23.5.2025 at 16–17
24.5.2025 at 12–13
25.5.2025 at 12–13

1st floor, Kiasma Theatre
Tickets: with a museum ticket
Admission with a same-day museum ticket or a Le Sacre du Printemps (Nuuksio) performance ticket (any day’s performance ticket is valid).

The screening of three video works guides the audience into Zheng Bo’s thinking.

As part of Zheng Bo’s Le Sacre du Printemps (Nuuksio) performances, three of their previously made video works will be shown at the Kiasma Theatre. The total duration of the screening is approximately 53 minutes.

Admission with a same-day museum ticket or a Le Sacre du Printemps (Nuuksio) performance ticket (any day’s performance ticket is valid).

Total duration: approx. 53 minutes.

Phoenix (2024)

Zheng Bo collaborated with seven Pakistani farmers living and working on a date palm farm outside Dubai, United Arab Emirates, to make a dance. The project, titled Phoenix, celebrates the beauty of the date palm (Phoenix dactylifera) and the skill of these stewards, highlighting intimate relations cultivated over millennia, vital to the economy and culture of the region.

Phoenix underscores the contribution of diasporic farmers to regional agriculture, while also drawing attention to the growing phenomenon of climate-induced migration, which in the coming decades is estimated to affect over a billion people, many of them in Asia.

Samur (2023)

During his extensive visits to different natural habitats around the UAE in the summer of 2022, Zheng Bo was captivated by the umbrella thorn acacia tree, known locally as Samr, Samur or Salam. For his Artist’s Garden commission at Jameel Arts Centre, Zheng Bo choreographed a dance with two human dancers and a Samur tree in the Mleiha desert as a way to understand and reconnect with the land and the tree. The dance pays homage to the tree’s strength and tenacity – the vibrancy of its branches, the delicacy of its leaves, and the defiance of its thorns.

Pteridophilia 1 (2016)

Connecting queer plants and queer people, Pteridophilia explores the eco-queer potential.

The screening is for adult audiences.

Zheng Bo is an ecoqueer artist of ethnic Bai heritage currently based on Lantau Island, Hong Kong. They collaborate with dancers, farmers, and scientists to cultivate kinship with plants: ferns in Taiwan, moss in Scandinavia, date palms in the Arabian Peninsula. Their ecological practice, arising from more-than-human intimacy, contributes to the emergence of a planetary indigeneity. Read more from the artist’s website.

Credits

Zheng Bo, Phoenix, 2024
Video, 14:03 min
Commissioned by Lahore Biennale Of Mountains and Seas

Zheng Bo Samur, 2023
Video, 21:23 min
Commissioned by Jameel Arts Centre

Zheng Bo Pteridophilia 1, 2016         
Video, 17:02 min.

Supported by Liverpool Biennial 2021, Kyoto City University of Arts Art Gallery, the 11th Taipei Biennial, Villa Vassilieff and Pernod Ricard Fellowship, and TheCube Project Space.