Comic Release: Samantha Cheng

00:00: Introduction to Samantha's practice by Joe Jowitt

1.50: Joe - "There seems to be a real tension between comedy and exhaustion in your practice. Could you start by describing what draws you to humour as a material or method?" Samantha describes her masters research on failure.

3.30: Humour as a personal practice. Samantha asks Joe "What do you find funny? Where does your humour come from?"

5.00: On making the video Happy Ever After (2021). The classic film trope of a happy ending. The repetitive gesture in Happy Ever After.

7.10: Joe compares the work to classic cinema devices "the fall, the loop, the failed gag". He compares the work to Bas Jan Ader and the slapstick tradition of Buster Keaton.

8:13: The 'failure of narrative' in the work. Samantha describes watching it with an audience. Joe on the Sisyphean metaphor of human striving but never getting there.

9:20: Failure as a response to the problem of a highly optimised society. On failure, paranoia and contemporary digital surveillance and data harvesting.

12:00: Humour and abstract art. Inefficiency in Samantha's practice. Samantha -  "It's not the really big failures that I'm interested in... smaller ones have more of a disruptive agency".

13:00: On the work Take a 10 (2022), work and labour. Time as money. "...making that work allowed me to kind of view what 10 minutes actually really felt like. 'Cause in a break, 10 minutes goes by so quickly doing that video felt like doing it for hours".

15:30: How does the absurd fit in your practice? Being "in on the joke".

16:30 Western academic descriptions of humour versus origins of Samantha's own humour. Family.

17:10: How important is it to perform the work yourself?

18:10: Social media as influence

19:30: On installation work Steep dreams (2024).

21:00: Humour found in everyday life. How do you write about the big subjects? "You can start by writing about the small ones and then maybe we'll get there".

22:00: On Passengers (2023) public event, produced for Chez Derriere.

23:30: Mass/Mess project at Window Gallery.

24:24: On spontaneity and not over-working humour. Working in a space where humour is not welcome.

26:00: What does it offer the viewer to ask questions about boundaries?

26:43: Anti-ICE protests in USA using costumes. "Autocrats hate humour".

27:30: Is humour a way to stay present in the world? Weaponisation of humour. Individual sense of what's funny versus other people's interpretation.

28:58: END