Tag: Tess Martens

Image: © Tess Martens, Ashes to Ashes, Pi*llOry part four, 2020. Photo by Tina Bararian.

Canada

Martens completed her Masters of Fine Art at the University of Waterloo in 2018. She is also part of the programming committee for CAFKA (Contemporary Art Forum of Kitchener & Area) and has interviewed artists for arts and culture blog, www.culturefancier.com. She has participated in performance art residencies and performed internationally. In her art practice, personal experiences are re-contextualized through performances. These performances draw from memories that are simultaneously nostalgic, shameful and based in fear. There is an attempt to fight off shame and guilt associated with exposing oneself in her performances. Humour is often used to invite and engage the viewer.

Pi*llOry is an event for Queer, BIPOC and Feminist performers to show case their work, focusing on trauma. Pi*llOrists are examining how we personally and politically dismantle heteronormative hegemony and engage in healing that puts an end to the repetition of communal trauma. Pi*llOry’s performers are liberating queer bodies as a primary agency that can harness the transformative power of presence, space, politics, shame and (dis)/ability while refracting their infinite incarnations. Pi*llOry’s artists renounce the binary and traditional gender roles, they not only create new ones for themselves, but give space for others to create their own as well. Through oral, visual and visceral mediums, Pi*llOry explores the depths of fragmented gender/queer identity, pushing beyond labels and classifications. On the edge of complete uncertainty, with only the already structural, limited and bound ways of description and discrimination of queerness, Pi*llOrists arm themselves with the unknown to disrupt inherited historical trauma invoking a lasting communal cultural healing.

ARTISTS
Sadie Berlin
lo bil
Simla Civelek
Nicole Lynn Deschaine
Madeleine Lychek
Tess Martens
Sheri Osden Nault
[ field ] (Coman Poon & Brian Smith)
Randa Reda
Amber Helene Müller St. Thomas
Holly Timpener
Johannes Zits

Pi*llOry would like to thank FADO for their sponsorship and support of Pi*llOry part three and four.

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