Performative Screenings #78

MAI LING KOCHT: STICK TOGETHER

Mai Ling invites you to a sensorial cooking ritual where we collectively pound sticky rice to explore its stickiness as an agency of pleasure and trust. Stickiness, often associated with disgust, is a chain of effects which at once affect how certain bodies are shaped. On this festive evening, the rhythmic gesture of mashing and kneading rice into glutinous mass acts as a transformative and emancipatory potential for empowerment, resistance, and care.

Let’s stick together!

Mai Ling Kocht is a series of oral, auditory, and haptic performances tapping into the collective rituals, labor, and conviviality of ‘Asian’ food through mobility.

Founded in 2019 in Vienna, the artist collective and association Mai Ling offers a platform to share and exchange experiences, struggles as well as practices of anti-racism, sexism, homophobia, and any kind of prejudice toward one’s difference — especially against Asian wom*n bodies. The name “Mai Ling” refers to a fictional figure invented by Gerhard Polt, a famous German comedian, in 1979. She embodies a submissive hybrid and fantasized stereotype of Asian women that have been silenced and invisible in the collective imagination. Triggered by this fictionally constructed character that still lingers around in our contemporary societies, Mai Ling, as an artist collective, re-narrates and portrays “Mai Ling” with collective voices and multi-layered identities.