Programme: Suspicious Stain

The first artistic component of Qiong Zhang’s doctoral research project ‘Tracing Ghost Hallucinations in a World of Technological Surveillance’.

Qiong Zhang

Published 5.11.2024 | Updated 6.11.2024

Why do we escape? What are we fleeing from? How do we disengage from internalized surveillance?

“Suspicious Stain” is a performance that traces the bodily histories of women who grew up in China and are now based in various European countries, including Finland and Germany. It reflects on their perpetual flight from suspect identities: as Chinese citizens, women, ‘blood packages’, costs of rapid development, ‘huminerals’ (human minerals), patriarchal patches, and colonial fantasies. This work explores the constant diasporic state embodied by these women, focusing on internalized surveillance, bodily colonization, and extractive capitalism’s impact on the female body in a post-colonial context.

The work opens a dialogue on embodied shame, fears, and trauma carried by women who kept escaping without nostalgia. It invites both participants and audiences on a journey of escape and disengagement, unfolding through constant hesitation and disorientation.

“Suspicious Stain” is the artistic component of Qiong Zhang’s doctoral research project ‘Tracing Ghost Hallucinations in a World of Technological Surveillance’, with questions of how national identity might be constructed through individual and collective fantasies and imagination? How the concepts of surveillance being imagined and practiced within people’s everyday life ideologically and politically?