March 1–31, 2025
e-flux Film is very pleased to present the March 2025 edition of our online series Staff Picks, featuring Patty Chang’s seminal video works Melons (At a Loss) (1998) and In Love (2001).
An acclaimed voice in performance and video art, Chang has been recognized for her provocative and darkly humorous explorations of gender, desire, and the limits of the body. Melons (At a Loss), often described as a reflection on grief and representation, stages a quietly unsettling ritual of self-consumption. Meanwhile, In Love turns an intimate kiss into an uneasy act of endurance, blurring the line between affection and discomfort. At a time of escalating political crises, when agency over marginalized, gendered bodies remains fiercely contested and the politics of embodiment continue to be a site of struggle, these works persist in challenging and resisting hegemonic perceptions of women’s bodies imposed by structures of power.
In Melons (At a Loss) (1998, 4 minutes), a single-take video, Patty Chang narrates a monologue about an imagined cultural ritual of being given a commemorative plate of her deceased aunt, who passed due to breast cancer. She simultaneously attempts to perform cutting, deseeding, and eating a cantaloupe that is held inside her long-line bra, all the while balancing a plate on her head. The melon appears to be uncannily synonymous with Chang’s breast. Chang takes a serrated knife to slice it open in an act of self-mutilation. Eating the melon, then, is also a form of a cannibalistic devouring of the self. The gesture paired with an attempt to sustain the monologue of imagined ritual becomes a site of production for the construction of memory, narrative, and gender.
In Love (2001, 3 minutes) is a two-channel video installation that follows Untitled (For Abramovic Love Cocteau) (2000) with a similar premise. Two separate scenes in a diptych present the artist with her parents, teary-eyed and seemingly engaging in an intense kiss. Gradually, it is revealed that the film is running in reverse, and Chang and her parents are not sharing a kiss, but an onion—and the tears are a result of the astringency of the onion. As they take turns taking bites from the onion, the tears subside and the onion is reconstituted. In Love corporeally and metaphorically explores parental and familial relations, as well as the blurry boundaries of love. The act of passing the tear-inducing onion back and forth becomes a sacrificial gesture, examining cultural notions of filial piety.
The videos will stream on e-flux Film from March 1–31. Watch here.
Patty Chang is a Los Angeles based artist and educator who uses performance, video, installation, and narrative forms when considering identity, gender, transnationalism, colonial legacies, the environment, large-scale infrastructural projects, and impacted subjectivities. Her most recent collaborative project, Learning Endings, is a multi-part interdisciplinary research that has surfaced amidst the overlapping contexts of climate crisis, threatened ocean ecosystems, and challenges to scientific expertise. In addition to numerous awards and fellowships, her work has been exhibited at institutions such as the Museum of Modern Art, Guggenheim Museum, New Museum, M+ Museum in Hong Kong, and Moderna Museet in Stockholm, Sweden. She teaches at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, CA.
Staff Picks is a streaming series on e-flux Film of recommended videos designed to disrupt the monotony of an algorithm. Before the end times of big data, we used to discover suggested content along dusty shelves in video rental stores, where Post-it notes scribbled by shift workers implored us to experience the same movies that made them guffaw, scream, or weep. Sometimes the content bored us, sometimes it overwhelmed us, and sometimes, as if by magic, it was just right. e-flux invites you to relive this rental store mode of perusal, with personalized picks curated through judgment that does not take into consideration your viewing history.
For more information, contact program [at] e-flux.com.