Meet Amit Noy

Twenty-two of Aotearoa’s best ascendant artists and collectives are showing work at the Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki right now in Aotearoa Contemporary, an exhibition celebrating a new guard of creatives and ideas.

The Art Paper × Aotearoa Contemporary presents conversations with the artists, exploring the works they’re showing and what they’re drawing inspiration from. Here we speak to choreographic artist AMIT NOY about his work, Errant.

All photographs: Felix Jackson

Amit Noy, *Errant*, 2024, live performance in three parts, written text, commissioned by Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki, 2024. Performance view: *Aotearoa Contemporary*, with Reece King’s *Old Builders*, *The Red Ruin* and *Shell of Hearing*, all 2024, in background

‘Errant’ belongs to the family of words Sadiyah Hartman names in her book Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, all oriented toward what she calls “an improvisation with the terms of social existence, when the terms have already been dictated.” What does it mean to be ‘errant’ in the gallery?

I love the connection that you’re drawing here with Hartman, because “an improvisation with the terms of social existence” is what Errant tries to effect. I started by thinking about the narrowly dictated terms for bodily experience in a museum. You can stand looking at a piece of art, or you can sit on a bench looking at a piece of art, and that’s about it. It’s paradoxical, because museums propose art as a space for virtually limitless nourishment of your mind and spirit whilst severely limiting your physical imagination.

So Errant tries to gently and playfully punch a hole through all that. It’s not just about introducing movement behaviours that would normally be considered wayward or deviant into a museum context. When a dancer performs the work, they’re trying to slip into a different mode of cognitive processing. Instead of immediately reducing our experience to premeditated language, can we relish in the thick unknowability of what we’re perceiving, and of who we are?

We’re trying to let the world bleed in through our skin. It’s exhilarating. It also gives you a headache if you do it for too long.

What does it look like to be errant in the gallery?

Errant intentionally does not signal itself. The piece roams throughout the whole Auckland Art Gallery building and is unaccompanied by any explanatory signage.

It’s an undercover performance, and this means that the work’s audience is primarily ‘accidental’. Gallery-goers are surprised when they encounter a person rolling on the floor with their tongue out and eyes glazed over, or darting between sculptures and making strange guttural noises. I hope that people who encounter this person in the throes of absolute, joyous self-permission are compelled to notice their own bodies and feelings.

Errant is completely improvisational, so the work looks different every time. Each performer employs their own agency within a set of ‘tools’ we use to rev our engines. The tools are concerned with cognition and perception, and give no physical cues. A few examples: No hesitation, no reconsideration. Welcoming the struggle, welcoming the slump, welcoming the swamp. What if how I perceive is my creativity at work? Many of these are taken from the American dancer and choreographer Deborah Hay, who I’ve studied with and has been a big influence.

Choreographed movement always, in some way, marks a form of errancy, because it marks a total awareness of the body in space. Forgetting this relationship is one of those dictated ‘terms’ Hartman speaks about: Be neutral or be void! I’m interested in how you see this idea playing out across your practice. The Cruising Project (2022–24) seems also to be speaking to the possibility contained within errant/wayward space.

In 2022 I made the first iteration of The Cruising Project, which is a video installation that places a dancer inside a public toilet to meditate on anonymous intimacy, death and memory. I haven’t been able to fully realise the piece, mostly because it’s difficult to find funding for a project that takes its name from a culture of anonymous homosexual sex.

I work a lot with my family members, none of whom are professional artists, partly in order to totally flatten neutrality and make things really, really personal. In general when I’m making, I’m trying to
find another way to be with the world. I like dance
because it’s so damn weird, and that’s what makes it a
miracle to me. It’s an energetic reality that resists
containment more wholly than anything else I know.
In a world that runs on the categorisation and
commodification of nearly everything, this feels pretty
damn errant to me.

To shift the terrain slightly: you often speak about the influence or spectres of mass death in your work (via the AIDS epidemic and the Holocaust). Thinking about this perhaps brings forward a more difficult meaning within errancy and the idea of flight. How do you negotiate this?

I’m a Jew. My family are not “from” any specific stretch of land: they’ve been continuously in flight, sometimes voluntarily and often not, for thousands of years. This choreography of migration is etched in my DNA. Who I am begets what I make.

I don’t know if I’m actively negotiating the Holocaust, my wandering Jew-ness or the AIDS epidemic in my work. They’re simply always in my thoughts and feelings, so they inevitably enter what I’m making.

I also retain a belief in art as a way to be with things that might otherwise be difficult to face.

Finally, a question we are asking all of the artists involved in Aotearoa Contemporary: What does ‘contemporary’ mean to you?

Alive and kicking.

_ _ _ _ _ _

Amit Noy is a dancer, choreographer, and writer. Born and raised in Oahu, Hawai’i and Aotearoa New Zealand, he now lives and works in Marseille, France.

Aotearoa Contemporary is on at Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki from 6 July – 20 October 2024. Entry is free.

Below: Amit Noy, Errant, 2024, live performance in three parts, written text, commissioned by Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki, 2024. Performance view: Aotearoa Contemporary, with Reece King’s Old Builders, The Red Ruin and Shell of Hearing, all 2024, in background