last portrait – 4 channel video installation

last portrait is a multi-year project that premiered at SPRING 2025, as a 1-hour performance within an
ongoing installation. Usually part of that space, this four-channel documentary is a reflection on labour. It braids connections between the artists’ families across the four screens and chapters: “Come back/回来”, “Labour/Arbeit”, “Water”, and “Fall”. Here, for the first time, the artists offer this experience apart from the performance and the full installation.

These video archives hold snippets of daily life, accepting the ethical awkwardness of dealing with
hyperpersonal family material. Ho and Naue accede to material across a range of aesthetics and origins: consciously-created documentary material, secretly-recorded conversations, highly intimate messages sent in states of psychosis, even a performance art sequence left for their future self. Unanswered questions like how to care for death, and how to live with loss, permeate the work, which
assembles an intimate, frank, and sometimes painful portrait of the people at the heart of this project.

Over two years, the artists dedicated periods of time to the places and people they grew up with. Sometimes together, sometimes apart, but always in conversation, they collected an archive of documents, part of which can be seen in these videos, alongside an ongoing influx of video documentation filmed by Ho’s mother, shared in their family group chat. Within the project last portrait, this video installation invites the authorship, voices, and physical image of two families – the absent people around which the work is centred. While the performers in the live work evoke these absent members, this video archive establishes their real presences, carrying them across time, geographical distance, and death. These scenes from lived life reflect physical motifs in the performance, offering a glimpse to the background of the performative gestures.