Walter Benjamin described pain as a navigable river—interpreting it as a flow or passage. He suggests that if one adapts to its currents, orienting oneself along its streams that intertwine and branch out like roots, flowing strongly, it will lead to something greater, something even more expansive. Something like the vastness of the ocean’s image and imagination. There’s a sense of overcoming something with this departure. Drifting further along, the riverbank fades with distance. In these moving waters and the glare of the lowering sun, only what lies ahead seems to matter. But the river water doesn’t flow uninterrupted in a straight line; it meanders, falls and recirculates. It tears asunder rocks and soil along its bed and carries this sediment down its course, sometimes even flowing back upstream. Like this river, pain is not a steady forward movement with an end in sight, but tangled and mercurial—at times voracious, at others uneasily calm.

Like this river that twists and squirms, recalling Tony Yap’s performance The Wound (2025), I struggle to speak of it from start to finish, to replicate it as a whole. Instead, it moves through my memory in fragments: uttered sounds, alternating images of excavated landscapes and nude, intertwined bodies projected behind the performers. For Yap, The Wound is more than the culmination of his residency at Temperance Hall, it is an ongoing existential inquiry into the psychic and cultural experience of pain. This is why I find it so difficult to speak of it with finitude. The Wound does not follow a narrative in which pain is a problem to be solved, nor does it offer a neat arc of healing tied to the affiliation of wounding. What felt most pertinent was simply to bear witness to the pain as it emanated through every throw and contraction—without words, without resolution and without any demand to ameliorate its affliction.

I spoke with Yap twice over the course of writing this response.² Yap’s demeanour was strikingly warm and gentle and our conversation was humorously at odds with the philosophical weight of the subjects we broached. As we delved into the complex terrain of pain, segueing into topics of trauma, dissociation, memory and mortality—persistent motifs in Yap’s work—a certain sentiment became clear. The Wound isn’t one of blood or pus, or the sickly acrid smell of bodily fluids and decay; it does not signify death, but its antithesis. The Wound is open and alive to the pains of living. Entering into a state of trance is what permits Yap and the performers—dancers Jack Riley and Taichi Ishii, along with Anca, a non-binary Bissu (young shaman), who is present with Riley in a video projection that forms the backdrop to the live performance—to feel pain in a way that is at once intensely present and subliminal.³ Throughout The Wound, I often got the impression of this disconnect: despite emitting such a strong sensation of pain through their agitated movements—a stumbling choreography of flinching and recoiling around the space. The performers did not appear to be in a state of delirium, but rather in a subconscious state, far removed and unbeknownst to the audience.