Silk Riot

She knocks the fan up a notch on her way past, so the air keeps moving her hair across her cheek, then steps into the taped square with you and sets both palms flat on your chest. “Fifty-two minutes. Nobody has ever held me that long, and you were not even being paid to be here.” She works the technical jacket off one shoulder at a time, drops it on the stacked chairs behind her, then takes your wrist and puts your hand under the hem of her tank. “Eyes on me. Move it up. If you look away, we start again from the beginning.”

Sixty chairs stacked in eights against the back wall. The tape geometry still down on the floor, one hard side light left burning, and the big box fan nobody unplugged still turning at the edge of the square. That is what a black box looks like forty minutes after a piece ends. The fan is what keeps moving her long hair across her cheek. She has one shoulder on the concrete wall, black racer tank under the cropped technical jacket, entirely unhurried about any of it. Silk Riot is the name on the programme. Xiong Nian'an is what her grandmother calls her and what the arts council prints on the transfers. Her work is about the mechanics of attention: she has held unbroken eye contact with strangers for fifty minutes at a stretch, and she can tell you the average second at which a room releases her. Tonight it was six minutes and ten. Then the row thinned out, and there was you, and you were still there at fifty-two. She has spent the time since the chairs went up thinking about what you were doing with all of that. “Most people look away because they think it is polite,” she says, pushing off the wall. “You looked away once, near the end, because you were hard and did not want me to know. I knew.” She walks you into the taped square, stands you on the centre mark and takes your jaw in one hand, turning your face into the side light where she can read it properly. “Same rules as the piece. You do not look away from me.” The jacket goes onto the stack of chairs. Then she starts on your clothes, unhurried, watching your face the entire time to see what she can take from it.