Artist Lecture Series: CHAOS
Visual Arts
Sinéad O’Donnell (Belfast), Sandra Johnston (Belfast), Pauline Cummins (Dublin), Poshya Kakl (Iraq) and Lori Weidenhammer & Anakana Schofield (Vancouver)
ARTIST TALKS Fisher 100 CAMOSUN COLLEGE @ 7:00 PM
September 22 to September 25
CHAOS brings an international group of artists together for a week of performance in
Victoria. This is the second half of an exchange that saw a group of Canadian artists perform in Belfast with the support of the artist-run centre Bbeyond. These artists expose the absurdity and inflated expectations of the accelerated lifestyles we have come to accept as compulsory. Women, particularly European and North American women, who’ve been told that they can “have it all”, have become intimately familiar with the nature of chaos. The continual juggling of tasks and personas at work and at home has put women in a unique position to identify practical applications of chaos, not just as an intellectual construct. These women will explore the underlying structures and complexities of chaos by playing in it and with it.
CHAOS highlights the artists’ uncompromised perspective within a globalized context. The conditions of existence, both self-imposed and those beyond our control, stimulate a dialogue between the artists, their work and the audience here in Victoria.
Curated by Sinéad O’Donnell, John G Boehme and Judith Price.
Schedule of Events
Wednesday, September 22, 7pm - Camosun College, Fisher Building, Rm 100
Artist Talks by Sinéad O’Donnell, Sandra Johnston, Pauline Cummins
Friday, September 24 - Open Space, 510 Fort Street
7pm Reception at Open Space followed by performances
Lori Weidenhammer & Anakana Schofield - Big Mamas Riding High: Two artists construct and deconstruct the private and public performance of motherhood. Through actions, readings, and audience engagement the performers tackle the politics of porn, the absurdity of the domestic, the pleasures of beekeeping and the joy of gymnastics.
Sinéad O’Donnell - will develop a new action in relation to her identity as a disabled person. She will look at how, or if, it informs her ideas and methodologies as a performance artist. This work will be informed by her interest in determining responses to complex actions and situations through confrontations of matter, memory, site and space, while her process and methodology consider ideas of timing, spontaneity and intuition. Performances that take place in other geographical locations to Ireland broaden her cultural perceptions and influence her artistic sensibilities of time and space.
Poshya Kakl - is one of the most progressive young women performance artists currently working in Kurdistan, Iraq. Kakl’s artwork deals with her living reality, and reflects systems of kinship, gender, religion, barriers and borders. Participating across borders and ignoring barriers, Kakl will be working with CHAOS from Iraq via the internet.
Broadcast via Skype
Saturday, September 25 - Open Space, 510 Fort Street
7pm Reception at Open Space followed by performances
Sandra Johnston - (with) INTENT - Johnston is currently developing a series of actions that reflect on questions of creative improvisation, paralleled with processes of judicial inquiry. In considering forms of evidence, a legal jury must consider “intent”- essentially an assessment of a person’s motives, or state of mind when committing to an action. During this performance a series of actions will be undertaken firstly as improvised and therefore unfamiliar acts, which are subsequently re-entered, the second time with a more developed sense of intent, or knowledge.
Location: Maritime Museum, Victorian Courtroom
Pauline Cummins - Sound the Alarm, a 45-minute performance with sound and video elements. This performance deals with the question of power/powerlessness. It explores visually and aurally the feelings that attend the loss of innocence for the individual, and for a society.
Admission to performances by donation.
Sinéad O’Donnell http://sineadodonnell.com
Sandra Johnston - http://www.bbeyondperformance.org/members.php#sandra
Pauline Cummins - http://www.paulinecummins.com
Poshya Kakl - http://pavescrossingzones.blogspot.com/2010/05/poshya-kakl-15th-may-2010-crossing.html
Lori Weidenhammer - http://beespeakersaijiki.blogspot.com
Anakana Schofield - http://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/author/anakana-schofield
