Performance
Imagined Spaces/Lost Objects curated by Victoria Stanton

FADO Performance Art Centre is proud to present Imagined Spaces/Lost Objects, a programme of performance works curated by Victoria Stanton for the 2011 Edgy Women Festival presented at Studio 303 in Montréal.

Between the timeless and the transitory, between dream and reality, fact and fantasy, there emerges a potent junction. This intersection, a “no-man’s land,” straddles temporal veracity and produces a space difficult to pin down. In this imagined space, a series of self-consciously constructed identities come to embody an invested trace – of lost love, lost words, of lost or stolen objects. Lost and yet, the trace of what remains sticks in the memory, and to the body. And in this “no-man’s land” we find four women – charting four distinct paths on land in-between multiply defined world.

ARTISTS
Janine Eisenächer (Berlin)
Amalie Atkins (Saskatoon)
Julianna Barabas (Calgary)
Laura Margita (Saskatoon)

Within the context of a fictional world, Amalie Atkin’s work investigates aspects of loss, isolation, transformation, and ritual to create a mythology both awkward and spectacular. Over the past few years I have been working in film, performance, fibres and photography, using these mediums in ways that at once inform one another and contribute to the creation of these fantastical environments. Fusing these separate entities together this seires marks the first appearance of my cinematic work in the context of performance. Initially made as a 16mm film for this event, Three Minute Miracle: Tracking the Wolf will be presented as a live performance, incorporating a live audio component and additional performative elements that tie into key events and objects in the film.

Antidote by Julianna Barabas is a series of performance actions designed to break down social norms around touch, gestures of care, vulnerability and public intimacy. Using hand washing and then massage of the hands of the audience participants, I offer them an opportunity to use the time spent engaged in the performance to metaphorically cleanse or alleviate tensions they may have in relation to their identities. Throughout the massaging of the hands, I also sing to the person receiving the massage, further heightening the intimacy of the gesture and interaction between us.

In her solo performance-series Eat Your Enemy #3 I am the Coca-Cola of art, Janine Eisenächer works with the Brazilian cultural concept of Antropofagia (cannibalism) and by that explores its potential of being an alternative subversive strategy. Focusing on processes of incorporation and transformation, the performance artist discusses matters of identity in relation to work and gender-specific questions, the (post)colonial discourse of “the other”, and the economic structures in the field of artistic work itself. By using text, objects, body and sound in a ritualistic structure, Eisenächer each time undertakes a new self-experiment of an imaginary voyage to overcome felt dependencies and to follow her own desires. The starting point for Eat Your Enemy #3 is a quote by the female performance art-legend Marina Abramovic, mentioned in the German art magazine monopol: “I am the Coca-Cola of art.” Eisenächer has been researching and working with Coca-Cola as material in her performance work since 2007, and Abramovic’s claim is the perfect basis for a new anthropophagic investigation…this time Eisenächer incorporates Abramovic and transforms into the Coca-Cola of Art herself. The traces of the live performance remain in the gallery space as ongoing installation. The artist would like to thank the Goethe Institute (Munich and Toronto), Edgy Women Festival (Montréal) and La Centrale.

Madame Blanche Hears Your Confessions by Laura Margita was a serious, heartfelt performance with all the things that make a performance professional like invitations, assistants, a videographer, a sculpture technician and a location in an artist run centre with a highly educated audience. The audience/participants were horrified, amused and afraid for me and the documentation of the events is one of the most embarrassing and distressing displays of loss of control that I have ever seen recorded on video. I may have lost the tape on purpose or not. I will try to find it or recreate it for this performance and take what I can learn from it in the service of my search for:

1. meaning
2. self awareness
3. forgiveness
4. love
5. power
6. artistic expression for a community of people that is 
a. beautiful
b. nourishing
c. scary
d. sad
e. funny

© Janine Eisenächer, Eat Your Enemy #3 I am the Coca-Cola of art, 2011. Photo Henry Chan.

Performance Yellow

This fragrance opens us to the question, has the show started? It's winter, the theatre is colder than the street and the room is filled with people and all their winter smells: wet faux leather, down, too much shampoo, and beer breath. The atmosphere is a trickster. Am I late, am I early?

Top Notes

yellow mandarin, mimosa

Middle Notes

honey, chamomile, salt

Base Notes

narcissus, guaiac wood, piss, beer