Expressing Hunger



PAINTING HUNGER


Research Projects:
Hidden Hunger 1
Hidden Hunger 2

A participatory exercise that uses the light painting method to capture the conscious and subconscious upper body movements expressing one's experience of dealing with food insecurity.

How to investigate, study and capture the embodied expression of hunger sensation through the means of body movements?
Los Angeles, 2017




 
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"I'll describe it as helpless, like i'm disable. I'll stand in one place and no place to go and nothing to do. It's like a coffin."










"A major part of our brain is busy with automatic processes not conscious thinking. A lot of emotions and less cognitive activities happen.”


George Loewenstein, Behavioral Economist





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"I was loading all this film and I realised I was shaking. I didn't know I was shaking. Then I realised I didn't had time to eat all day. So I hadn't eaten for 13 hours. I just didn't realised that becasue i was doing all this work."









We, as humans, are emotional beings and usually express our feelings through verbal language and body movements especially via hands.
The Painting hunger visualizes the physical embodiment of food insecurity among college students.
The vibrant and vigorous lines are long exposure photographs describing their personal experience of the moment of starvation on the campus while being engaged in a conversation with the artist.






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“I think the stress is like a black hole that kind of twirls and it gets deeper and deeper and its affect of expanding to envelope lot of other stuff. It has a way of sucking things into this vortex that you cannot swim out of, you are swimming backwards in a way."







The exercise was performed in a dark room where participants wore light props on their arms and were engaged in the conversation with the artist without any instructions to perform. The final images were captured at the exact moment when the participants were describing the time they were famished on the campus and were bounded by the unruly constraints to get somthing to eat.


Location: ArtCenter College of Design, Pasadena, California, USA
Participants: ArtCenter students
Mentor: Elizabeth Chin
Year: 2017
Publication: none






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“I think the stress is like a black hole that kind of twirls and it gets deeper and deeper and its affect of expanding to envelope lot of other stuff. It has a way of sucking things into this vortex that you cannot swim out of, you are swimming backwards in a way."





The project is a continuation of the artist's Hidden hunger, a research-based project that questions the different aspects of food insecurity among campus students


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Mark