“Total Body Workout” leads you through a ‘total body’ experience in which history unfolds not in chronological order but in a head-to-toe sequence.
How is our body scripted and shaped by the times it lives in? How are national agendas and political ideologies woven into bodily semiotics? How does one’s body memory become an integral part of hegemonic historical narratives? And how do we inhabit a historical and totalized body?
Based on nationwide physical exercise routines and mass gymnastic performances in Asia, the Eastern Bloc and the United States, “Total Body Workout,” proposes a recomposition of the existing corporal movements and a reconfiguration of the past in the present. Here and now, we work out the total body.
Kexin Hao (CN, 1993) is a visual artist and designer born in Beijing and based in The Netherlands. Her practice is a marriage of design and performance. Kexin likes to challenge the boundaries between art and “non-art” space. She thinks beyond the disciplines of design, performance, game, clubbing, and fitness, which results in a rich hybridity in her art-making.
Using daring visual language, her work is a constant swing between an intimate close-up of personal stories and zoom-out to collective narratives, between a past of political heaviness and a flashy modernity rendered in humor and sarcasm. In her recent practice, Kexin investigates the themes of body, rituals, health, labor, and collective memory.
