Poetic Translation: In-Conversation

Poetic Translation: In-Conversation

Angie Kilsby and Ziyi Wei

Moderated by MaggZ

6:30-8pm, Friday 14 November, 2025

Please join us for a special screening and in-conversation event with artists Angie Kilsby and Ziyi Wei, moderated by artist, creative director, and producer MaggZ.

This event forms part of Poetic Translation, an online moving-image exhibition developed in partnership with Blindside and featuring short works by Angie Kilsby and Ziyi Wei. The program explores themes of identity, cultural hybridity, and translation across languages and contexts.

Curated by Shannon May Powell, Ming Liew, and Channon Goodwin, Poetic Translation is part of Blindside Mobile, a curated online platform for digital projects organised by Blindside.

Poetic Translation brings together two practices that engage deeply with questions of return, hybridity, and diasporic experience. Both artists navigate the tensions between cultural inheritance and lived experience, offering distinct perspectives on what it means to inhabit—and translate between—multiple worlds at once.

ผู้สังเกต (Observer) by Angie Kilsby is a reflective video work composed of found footage from a recent return to the artist’s homeland, Thailand. Through a Luk Khreung (half-Thai) lens, the work moves through the “third space,” where language, place, and self fracture and fold into a quiet negotiation of belonging. Disrupting fixed notions of Thai-ness and the structure of the Thai language, the piece meditates on cultural hybridity through moments of dissonance, estrangement, and re-encounter. Drifting between observation and personal archaeology, Observer becomes a lyrical act of looking—both toward home and from its shifting edges.

Qiánniāng’s Journey West: Milan Odyssey / 黔孃西游纪行:米兰奥德赛 by Ziyi Wei is a two-part documented performance filmed in a club in Guiyang. Staging a nail salon setting, pearl-chain constraints, traditional instruments, and red warning lights, it conjures webs of female labour—at once seductive snares and inexhaustible engines of desire. The work interrogates hyper-consumption, gendered corporeality, and the attrition of ethnic culture under Western-capitalist regimes. Returning from Australia, the artist reconsiders the politicisation of the Asian female body, exposing a dual misrecognition: the East’s estrangement from the West and the West’s fantasmatic Orient, where identity remains suspended in displacement.

Image: ผู้สังเกต, 2025, Angie Kilsby, moving image work, courtesy of the artist.