CURATED BY DEEJ FABYC (L.A.I.) & SANDRA CORRIGAN BREATHNACH (BBEYOND)
BBEYOND ARE EXCITED TO BE COLLABORATING WITH LIVE ART IRELAND TO BRING TOGETHER A NEW PERFORMANCE ART EVENT CONVERGENCE.
WITH A PERFORMANCE ART WORKSHOP FROM THE INTERNATIONALLY RENOWNED ARTIST ALASTAIR MACLENNAN AND ARTIST DEEJ FABYC CHAIRPERSON OF LIVE ART IRELAND AND CO-CURATOR OF CONVERGENCE, THIS WORKSHOP WILL BRING AN INTERESTING INCITE INTO THE TWO ARTISTS MODES OF PRACTICE. (PLEASE NOTE ATTENDANCE MUST BE BOOKED IN ADVANCE SEE BELOW)
CONVERGENCE WILL ALSO CONSIST OF SEVEN PERFORMANCES BY INTERNATIONAL AND IRISH ARTISTS BRINGING AN ECLECTIC MIX OF PERFORMANCES, WITH BOTH DURATIONAL AND SHORTER WORKS (PLEASE NOTE ATTENDANCE MUST BE BOOKED IN ADVANCE SEE BELOW)
TAKING INSPIRATION FROM BBEYOND PERFORMANCE MONTHLIES AN OPEN GROUP PERFORMANCE WILL BE HELD IN THE GREEN, CLOUGHJORDAN, ALL ARE WELCOME TO ATTEND THIS FREE OPEN EVENT, PARTICIPATION FROM ARTISTS AND THE PUBLIC IS WELCOME
Owing to her training in the plastic arts, her work in performance arises from a need to eliminate the artistic object in order to create a more direct exchange between the public and herself, frequently involving direct audience participation. She tries to make the work aesthetically simple, by using everyday objects infused with an important symbolic charge.
She wants the spectator to clearly perceive the message that she seeks to transmit; or rather, more than that, she hopes that her work provokes feelings that are within everybody’s grasp, whether or not they are familiar with the artistic references, that the work is open to an additional, more complex, level of interpretation. This second level is where the influences of her performances are revealed; in general, in poetry, songs and traditional stories, as well as issues that concern her in her own social circumstances, particularly those related to questions of gender. Her performances focus upon notions of her identity as a woman, as Spanish and also as human being in society. She is also concerned with violence and the play of power in our society.
Art Performance is my main artistic medium, in terms of research and practice. To develop links between art and life, thought and the action. To explore paradoxes of the human condition. To treat my body as a field of experimentation, in a society that would treat it superficially or would instrumentalize it. My work usually starts with an intimate experience which is “translated” into an artistic action/gesture. An ephemeral action, created in situ, achieved with ordinary resources. To create not a product but a presence. In relation with elements (earth, water, fire, air), materials (stones, branches, leaves, feathers, blood, ashes, salt …) or simple objects (candles, balloons, typewriter, harmonica, grater,…).These actions are fragments of a continuous process, which is transformed by the space, the time, the meeting of those who witness it, by my life and its experiences. These actions refer to poetry, to its etymological sense of “do in the making”. Let poetry of life be our absolute weapon, writes Raoul Vaneigem, because it captivates without capturing, gives and does not appropriate, spread a vocation of happiness, which revokes the need to kill …
IMAGE | HELENA WALSH | FUTURE HISTORIES | 2016
HELENA WALSH
Helena Walsh is an Irish live artist, activist and academic. She has been based in London since 2003. Within her live art practice, Helena works with time, liveness and the materiality of the body; both within constructed installation environments and site-specific spaces. Drawing on her lived and embodied experience through her work Helena seeks to positively violate the systems, borders and rules that construct gender. Her practice explores the relations between gender, national identity and cultural histories. From her diasporic vantage point as an Irish woman living in Britain, Helena has examined histories of colonialism and migration in relation to issues of gender and labour, alongside the radical activism of Irish feminist diaspora.
Walsh has performed widely in galleries, museums, theatres and non-traditional art spaces, including public sites. Walsh is a founder member of the direct-action feminist performance group Speaking of IMELDA (Ireland Making England the Legal Destination for Abortion), playing a key role in sustaining the collective collaborations of Speaking of IMELDA, contributing to the development of the group’s public performances, publications and media campaigns.
Walsh regularly presents and writes on feminist performance practice. She has published in collections focussed on live art and also the performing arts in an Irish context, including peer reviewed journals such as Scene
Kane Stonestreet is known as a cryer, a lover and a pure spiral. Through their multidisciplinary performance practice they are interested in inhabiting alternative modes of attention; slower ways of being. stonestreet’s playful meanderings include dancing with chains and ice, carving a spiral into their chest, pressing their body to the concrete and reaching out to you. These actions may take place in the city time of clubs, galleries, theaters and warehouses, but Stonestreet’s mind is in tectonic time.
Stonestreet’s practice is based in collaboration. They have established substantial connections with Joseph Morgan Schofield, Eleanor Dalzell Jenyns among others. Their project entitled Collective Attention: Anarchic Action created a space for seven artists to lead and learn from each other’s practices. The four hour performance at Ugly Duck allowed for a flow of shared actions, through which Stonestreet found new qualities of engagement and entanglement. Their ritual actions reach towards gestures of radical softness and forms of queer intimacy. It is a process of survival. stonestreet is slowly unearthing ways of being that belong to their “we” / to our “us”.
Kelvin Atmadibrata recruits superpowers awakened by puberty and adolescent fantasy. Equipped by shōnen characters, kōhai hierarchy and macho ero-kawaii, he often personifies power and strength into partially canon and fan fiction antiheroes to contest the masculine meta and erotica in Southeast Asia. He works primarily with performances, often accompanied by and translated into drawings, mixed media collages and objects compiled as installations. Approached as bricolages, Kelvin translates narratives and recreates personifications based on RPGs (Role-playing video games) theories and pop mythologies.
As an expansion of his post graduate study, he is developing the language of queer abstraction and minimalist erotica in his illustration of the mecha and transhumanist fantasy. As an apprentice tattooist, he has also been experimenting on the process of image markings on skin as a continuation of his attraction to living sculptures, breathing mannequins and bodies as pedestals.
IMAGE | OLIVIA HASSETT | SCREENED | 2015
OLIVIA HASSETT
The exploration of material and colour are hugely important elements in my practice. Like a scientist I will experiment with the physicality of each material and object that I am drawn to. I will return again and again to explore its strengths, limitations and how it might transform in relation to its environment, my performing body, or other materials. Using brightly coloured man-made materials alongside reappropriated medical elements I explore the complex relationships we have with our visceral body. Often, we fear and disassociate from this complex body hoping that all the different organs and systems will keep working together and not succumb to fragility or illness.
Over the years I have engaged and reengaged with the notion of human skin as a porous liminal boundary that wraps around the body holding it all together. More recently my explorations have focused on the idea of the fragility of the human body under pressure. Brittle, hollow, bones split and fracture needing to be held together and supported. My art works seek to repair, reconnect, and rebuild a new provisional whole, one that recognises the beauty in our lived bodily experience, sunspots, scars, traumas, and all.
VERÓNICA PEÑA is an interdisciplinary artist, and her work explores absence, separation, and the search for harmony through Performance Art. Her practice is motivated by challenging existing preconceptions, generating new understandings, and eliminating barriers to human unity; barriers such as migration politics, physical distance, pain, racism, machismo, cultural segregation, and death.
Peña’s performance installations combine underwater submersion, durational process, visual metamorphosis, and audience participation to address global issues of migration, cross-cultural dialogue, peaceful resistance, empathy, liberation, and women’s empowerment. In her work, stillness and confinement are a means to overcoming separation, and counteracting violence. The prolonged submersion of the body is an act of resilience against imposed limitations; a return to the harmless state of the one’s still in the womb; a search for harmony. Confined, the female body reveals strength, the immigrant defies distance and separation, the alive search for the absent.
Minns is an older non-binary multidisciplinary artist using dance, music technology, words, video and liveness. Immersed in the London queer club scene of the 1990s they were bassist in bands such as Leigh Bowery’s Minty and Aiden Shaw’s Whatever, and were a combat medallist in Silat martial arts world championships in 1997 while earning a living as a sex worker. As a mature person they took a degree in Dance and Music Technology, and began working with motion-sensing music tech in conjunction with martial arts.
Minns then wrote and toured mixed-genre socially engaged theatre: Get Therapy, Danielle Imara’s In Jail; made collaborative video art: Y&I series, Matters A:Rising and award-winning solo pieces, performed solo live art/cabaret at many queer events (Duckie, Deep Trash, The Glory), and facilitated collaborative durational eco live art via Be-coming Tree. Minns is a member of non-binary live art gang FBI+A, who have performed works at LADA and MK Gallery and made collaborative video. Minns has now returned to the exciting combination of martial arts based movement and motion sensing music tech. Supported by Creative Scotland they have begun to explore improvised continuous movement wearing limb-mounted sensors to create soundscapes.
STATEMENT
Minns likes unexpected combinations, believing in the supreme connection of all forms and all beings. By combining ancient, esoteric movement forms with state of the art technology there is a sense of circularity, a laugh at the supposed linearity of time, and the hope that the resultant soundscapes might have a cosmic resonance. Minns wishes to create new forms that do not answer the right questions.
Soren James is a surrealist/experimental writer and visual artist living in Scotland, and currently funded by Creative Scotland to produce a first book (a novel in flash). An intensely private being, little is known of Soren’s character except that it recreates itself on a daily basis from the materials at its disposal, doing so in an upbeat manner until one day its drained materials will be sumptuously thrown aside to resume a stillness without asking why. Soren has been widely published as writer, poet and artist in: Strange Horizons, Grievous Angel, Cafe Irreal, and many others. A selection of its work can be seen here: https://sorenjames.wordpress.com
Statement:
If the space between you and me is large enough that words can get between, we’re fucked. If the space between the universe and humans is so large that money can get in, we’re fucked. If the space between nothing and nothing can get a mention, there’s hope.
During our residency at Milford House, we developed our ongoing project Growing Sculptures From The Land, where we investigate the landscape through performative sculpture making. Using mud, cloth, stone and sound.
We started from the writings of Schelling about the cosmological intricacies of the system of nature, art and culture, just as much as BBC documentary series Around The World In 80 Gardens, alongside the concrete ideas of borders, nations and communities in relation to mud.
Reading sections from Timothy Morton All Art Is Ecological, Thomas Nail Theory Of The Earth, and Fredric Jameson Archaeologies Of The Future, we developed thinking about co-existence, re-wilding, place and space. We saw the layers of fallen trees and undergrowth growing out of the destruction of the old, into hypercities of bugs and critters, birds and plant life. We have been particularly inspired by the idea that everything emits time, as well as the deep understanding of the existence of others. The work became involved in geological relations between the soil, human culture, and nature.
We performed the making by digging the mud material from the ditches, filtering through the cloth and hanging them on the trees; then tending the sculptures day by day until they were ripe. Plucking them from the trees and opening the cloth to reveal the mud shapes, the fire pit dried them into fragile, cracked artworks. We then transferred the sculptures into the screen so they can travel freely. Finally, we placed the remnants of the physical mud sculptures in the public space of Portumna Forest, where they will participate in the ongoing ecosystem dialogue, decomposing, feeding, being part of the ground.
Here’s our Pragmata Collective artist statement:
Pragmata Collective is engaged in art-making with people things and places that are: sometimes private but relate to public; sometimes personal but relate to social; networked, entangled, technological; performed, prescriptive, perchance; researching, learning.
Pragmata is the collaborative practice of artists Adele Lazzeri and Toby Tobias Kidd.
Adele’s research and art practice revolve around sculptural experiments as philosophical enquiries into the geological-cosmological relations between art and nature.
Live Art Ireland together with Bbeyond are collaborating to create a new Performance Art event ‘Convergence’ Curated by Deej Fabyc and Sandra Corrigan Breathnach.
We are calling for proposals for six solo performances that will be taking place at Live Art Ireland’s Ealaín Bheo Centre for Art Research and Development on the 15th of July 2022.
We are looking for new works created specifically for the event that may or may not be site specific. Information re the space can be found by visiting https://www.live-art.ie/milford-house/
Selected artists will receive a 200 Euro artists fee.
Application Deadline | 6th May 2022
Application Information:
Please send a short Bio. of no more than 200 words
Please send a short Statement of no more than 200 words
Please send 3 good quality performance art images of at least 300dpi
Please send on links to an online source to view your work – reviews etc. (Websites or Facebook etc.)
Please send an outline of your proposed performance – (Please Note This Must be a New Work) 250 Words MAX.
Please Note – Applications are welcome in a non traditional form from artists with additional access needs. Please contact Deej at live.art.ireland@gmail.com or Sandra at bbeyond@europe.com to make arrangements.
Live Art Ireland and Bbeyond are performance art organisations that strongly believe that creativity and the arts are for all. We are committed that Convergence will be an inclusive equal opportunities event, which strives to be open to artists from every background, we welcome applications from artists of different religious beliefs and political opinion, different ethnicities, differing marital status and sexual orientation, gender and persons with disabilities and additional access needs, persons with dependents and persons without.
