Image © Louise Liliefeldt, Land of the Living, Rhubarb Festival, 2022. Photo Henry Chan.
South Africa / Canada
www.louiseliliefeldt.com
Born in Cape Town, South Africa, Louise Liliefeldt is a Toronto-based performance artist and painter. Liliefeldt’s work has been presented across Canada in a wide array of festivals, platforms and venues including 7A11D International Festival of Performance Art (Toronto), Art Gallery of Ontario (Toronto), Art Gallery of York University (Toronto), FADO Performance Art Centre (Toronto), Images Festival (Toronto), LIVE Biennale (Vancouver), Mayworks Festival of Working People and the Arts (Toronto), Mercer Union (Toronto), Rencontre Internationale Performance D’art (Québec City), and Western Front (Vancouver) among many others. Her work has been presented internationally in the Netherlands, Poland, Turkey, USA, and Wales. She is a co-foundering member of Toronto Performance Art Collective (TPAC), which produces the 7a*11d International Festival of Performance Art.
In 2016, Liliefeldt was commissioned to create a new performance in the context of the exhibition, Toronto: Tributes + Tributaries 1971–1989 at the Art Gallery of Ontario and curated by Wanda Nanibush. Liliefeldt’s performance, entitled What Does It Mean To Forget? was the first in a series of works that focused on the more fragile aspects of the human experience: aging, dementia and death. Her work is predominately concerned with the politics of identity as it intersects with gender, race and class; and seeks to examine the cultural conventions of spectatorship and the links between emotional and psychological states, and physical experience. The methodology of her performance art practice is shaped by the notion of always taking into consideration the significance of changes in circumstances.
