Kenneth Tam (b. 1982; lives and works in Houston and Queens) works across video, sculpture, movement, installation, and photography. He makes work about the performance of masculinity, spaces of physical intimacy, and the transformative power of private ritual.
For MATRIX 281, Tam’s latest video and sculptural installation, The Founding of the World, makes its museum debut at BAMPFA. Incorporating the artist’s long-standing research into the history and practices of fraternities—UC Berkeley being home to one of the first Asian American fraternities in the United States—the work takes as its framework the ritual of the probate. In these stylized and structured public ceremonies, synchronized choreographies of death and rebirth illustrate the telling of a brotherhood’s history. Using movement and sound, Tam’s video work probes the dynamics of male intimacy and ritualized violence engendered by these social...