Sarah-Jane Norman, 2nd Venice International Performance Art Week photo Monika Sobczak |
Pertinent is the 2014 theme of this biennial art week: Ritual Body—Political Body, as performance art continues to hold to ‘the body’ as a site to explore relations between ritual and the political, and broader questions of action and efficacy.
Two beautiful 18th century palazzos played host to the event, with Palazzo Mora offering three floors of marble, ornate plaster and chandelier emblazoned exhibition and performance spaces. Attendance was free. In a country whose government, as I heard lamented, provides negligible funding for independent arts, securing such venues and notable international artists was an impressive achievement. Many confirmed the sentiment that the event had been enabled by the extensive network surrounding its curators. Local businesses, volunteers, documenters and publics were likewise mobilised. Here was an intervention into a city that exists in the art world imaginary as a place of grand institutions and international art biennales.
Jill McDermid, 2nd Venice International Performance Art Week photo Monika Sobczak |
Marilyn Arsem, 2nd Venice International Performance Art Week photo Monika Sobczak |
In ritual, as in political acts, the presence of a particular body endows its significance. Such is the case with Sarah-Jane Norman’s Bone Library, a work previously performed in Australia and the UK, deserving a more extensive review than I can provide here. As Norman undertakes to engrave a lexicon from the Aboriginal Sydney Language (commonly miscategorised as Eora) onto bleached cattle bones—a collection that grows over the week, methodically labelled and laid out on padded white tables—it is important to know that Norman is of Indigenous heritage herself, her grandmother being one of the last known speakers of the language. As she sets about her meticulous task she may be the image of a cosmopolitan artist, dressed in black including thick-rimmed glasses and cowboy boots, yet, like the objects she makes, she is positioned to straddle worlds. The bones recall a colonial industry that took Aboriginal land and labour yet now they contain an extinguished language that is enlivened by one who can act from duty and belonging. (See review & realtime tv coverage of Unsettling Suite including the Bone Library.)
Melissa Garcia Aguirre, Desapareciendo/ Disappearing, long durational performance, 2nd Venice International Performance Art Week, Palazzo Mora, 2014 photo Monika Sobczak |
The exhibition was an opportunity to explore a large collection of records of performance art, many from its pioneers. Perhaps what could be said is that the astute or poetic gesture in performance is communicable also in mediatised forms. The video works of Regina José Galindo (Guatemala), viewable on two monitors in a dark corner of the Palazzo, were some of the most political and disturbing (see Performance Now review). In Hilo di Tiempo the artist is placed in a black knitted bag in a public square with a loose thread that the impromptu audience proceeded to unravel. I liked the idea of a found duration—the video went for as long as it took to unravel the bag, it encompassed a public and public space beyond its art audiences, and the care with which this public completed this action, untangling the wool from Galindo’s feet, legs and neck as they went was touching. Galindo has for over 15 years created actions in public, galleries and natural environments that move between overt political statements concerning violence, war and torture and musings on the precarity of human life and experience.
Zai Kuning, 2nd Venice International Performance Art Week photo Monika Sobczak |
Migration and border crossing has long concerned the ‘radical pedagogy’ of La Pocha Nostra as introduced in one of the morning talks, “(In)visible Cultures—(In)visible Borders,” through workshop activities. The company’s artistic director Guillermo Gomez Pena activated the forum with a ‘jam session’ making verses out of “my home is…”, “my body is…” in inspiring and charismatic style. The presence of La Pocha Nostra had a ludic effect, like the circus coming to town, though their own performance extravaganza on closing night saw tropes of contemporary performance at times wheeled out like empty ritual. I think we’ve come to a point where nudity and pigs’ heads in performance are not transgressive in themselves. Thus ritual can suggest significance arrives merely in repetition. Despite this danger, by and large the artistic strategies evident in the Performance Art Week showed sustained attention, even in repetition, as a means to respond to new contexts and remain open to innovation.
Venice International Performance Art Week 2014, various artists, curated by VestAndPage, Palazzo Mora, Venice, 13-20 Dec 2014; performances by Australian artists Sarah-Jane Norman, Julie Vulcan and Barbara Campbell were curated by Leisa Shelton-Campbell.
RealTime issue #125 Feb-March 2015 pg. 13
© Megan Garrett-Jones; for permission to reproduce apply to [email protected]