FADO continues its 12-month duration performance art series, TIME TIME TIME, with Manifesto, a new work by Canadian artist Rebecca Belmore.

Sitting in a storefront window where she can be viewed and heard from the street, Belmore will spend twelve hours writing and speaking. At the end of twelve hours, she will organize her writing into a neat pile and invite people to an ‘opening’—the exhibition of her writing.

Belmore says of this piece: “I do not enjoy writing about my own work. But I like writing. I speak about my work in front of others. Revisiting sites. Places. Looking again at my ideas. Hearing the sounds made by my voice trying to remember time. ‘Manifesto’ is a place to hear the sound of my own writing. It is a private inner place made public. I like writing. But never real writing like a writer. Just my hand and my head working to mark down and speak beyond my body…. I view this experience as a process where I have the time and space to make my thoughts into an object. The result of this performance work will be the writing, not to be read but to exhibited as an object.”

For the past ten years, Rebecca Belmore has been exploring issues of identity and place through installation and site-specific works as well as performance art pieces. She has performed in numerous festivals, conferences, public galleries, artist-run centres and unofficial spaces for a wide range of audiences. Some venues include the Havana Biennale (1991), two performance biennials in Québec City (Premiere biennale d’art actuel de Québec, 1990; Rencontre internationale d’art performance de Québec, 1994), the American Indian Art Institute (1995), the Banff Centre (1997), 7a*11d Performance Art Festival (1997) and a tour of Germany organized by Boris Nieslony in 1998.

Image (above) © Rebecca Belmore, Manifesto, 1999. Photo by Paul Couillard.