Taipei Women’s Experimental Comedy Club, 2010
installation, performance
Taipei Biennial 2010
Taipei, Taiwan

Curated by Tirdad Zolghadr and Hongjohn Lin

A room within the exhibition harbored an exclusive “experimental” stand-up comedy club. In an extensive research and practice program, a group of local performers and writers developed acts with Portnoy, drawing on recent humor theory and a shared mission to use the frame of jokes as a container for forms and registers typically outside the realm of stand-up -- the sublime, the abstract, the blatantly inscrutable, the deeply sad, the theoretical, the choreographic, the procedural, etc.

The results of this work were presented during the opening of TB10, and performances continued periodically throughout the duration of the exhibition.