The Zoom Out (Make Your Life Count) by Sarah Aiken

The Zoom Out works with video material from live performance Make Your Life Count (2022), a work that looks up close at the self and considers authorship and the performance of identity: building, multiplying, destroying and replacing a Sarah who is her own protagonist – a hero in a neoliberal dream, self-actualised at all costs and pitted against all others. The individual is swollen to grotesque importance and reduced to an ineffectual, even invisible impotence.

At once expansive and microscopic – monstrous and destructive or lost in the crushing scale of humanity, ecology, time and the universe, this kaleidoscopic, endless zoom-out is an attempt to shift perspective and soften the focus on the individual – to lose sight of ones self in the patterns of community, ecology and history.

Artist statement

“It’s reasonable to zoom in and find yourself oversized and powerful. And in the same breath, savour how infinite and insignificant you are. Commit passionately to making a mark – and to being washed away, by the enormity of space, time” (Sarah, as the Giant).

About the artist

Sarah Aiken is a dancer and choreographer whose work investigates assemblage, authorship, scale and the self, looking at the roles of audience, performer, subject and object employing repurposed materials, sound, light to distort and manipulate perspectives to consider performance as a site for empathy and exchange. Sarah is co-director of Deep Soulful Sweats, working with Rebecca Jensen to invite audiences into cathartic and thoughtful performative experiences. Sarah was artist in residence at HIAP, Finland and is a grateful recipient of the Chloe Munro Fellowship, she is developing new works for stage, screen, gallery and site responsive contexts.

Fed Square is co-presenting The Zoom Out (Make Your Life Count) with the Centre for Projection Art.

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Image credit: Still from The Zoom Out (Make Your Life Count) by Sarah Aiken