The video manipulates footage from a pre-covid Lower East Side performance at Mehanata Bulgarian Bar for the party Unseelie that was very important to me, mostly because it was such a great night and now that space is closed permanently and the way we operated inside that club is no more, even one person I saw there passed during covid...so this footage feels really special now, my friend and peer RaFia and the party Unseelie took the footage I think. The title comes from a note I was given in the club a few years ago, I see this note as a moment when someone saw MHYSA in the club and gazed with loving eyes that see her the way I want her to be seen. I traced the note to make the title card. This footage also expresses MHYSA in this ideal way and is another moment when onlookers looked lovingly. I see this work as an experimental video essay about this loving gaze on the diva, and me embodying the underground diva performance, in a really pure way. I love that the club had poles and that I felt safe and free to play with them, safe in a queer club context from certain gazes while consenting to a queer sexual gaze.

The sound uses audio from the footage but manipulates it allowing MHYSA's voice to fade in and out of audibility. I'm wary about how MHYSA comes up in my object-based work or appears in a gallery context. This is my first work explicitly for the gallery where MHYSA's singing voice appears at all in opposition to my Lavendra/recovery (2015-) videos where she is joyfully singing offkey or official music videos which are primarily made to promote her music. This manipulation of the voice is about a feeling of agency and autonomy as a performer, outside of audience desire. We are deeply concerned with the history of MHYSA's body operating in music spaces and how often Black women and femmes are not seen as inherently in control of their body in pop and how that translates into underground music. I like that the footage is very dark and grainy and sometimes MHYSA is only a silhouette, moments where it's less about the visibility of her as a singular being but more about how her body is acting out certain gestures onstage. These gestures have been slowed down, so instead of video at times, it feels like a moving portrait.”

• E. Jane

About MHYSA: Since 2015, Jane has been developing the performance persona MHYSA, an underground pop star. MHYSA operates in Jane’s Lavendra/Recovery (2015-)--an iterative multimedia installation--and out in the world. Jane considers this project a total work of art--or Gesamtkunstwerk--that honors and examines the life of the Black diva and of Black femmes in popular culture. In 2018, MHYSA followed her critically acclaimed debut, fantasii, with a live EU/US tour. Highlight performances include the ICA and Cafe OTO in London and Rewire in The Hague. Her second album NEVAEH came out in February 2020 on Hyperdub records in London.