Joshua Serafin: Touching The Void

Philippines-born Joshua Serafin is among a new generation of artists connecting performance with speculative futurism, queer subcultures and postcolonial thinking. From Berlin to Hong Kong to New York, Serafin has entranced audiences with intense, otherworldly performances that convey feelings of otherness and the freedom of nightlife, distilling complex issues with captivating movement.

“We can move and dance as we do, but such choreography is empty if there’s no context within it,” says the artist over Zoom from their Brussels home. “My context comes from research, struggle, heartbreak and my experience of injustice towards the migrant body. But also how we understand narrative and stories beyond ourselves. What are our privileges? What is the world going through?”

I spoke to Serafin, 28, a few months after they performed Void (2022-present) at the 60th Venice Biennale; the art world equivalent of the Olympics, it takes place in the maze-like sinking city every two years. Encompassing choreography, dance, filmmaking, installation, painting and drawing, Serafin’s multidisciplinary practice tackles complex themes like transmigration and queer politics in a striking, shamanistic fashion. Their work has garnered so much attention that Forbes included Serafin in its ‘30 Under 30 – Asia’ list this year, a rare achievement for a visual artist. “It’s very surreal for me,” they say. “I think it’s everyone’s dream and it’s been quite a crazy ride.”

Raised in a working-class family in the Philippines, Serafin’s art journey began when they auditioned for the Philippine High School for the Arts, which was visiting towns across the country to audition children for creative fields. “Long story short, I passed as a theatre major,” says Serafin, who was also exposed to ballet and visual art. “While doing theatre during the school year, I trained as a ballet dancer every summer. When I graduated high school, I decided to pursue dancing full-time.” Serafin later moved to Hong Kong before settling in Belgium to continue formal academic education at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts (KASK) in Ghent.

“I was looking for more context and ideologies to understand what dance beyond the body is,” they say, describing their intention to bridge physical contemporary dance with the academia of art history. Now Serafin is among a new generation of artists, such as Adham Faramawy, Bones Tan Jones, Boychild, Precious Okoyomon and Wu Tsang, who are similarly bridging performance with research surrounding marginalised narratives and queerness.

Void attracted more than 63 million Instagram views

This year’s Venice Biennale, titled Foreigners Everywhere, was curated by the Brazilian Adriano Pedrosa, who, significantly, was the first person living and working in the Global South to organise the event. In a move that was not without controversy, Pedrosa largely avoided including established artists or market darlings working with blue- chip commercial galleries; instead, he featured work that aligned among four themes: foreigner, queer, Indigenous and outsider. Invited by Pedrosa, Serafin presented Void. The performance drew from myths surrounding the creation of the Philippines archipelago imagining a different future for nonbinary species and a gender-diverse environment. The event was one of the most highly anticipated of the opening week.

In a dark room, Serafin had attendees entranced. They watched them manoeuvre around a central crater in the floor while throwing an unidentifiable oil-like substance – somewhere between solid and liquid – all over their body. The New York Times reported how Serafin was “dancing and writhing through a pool of black, viscous material that doubles in the work as primordial ooze and healing balm,” likening it to “pop concerts, fashion shows, drag performances” and the “history of lavish spectacle in religious rituals”. The performance was so messy that spectators were given ponchos for protection.

“I couldn’t speak for two hours after seeing the performance,” says emerging Chinese painter Tommy Xie. “It was astonishing how a pain from their biography, and in the context of broader colonial histories, manifested in such a heavy performance that Serafin put their body through – it was one of the most moving performances I have ever seen.”

Tobi Maier, chief curator of Amant, an experimental arts organisation in New York that presented an iteration of Void in Brooklyn this summer, explained that “the centre and titular character of Joshua Serafin’s performance work is a speculative deity and an oneiric alter-ego; a fluid, undefinable, primordial being who represents an ancient, ancestral body danced into life.” Bringing together audiences interested in avant-garde choreography and composition, decolonial narratives and contemporary fashion, he says the audience was mesmerised by the combination of a light and smoke installation, dance, video and sound.

I can’t help but ask Serafin if the dark, glistening shadowy colours that appear throughout both their paintings and physical activations have any connection to BDSM culture or gay nightlife and they concede that they do. “When I was a student, I would party a lot – sometimes I still do. I’ve had my fair share of being in a club and among queer nightlife. This is a place of inspiration for me: when we go to such parties, it’s a collective coming together to experience an ecstatic night.”

Serafin animatedly continues: “Void considers what is the club as a creature? What is this god within the darkrooms, toilets and bathrooms? You know, where we take all these drugs secretly…What is that entity in the darkroom? What are the energies of human behaviour in this equation? How do I become that entity? How does the entity move? Breathe? Look? It’s world-making.” Indeed, in all of Serafin’s output, they somehow channel the vibe of hedonistic curiosity that’s only possible in safe spaces that are free from convention, prejudice and judgement. “For me, it’s important to live within these communities that I enter and spaces I inhabit, and the faith that I experience,” they add. “I think, how can I take these experiences and ideologies that I’ve gathered and embody them to create a certain physicality?”

For Void, Serafin danced so wildly in the dark primordial ooze of the performance that the audience were supplied with ponchos to protect their clothes

Unlike artists whose practices are predominantly predicated on selling tangible objects, like painting or sculpture, Serafin operates a model more like those in theatre or music by working with a production company and touring the artworks worldwide. Also utilising subsidies from the Belgian government, Serafin communicates with theatres worldwide to co-produce their works. “Making performance is costly,”

they say, noting how many materials – such as LED screens, liquid and soil – are required to produce one of their shows, “and, sometimes, the rehearsal has to be the performance itself.” When we speak, Serafin has performances of Pearls, the final segment of their trilogy, planned in Bergen, Birmingham, Rotterdam and Singapore. They were also selected as a finalist for the prestigious 2024 Circa Prize – its jury includes Marina Abramovic, Michèle Lamy and Hans Ulrich Obrist, among other influential figures – and will have their work broadcast on monumental outdoor screens in Berlin, Milan and in Piccadilly Circus.

It is sometimes observed that artists (and the art world, which can be fairly staid) haven’t quite cracked social media like fashion and commerce. However, Serafin’s work certainly bucks this trend. Their Venice project went viral, attracting more than 63 million views on Instagram. A clip of Serafin dancing among the dark quasi-liquid blew up and they were likened to figures ranging from RuPaul to the Marvel character Venom. On Instagram, one user commented, “Not me thinking she’s about to vogue and boots the house down in fossil fuel realness.” When I raise the subject, Serafin laughs. “When you go viral, it brings a lot of great opportunities, even this interview for 10 Magazine! But it also gives you an understanding of how people see the work. It’s nice because it taps different audiences – not only those that studied art.” This is Serafin just getting started, watch them soar.