Park Nights 2021: Tosh Basco

For Park Nights 2021, Serpentine presented an evening of durational performance with artist Tosh Basco.

NO SKY is a durational performance by artist Tosh Basco. Named after the poem “No Sky” by Etel Adnan from her book TIME, the piece uses poetry as a portal. Performed over the course of a half-day, NO SKY was a simple mediation on Time.

Much of Basco’s work quietly frames performance as ritual. NO SKY invited the audience to slow down and enter a state of heightened attention where the body is a time travel machine; it slips and spins as the hours are lost, bleeding into one another. Basco conceived this performance as a gift in response to Sophia Al-Maria’s sculpture, TARAXOS, which centres the dandelion as an emblem of freedom and resistance. Throughout NO SKY simple movements scale between the macro and micro and small gestures become epic and grand events mundane.

“A dandelion seed contains the whole cosmos. A wish is a form of travel. We are all a long way from home.” – Tosh Basco