In 2014, Swedish performance and visual artist Gustaf Broms composed a list of nine questions that he started to circulate to fellow performance artistsâmany he had a personal connection with and many more he had never even met. The questions covered a range of paired conceptsâthe bricks and mortar of performance practice (material/object, audience/receiver, sound/silence, time/rhythm, space/emptiness)âand grounded by questions about personal experience, lineage and language.
The impulse to gather this collection arose from a conversation Broms had had with another artist; but what makes this volume first and foremost an artistâs project is that the questions are asked from the specific perspective of Bromsâ deep personal understanding that, as a practice, performance resides at the permeable borders between the conscious and subconscious, and the meeting of the concrete world of form and the spiritual realm. For Broms, these are the essential questions. The responses collected are as diverse and wide-ranging as the artists and their own approaches, from the practical, to the abstract to the simply far-flung, in addition to some reassuring and surprising overlapping ideas and connections.
The roster of participants in 9Questions is an impressive array of international performance artists whose work covers a range of performance and performative multi-disciplinary approaches.
CONTRIBUTORS
Adina Bar-On
Alastair MacLennan
Andrea Saemann
Antoni Karwowski
Arahmaiani
Artur Tajber
Barbara T. Smith
Bartolomé Ferrando
Boris Nieslony
Brian Connolly
Dorothea Rust
Elvira Santamaria-Torres
Esther Ferrer
Fausto Grossi
Guadalupe Neves
Guillermo Gómez-Peña
Gustaf Broms
He Yunchang
hermann nitsch
Irma Optimist
Jamie McMurry
Jill Orr
Johanna Householder
John Duncan
Kurt Johannessen
Leif Elggren
Linda Mary Montano
Macarena Perich Rosas
Margaret Dragu
Mariel Carranza
Marilyn Arsem
Martha Wilson
Monika GĂŒnther & Ruedi Schill
Myriam Laplante
Nigel Rolfe
Nobuo Kubota
Paul Couillard
Pekka Kainulainen
Rocio Boliver
Roi Vaara
Ron Athey
Serge Olivier Fokoua
Shannon Cochrane
Stelarc
Tanya Mars
Tehching Hsieh
Tomas Ruller
Ulay
Valentin Torrens
Zbigniew Warpechowski
Zhu Ming
9Questions, an artist project by Gustaf Broms
Published by FADO Performance Art Centre and Centre for Orgchaosmik Studies
Edited by Gustaf Broms and Shannon Cochrane
Translations by Paula Alvarado, Robert Rowley, Nicolas Scrutton, Tomasz Szrama, Jie Wang
Design: Lisa Kiss Design, Toronto
ISBN
978-0-9730883-4-2 (FADO Performance Art Centre, Canada)
978-91-639-8460-0 (Centre for Orgchaosmik Studies, Sweden)
This publication project is partially supported by Stiftelsen LĂ€ngmanska kulturfonden (Sweden).