GABI DAO
Lucifer falls from Heaven at Dawn, 2023
2-channel video
13 minutes, 34 seconds
gabi dao’s video Lucifer falls from Heaven at Dawn focuses on the figure of the bat as way to think about the intersections between ecology and economy, pestilence and good fortune, sight and sound, as well as alienation and belonging. The video was made as part of a larger body of work that also included ceramic and textile marionettes for the 2023 exhibition Hold these questions close at Unit 17 in Vancouver and the 2024 exhibition What breaks on the horizon? at the Southern Alberta Art Gallery.
This project was conceived alongside the advent of COVID-19 as a response to the debunked, viral video of Chinese influencer Wang Mengyun that circulated on right-wing extremist media channels. Mengyun’s video was shot in 2016, and depicted her enjoying bat soup, a delicacy in Pulau. It falsely fueled claims that the global pandemic began with the ingestion of bats and consequently incited racism, xenophobia, and bigotry that linked the pandemic to Asian communities.
dao’s film ruminates on the association of bats with virality and evil, particularly in the West. This negative perception of bats is emphasized through the film’s main protagonist, a bat marionette named Lucifer, whose name is synonymous with the devil, infusing a tongue-in-cheek critique into this entrenched belief. In this story, Lucifer falls to Earth and lands at the foot of a shattered, limestone mountain, Turtle Mountain (Blairmore, Alberta), and begins their journey to reunite with their fellow bat kin. The collapsed limestone mountain is a shattered backdrop for Lucifer’s journey through the vestiges of resource extraction and settler colonialism on the prairies. Lucifer’s journey moves over land and through time on a journey to find the Others, the bat species that Lucifer seeks to reconnect with. Along the way, Lucifer encounters biologists who are also searching for the Others but with technologies that heighten their audio and visual abilities. As the biologists search and research, the rhythmic treatment of the audio/visual materials in the film takes inspiration from bats as models of experimental film, ‘imaging’ the world around them through echolocation and ultrasound.
Part pseudo-documentary and part experimental art film, the narrator points to various international bat conservation efforts in recent decades, highlighting how their insect eating diet saves the agricultural industry billions of dollars. Putting forward an economic argument that bats are deemed ‘good workers,’ the film points to the conditions in which Otherness is tolerated under capitalism. Lucifer falls from Heaven at Dawn also offers a reflection on the discriminatory ways in which humans treat each other across constructions of Otherness. Lucifer asks the viewers, “am I worthy of your protection?”
dao’s project questions how conservation efforts determine what beings deserve our resources and protection and reflects upon the intentions of conservation more broadly. Like their biblical namesake, Lucifer has fallen to Earth. dao points to a tension between the motives of ecological protection and saviourism, critiquing the dominance of Enlightenment thinking, the scientific method, Christian theology, value, and redemption.
Text drawn from exhibition text by Adam Whitford, Associate Curator & Exhibitions Manager, Southern Alberta Art Gallery. For an expanded text by Godfre Leung go to https://www.saag.ca/archive/gabidaowhatbreaksonthehorizon
Artist Biography
gabi dao is an artist and filmmaker from the unceded and ancestral territories of the xʷməθkwəy̓əm, Skwxwú7mesh and Səl̓ílwətaʔ/Selilwitulh Nations, now based in The Netherlands.
dao’s practice culminates in moving image installations, experimental films, sculpture, scent and collage. Their works insist on multiple truths, blurry temporalities, sensory affirmations, and ways of knowing otherwise—often working through long-gestating, fluid processes of gathering, breaking, and repairing from their own world-making vernacular of audio/visual fragments, tactile collections of whatnots, and scraps of linguistic detritus. Thinking with these materials, their work begins within the slippages of “history,” archives, and storytelling, toward channeling the ineffable tensions between grief and joy, alienation and belonging, dissidence and complicity, disassociation and sentimentality. From this juncture, dao attempts to reclaim meaning-making from the ruins of capitalism and colonialism, especially the ways they have extracted from racialized, gendered, and more-than-human communities.
They have screened and exhibited their work at E-flux Screening Room (Brooklyn, USA), Southern Alberta Art Gallery Maansiksikaitsitapiitsinikssin (Lethbridge, CA), Radius CCA (Delft, NL), The National Gallery of Canada (Ottawa, CA) and Vincom Centre for Contemporary Art (Hà Nội, VN). They were recently in residence at Triangle Astérides (Marseille, FR) and the EKWC (Oisterwijk, NL). They are currently in residence at Jan van Eyck Academy.
For assistance with this project, the artist would like to thank:
The Alberta Community Bat Program, especially Susan Holroyd and Cory Olson. Calgary Wildlife and Melanie Whalen. The researchers at Cypress Hills Interprovincial Park Field Research Station: Luisa Weigand, Alex O'Callaghan, Hannah Wilson, Emma Blanken, Josh Christiansen. The biologists at Ecoresult and South Holland bat count volunteers: Anton Van Meurs, Marlon de Haan, Mark Bouwmeester, Rudy Vanderkuil, and Karin Gossin. As well as: Lan Tieu, Kim Dao, Bernadette Dao, Terrance Houle, Alysha Seriani, Lou Lou Sainsbury, Steffanie Ling, Natasha Chaykowski, and Ioana Lupascu.
Lucifer falls from Heaven at Dawn, 2023
digital film still
13 minutes, 34 seconds
Courtesy of the artist and Unit 17