Threads of Time — Singapore Art Week, PhD Practice Reflection
As part of my PhD practice, I presented Threads of Time, a live, site-responsive street performance developed and performed during Singapore Art Week 2026. The work sits within my ongoing research into ritual, temporality, and embodied knowledge, and explores how ancient ceremonial structures can be activated through contemporary performance in public space.
The starting point for this performance came from time spent at the Asian Civilisations Museum. I was particularly drawn to a ritual mask in the collection—not only because of its form, but because it belongs to a living ritual system that is activated only at specific moments in the year.
The mask is associated with Hudoq, a ritual masking tradition from Central Borneo in East Kalimantan, Indonesia. Hand-carved Dayak masks, made by Indigenous communities such as the Bahau and Modang, are used in healing rituals and agricultural ceremonies. During Hudoq festivals, the mask is worn only once a year, marking the agricultural cycle and invoking protection and renewal. What resonated strongly with my research was the inseparability of the object from time, seasonality, and collective participation. The act of wearing the mask is itself ceremonial—an embodied crossing between cycles, linking humans, spirits, and the land.
Threads of Time responds to this ritual logic not through representation, but through material, gesture, and duration. Red yarn became the central element of the performance, standing in for labour, care, continuity, and the repetitive actions that structure both ritual and everyday life. Performers slowly unravel and re-weave the thread through cyclical, task-based movements. These actions stretch time, allowing gestures to accumulate meaning. At the centre of the work, a small golden egg is gradually revealed, functioning as a quiet symbol of transformation, resilience, and potential held within repetition.
The performance unfolded along the riverfront, turning public space into a temporary ritual site. Rather than functioning as a spectacle, the work invited quiet attention. People could encounter the performance briefly or stay with it over time, allowing ancient ceremonial structures to resonate gently within a contemporary urban environment.
The work was structured across four live sessions, reflecting the rhythm of the four seasons. Two sessions took place in the morning and two in the afternoon. Audiences were free to join at any point along the route or observe from a distance. This openness was intentional, positioning the performance as a passing ritual embedded within everyday movement rather than a fixed event.
The first two sessions were performed by Elena Ryabchenko, Marina Sinitsyna, and myself. Bringing together performers from Belarus, Russia, and Kazakhstan, this trio was conceived through the symbolic framework of the Moirai—the mythological figures who spin, measure, and cut the thread of life. These sessions foregrounded time, destiny, and the cyclical nature of human labour and care.
During these sessions, we wore bird masks. The bird figures emphasised ideas of fate, distance, and cyclical time, suggesting movement between realms—earth and sky, past and future. The performers functioned less as individual characters and more as temporal messengers, situated within a mythic and seasonal structure shaped by repetition and return.
The second two sessions shifted toward an intergenerational and familial structure. These were performed by myself, my daughters Liza (5) and Alica (15), and our nanny Chai Foon, bringing together four generations and multiple cultural backgrounds. Here, the work moved away from mythic archetypes and toward lived continuity. Family, care, inheritance, and learning became visible through shared action. The presence of children introduced unpredictability and responsiveness, grounding the ritual in everyday relationships.
In these sessions, we wore chicken masks. Unlike birds associated with flight or transcendence, the chicken is domestic and grounded, closely tied to daily rhythms of care, feeding, and vigilance. Worn by four generations—my daughters, our nanny, and myself—the chicken masks shifted attention away from personal identity and toward intergenerational presence. Rather than producing a cast of characters, the masked bodies revealed a lineage of embodied memory, where gestures were learned, mirrored, adapted, and carried across ages.
Taken together, the two performer groups form a complete cycle: myth and family, destiny and care, past and future. Across the four sessions, Threads of Time operates as a living calendar—woven through movement, thread, and shared presence in public space. Rather than treating ritual as a static reference, the performance explores how ritual knowledge continues to live through bodies, relationships, and repeated acts of care.
This way of working aligns closely with the thinking of anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, particularly his writing on masks and artistic creation. Lévi-Strauss challenges the Western idea of the solitary artistic genius, arguing instead that creativity always emerges within social, historical, and cultural structures. The artist, in his view, is a bricoleur—working with inherited materials, symbols, and systems rather than creating in isolation.
Seen through this lens, Threads of Time does not attempt to invent ritual anew or position itself as an autonomous artistic gesture. Instead, it acknowledges its place within layered cultural systems: ritual calendars, textile traditions, mythological figures, family structures, and embodied labour. The red thread, the seasonal structure, the masks, and the intergenerational bodies function as fragments drawn from a shared cultural archive.
Within my PhD practice, this reinforces the understanding of performance as a living structure rather than a personal statement. Threads of Time does not stand alone; it answers, listens, and re-weaves—positioning artistic practice as a relational act embedded within cultural time rather than outside of it.