The Glass Essays: Performance Lecture

Composed as an ode to Gabrielle Goliath’s Elegy, ARIA(S) unfolds across three events that create spaces to reflect on violence experienced by women and queer people, their acts of political resistance, and explore grief through ghostly presence. 

In The Glass Essays, a young man, unable to sleep, is lured into the woods by a mysterious sound. He follows it across a river, through forest and shadows, until he finally comes upon the red curtains of a travelling funeral performance stage. The mesmerising mourning recital that unfolds is a dreamlike invitation into a sensorial exploration of memories, rituals, and ghosts. The film reconstructs landscapes from director River Yuhao Cao’s early memories of Southern China, using psychoanalytic techniques to explore how lamentation enables the exploration of fluid identities and queerness. This performance lecture by Cao incorporates humming practice, live sound, mourning performances, and a screening of the film to open a shared space where individual memory meets collective resonance.

Cao’s performance lecture concludes ARIA(S), combining the film’s unique audiovisual language with fluid, sonic, and communal gestures to explore mourning as a regenerative practice. The film re-examines the performance of mourning in regional Chinese cultures through a queer lens, proposing grief as a ritual and fluid process by which to confront the past, while silently and lyrically interpreting the perspective of the revenant and folkloric concepts of haunting. 

Doors open at 2.30pm; event starts at 3pm and ends at 4.30pm.

Image credit: River Yuhao Cao, The Glass Essays performance lecture at LUX (2026). Photo by Gregor Petrikovič.