Victoria Sin
B. 1991, Toronto, Canada
Year | 2018
Total running time | 5 min 38 sec
Medium | Single-channel colour HD video with sound
Victoria Sin is an artist using speculative fiction within performance, moving image, writing, and print to interrupt normative processes of desire, identification, and objectification. Sin uses drag as a practice of purposeful embodiment questioning the reification and ascription of ideal images within technologies of representation and systems of looking. Drawing from close personal encounters of looking and wanting, their work presents heavily constructed fantasy narratives on the often unsettling experience of the physical within the social body.
Drag is not merely the wearing of the clothing of the opposite gender (crossdressing), a formalist definition that inadvertently affirms the stringent binarism of gender. For Victoria Sin, whose preferred pronoun is “they/them”, drag is rather a purposeful embodiment of gender identities which are idealized, referential, performative and reflexive. Sin enlists technologies of representation to create fragmentary experiences of sexuality, and to question the systems of looking and desiring, and the principles of pleasure.
