Artist
Kirsten Forkert

© Kirsten Forkert, Walking and Getting Rid of Something, 2003. Photo Miklos Legrady.

Canada

Kirsten Forkert is a performance artist, writer, and teacher at Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design. A graduate of the Fine Art Masters Program at Simon Fraser University, Forkert has produced a number of performances and installations across Canada, working solo or in collaboration with other artists, including Peter Conlin and John Dummett. Her work, which is often site-specific, explores our relationship to larger social and economic structures, especially as they get played out in urban space. She is also interested in exploring alternative conceptions of community. Audience participation is an important part of her work.

Performance
Walking and Getting Rid of Something by Kirsten Forkert

Kirsten Forkert’s Walking and Getting Rid of Something is the final performance project in FADO’s three year long Public Places / Private Spaces series. This performance considers the problems of living in a consumer culture, juxtaposing two situational questions: what to do with unwanted material goods; and how to work through a collaborative or community decision-making process.

SEEKING: participants for collaborative performance action on March 1, 2003.
You are invited to come along for a walk. Bring an object you would like to get rid of. 

This could be:
for personal reasons
because it’s broken or useless or just takes up space
for other reasons, you just don’t need it anymore
because it can be easy, or difficult, to give something up

We are going to meet on March 1 and go for a walk together. During this walk, we will each find a way to get rid of the object, without simply throwing it away or selling it. We will help each other to do this. We will all decide together on the directions the walk will take, depending on where people want to go and how well we know the area. The walk will be over once everyone has rid themselves of their objects.

This project developed out of a collaboration with Peter Conlin. It is inspired by questions of what defines a collective experience: Why did you come here? Why are we here together? What kinds of relationships and dialogues could develop out of a group of people brought together, absurdly, by what we don’t need? Could this be thought of as community, however brief? Is this utopian? Maybe.

Artist Talk with Kirsten Forkert and Sylvie Cotton
February 26, 2003 @ 8:00pm
WARC (Women’s Art Resource Centre), 122–401 Richmond Street West, Toronto

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