectional.
The events will be organised within the framework of the project Оrganizing and conducting of The Old School residency on the topic of Ritual Art – Time and Space financed by a grant under BG 08 Cultural Heritage and Contemporary Arts Programme of the EEA financial mechanism – Small grant scheme „Contemporary art and culture presented and reaching a broader audience” .
