Monday 30 November 2009

Performance Matters



Image c- Tim Etchells

Performance Matters has launched! Performance Matters is multi-organisation AHRC programme (2009-2012) that 're-thinks why performance matters through the matter of performance'

There are some dialogue projects, viewable online, by related writers, artists and performance practitioners. These projects run simultaneously in between various Performance Matters discussion events, live presentations and symposia. Lots to see and get involved with and we are very excited that the programme has now started!

See the website >>>here<<< for more details on projects, people and activities you can join in with.

//////


Performance Matters is a creative research project exploring the challenges that contemporary performance presents to ideas of cultural value. The project asks whether such forms of cultural practice are now being taken seriously in culture more broadly, and how they may possess the potential to refashion understandings of what, and how, things matter in the contemporary world.

Performance Matters will comprise numerous events and activities: the bringing together of performers and writers in creative dialogue projects; an exciting series of practical workshops; two public international symposia; the publication of a substantial book; the development of two innovative PhD projects; and a series of talks focused around the project’s concerns.

Between 2009 and 2012 Performance Matters will move through three themed years of interlinked research activities, Performing Idea (2009/10), Trashing Performance (2010/11), and Potentials of Performance (2011/2012).

In the first year Performing Idea will investigate the shifting relations between performance practice and discourse, event and writing.
How to get involved

To register your interest and keep up to date with Performance Matters, send an email to info@thisisperformancematters.co.uk with the subject heading ‘Register me’.

Thursday 26 November 2009

WRITING EXHIBITIONS , 27th and 28th November at Stanley Picker Gallery

A lab on writing and exhibition making. Part of GUESS WORK GUEST WORK by David Berridge and Compulsive Holding
http://www.7point9cubicmetres.com/david_berridge.html


FRI 27TH, STUDIO 1, STANLEY PICKER GALLERY, 10.30-5.30

10.15-10.30 ARRIVAL
10.30-10.40 INTRODUCTIONS
JONATHAN KEATS, EXPERIENCE EXCHANGE
10.40 -11.40 STRATEGIES
ANNE CHARNOCK 20 minutes
MATTHEW MACKISSACK 15 MIN
11.40-12.40 ARCHITECTURES
KIM PATRICK - 15 mins
DAVID JOHNSON - 15 mins
12.40- 13.30 BREAK
MICRO-EXHIBITION: MATTHEW MACKISSACK'S "DIMINISHING RETURNS" WILL RUN THROUGHOUT THE AFTERNOON
13.30- 14.30 WRITINGS
TAMARIN NORWOOD 30 mins
FIONA FULLAM 30 mins
14.30- 16.00 LIVE
SCREENING: CAROLINE BERGVAL SAY:PARSLEY 15 mins
MATT GIRAUDEAU 10 minutes
MARC CAFFREY 30 minutes
MARIANNE HOLM HANSEN 30 minutes
16.00-16.15 TEA BREAK
16.15-17.20 DISCUSSION
17.20-17.30 MINUTES
PIPPA KOSZEREK

*

THE DAY WILL ALSO FEATURE TEXT PROVOCATIONS FROM OWEN HART AND MARY PATERSON; JONATHAN KEATS EXPERIENCE EXCHANGE WILL RUN THROUGHOUT BOTH DAYS OF THE EVENT.

SAT 28TH NOVEMBER, STUDIO 1, STANLEY PICKER GALLERY, 12-4

A SEQUENCE OF EXHIBITIONS BY:

IN THE CUBE:
ANNE CHARNOCK 12.10- 12.30
SAM CURTIS 12.30 - 12.50
JONATHAN KEATS 12.50- 13.05
TAMARIN NORWOOD 13.05- 13.35
BREAK 13.35-14.00
ALEX HETHERINGTON 14.00-14.15
THE WAYWARD PLANT REGISTRY 14.15-14.40
CONT3XT 14.40-14.55
MARIANNE HOLM HANSEN 15.00-15.20
CONCLUSIONS 15.20-15.50
OUTSIDE THE CUBE
TEXTS AND RESPONSES BY:
FIONA FULLAM
MARY PATERSON
BOOKWORKS
MARIANNE HOLM HANSEN
HYUN JIN CHO
OWEN HART

7.9 Cubic Metres is a gallery within a gallery. A temporary exhibition space, an architectural insert, a sculptural work, a collaborative document - James Carrigan’s 7.9 Cubic Metres is a curious coalescence of many forms. http://www.7point9cubicmetres.com/

Stanley Picker Gallery
Faculty of Art, Design & Architecture
Kingston University, Knights Park
Kingston upon Thames
KT1 2QJ
Directions to Stanley Picker gallery are here:http://www.7point9cubicmetres.com/directions.html

Live Writing from 10 Performances

Rachel Lois Clapham and Alex Eisenberg are at 10 Performances which is taking place at Roehampton University today.

Wednesday 25 November 2009

10 Performances (Scribbled Live)



10 artists + 10 texts + 1 = 10 Performances
at Roehampton University, 26 Nov 2009.

Can’t be there? Don’t worry, 10 Performances will be scribbled live on the day here:

http://www.scribblelive.com/Event/10_Performances_1

Log on to get text live and direct from inside the event by Rachel Lois Clapham and Alex Eisenberg

Rachel Lois Clapham and Alex Eisenberg will also be opening 10 Performances by presenting ‘10 Performances +1’.

///

About 10 Performances +1

+1 is a date, an invitation to attend. It is also to be welcomed in addition or by extension. You can tell a lot from a + 1.

10 Performances + 1 is a sympathetic critical response - a + 1 – to '10 Performances' by Rachel Lois Clapham and Alex Eisenberg.

Repositioning the surplus nature of a +1 - exploring it as fundamental, and asking how to be or write, +1 - 10 Performance (+1) will go before 10 Performances and anticipate the work whilst exploring some of the central themes of the day.


10 Performances is funded by the AHRC ‘Beyond Text’ student-led initiative. (www.beyondtext.ac.uk)


For more details on 10 Performances see http://www.roehampton.ac.uk/10performances/

Monday 23 November 2009

WRITING LIVE - continues


Image by Ryan Tracy: l - r Rachel Lois Clapham, GINA PERFORMA, Mary Paterson. The Bronx Museum, Sunday 15th November 2009.

Performa 09 drew to a close last night, 22nd November, with Scratch The Grand Finale. On the previous evening, Saturday 21st November, the Writing Live Group held our Writing Live Symposium at the Performa Hub, 41 Cooper Square.

Keep checking the Writing Live site for responses to this and the rest of Performa, and experiments in writing on, as, with or for performance.

Writing Live will continue into 2010. For now, it lives on through:

Writing Encounters, textual transactions between the US-based Writing Live 09 Fellows (Rebecca Armstrong, Tyler Coburn, Patricia Milder, Ryan Tracy, Kenny Ulloa and Peter Walsh), UK artists (Emma Cocker, Marcia Farquhar, Claire Hind, Johanna Linsley, Ben Roberts and Simon Zimmerman).

York New York, a commission of 101 postcards from York New York http://yorknewyork.blogspot.com/

Saturday 21 November 2009

This Too Shall Pass by Anna Livia Löwendahl-Atomic

This Too Shall Pass is a life-long artwork by Löwendahl-Atomic that involves the clandestine yet public exchange of screws from buildings across the globe. Documentation of the work is currently being exhibited in the group show SPUREN at Kunstraum t27 in Berlin.

SPUREN features work by Klaus Abromeit, Jasmin Höher-Kosel, Geraldine Hudson and Sabrina Jung, five artists who approach the topic of traces (SPUREN) in different ways.

The below text is the exhibition catalogue essay for This Too Shall Pass, written by Rachel Lois Clapham in dialogue with the artist.


////////

An Epically Pointless Proof of Life (art) OR This Text Too Shall Pass.

Initially I felt that I had made my life so easy. Do you think I could put the text up on my blog after it is finished? Because I only have to change a screw to achieve something, but then lately I noticed that often I don’t feel like changing a screw :(. I could include a link to the exhibition on the blog post of course. But I still have to do it, and those days I feel really useless. Yes a link would be great thanks. Why do you feel you have to do it? OK give me names, dates of the show etc. Because this project will go on for the rest of my life. So you feel if you stop, the project will have failed? And in order to do that I need to ..well to do it. If your life gets cut off in its prime you will have still finished 'the project'? Stopping is not even an option. Like if you are run over by a bus the last screw won’t go in your coffin then maybe because people won’t know to keep the screw you have on you, unless you make a will? This is true but I have a back up. …A back up? Someone is always responsible for organising the screw etc after I am gone. So they will be responsible for nailing you shut? Yes. They will go back to the last place where you removed a screw, pick it up, and that will be the one left. It’s out of my hands :). …The screw you replaced it with I mean. Literally. Forgive me, this is all very fatalistic, but actually the work seems not so much about death as it is living. Performance, or life, and death inextricably linked of course- performance only remains through its disappearance (its death). Bodily remains only become such through the disappearance of life. I feel like paradox is never far away from your work. They will go get the last screw I did which will exchange place with a screw from my coffin. In the end there will be one screw left over. Yes, it is about living. Living with something for a very long time and having it burn a hole in your bag or pocket. It’s also in some way a secret mission. Does this project give your life purpose? Actually, it’s a very meditative. It’s funny I was writing about it yesterday and I was thinking about the secretive nature. The work is sometimes performative and sometimes clandestine. Perhaps all durational art, life art, as it were is secretive as you can’t constantly be showing and publicising what you are doing. It is necessarily private, like most process (as opposed to product or performance). It begs the question of why and when you think of it as art, and not. How do you mean? Like if you make art in the studio when no-one is looking, that’s unseen, secret, made in private for a deferred audience. True. But there is something different happening in the making of durational or life art because the audience is nearly always un-anticipated in a major way. The work is made to be purposefully unseen as work. Another paradox. You find yourself ‘going through the motions' and not really treating it as an out of the ordinary gesture. But then you pull it into an exhibition, a moment, a conversation with me, and then it is witnessed as art. But is that something different from the work itself. That goes back to what I first said, that I thought I made life so easy for myself as I "only" have to exchange a screw to feel I achieved something. I am interested in how to leave a trace without adding anything. With this arrangement. Like subtraction, and addition = 0 but also more than 0. And also how the work is simultaneously epic but also maybe pointless. How a dug out hole, later re-filled, can be an inverted mountain but walked over without noticing. I love epic and pointless in the same sentence. This feels important.



Rachel Lois Clapham is Co-Director of Open Dialogues www.opendialogues.com

For information on Anna Livia Löwendahl-Atomic and This Too Shall Pass see http://annalivia.wordpress.com/