肆無忌憚 第四屆女節

Live Performance Screening of British Female Artists


A selection of documentation and works made for camera by UK based women artists, reflecting the diversity of practices and approaches many artists are working with today - from public interventions, through gallery installations, and theatrical presentations, to reinterpretations of performance works, and works made especially for the screen. Featured artists: Bobby Baker, Stacy Makishi, Grace Surman, Yara El-Sherbini, Kira O'Reilly, and Marcia Farquhar.


Curated by Live Art Development Agency
Time: May 15-18, May 22- 25 (18:00-19:10)
Venue: Arts Studio of Guling Street Avant-Garde Theatre, Taipei
Fees: NT$100 at the door

NOTE: The video program is one hour long with short segments of each artist. Same video is played at every screening.

＊Bobby Baker
Spitting Mad


Expanding Pictures – a BBC2 and ACE Commission, Euphoria Films.
Executive Producer: Keith Alexander


“This was made with film director Margaret Williams and shot in an interior space which references both an artist’s studio and a domestic setting. Spitting Mad was a part of a series of six commissioned films and has been one of the few times that ‘performance’ or ‘live’ artists have been able to collaborate with experienced directors. I love this film, its shock quality, contained anger, subtlety and vulgarity.”


＊Stacy Makishi
You Are Here…But Where Am I?


You Are Here...But Where Am I? was originally commissioned by the Bluecoat for the Liverpool Biennial 2002. The piece has since been reworked for PSi12: Performing Rights, London (2006) and Performing Rights Glasgow for NRLA (2008).


“The piece was created in response to my own encounters while crossing borders and has evolved to include the experiences of other immigrants who perform in the piece as immigration officers. It is part intervention, part interrogation and part collaborative poem between an audience member and a performer.”


The performance begins when officers (who are attached to drip stands and suitcases) create a border. Audience members are suddenly stopped, searched, photographed, fingerprinted and ‘processed’. Then they are told that if an officer is made to repeat a question they will be detained and punished. Audiences are asked surreal questions such as: What do borders dream of crossing? What is the sound of a map being murdered? The officers do not speak English as a first language and are often misunderstood by the confused audience member. He/she is then subjected to the humiliation, frustration and fear that occupy the treacherous territories of the border. With each response, audiences unknowingly co-create their own passports.


＊Grace Surman
Three Pieces through A Camera


…White
Camera/Edit - Graham Clayton-Chance
Assistant - Tashi Gore
Music by The Magnetic Fields www.houseoftomorrow.com
Supported by CCA Glasgow
The performance …White was originally a Tramway 2003 Dark Lights Commission


Slow Thinking
Performed by Nic Green and Grace Surman
Camera - Gary Winters
Commissioned by Tramway, Glasgow and funded by Scottish Arts Council


Yournamelitupinneonlights
Director of Photography /Editor/ Digital Post Production - Graham Clayton-Chance
Animation Supervisor - David Griffin
Sound - Alfredo Genovesi
Set Realization - Stacy Matthews
Gaffer - Simon Ross
Set Painters - Catherine Hoffman, Amy Marletta, Gary Winters
Carpenter – Stephen Murray
Make-up - Maureen Manley Lee Wilson
Runners - Kevin Wrattern, Silje Silden, Meryl Gilbert, Sarah Little, Amanda Neill, ShannonO'Neill and Sharon Wilson.


…White (2005)
Using the premise of a female assistant to an absent magician, the solo performer has to conjure moments of transformation and everyday enlightenment from the materials available and surrounding her. This work approaches performance, presentation and identity by playing with the subtleties of appearance and persona, in order to question a perceived identity or role.


Slow Thinking (2005)
A performance that borrows images from familiar patterns and cycles to consider acts of becoming: becoming the natural, becoming wild, becoming the 1970’s, becoming old, becoming linked with the moon, becoming furniture, becoming bird, becoming cut-off. It meditates on ways to occupy (temporarily) or own (simultaneously) an identity, a name or a label.


Yournamelitupinneonlights (2006)
This work plunders children’s television and picture books, circus animal tamers, the Dadaist and Surrealist art movements, silent films and amateur pantomimes. Sited prosaically in a world of constructed make-believe – with parts of the set left unfinished, evoking the childhood excitement of dressing-up and employing a familiar film-making technique - acts of metamorphosis emerge.


＊Yara El-Sherbini
A Demonstration (2005)


Yara El-Sherbini’s performance to video uses the popular and recognisable format of educational TV to playfully consider ideas around authorship and high and low art, through the making of a visual pun. A Demonstration teaches the viewer how to make their own Carpet Bomb, while inviting the audience to relate form and meaning.


＊Kira O'Reilly
Wet Cup (2000)


A Making It commission supported by Expo, Arts Council England, and Future Factory.
Wet Cup (2000) has existed as a performance, a video and an installation:


“Feminist in it’s investigations and concerned about the dynamics of power that inhabit and inform bodies, Wet Cup approached the Body/my body as material and it’s innate mutability. The skin is engorged with the vacuum making cups and cut repeatedly so that the membrane becomes open, poised at inbetweeness. The materials of heated glass applied to flesh meet in a crude and beautiful interface with a simple yet efficient technology. Throughout the process there is a re-opening of the skin. The differentiation between ‘making’ and ‘performing’ becomes confused and redundant as the body persists in its own methodology.”


＊Marcia Farquhar
12 Shooters (2007)


12 Shooters was produced with a grant from the Arts Council of England, co-produced by J. Maizlish and filmed in England, Ireland, Spain and Germany. Featuring the work of: Zöe Brown, Nichola Bruce & Rebecca E Marshall, Judith Goddard, Dryden Goodwin, Jem Finer, Andrew Kötting, Trine Nedreaas, Saskia Olde Wolbers, Uriel Orlow, Tom Paine, Sarah Pucill, Tal Sterngast and Gary Stevens.


Marcia Farquhar has collaborated with twelve different artist-filmmakers, dedicating a selection of her past performance works to the recording eye of their cameras. Some new, some revisited and re-imagined, these works include monologues, visitations, walking tours, a Humpty Dumpty seance, and her famous life-size Punch & Judy show. In all cases, Farquhar has delivered a pre-arranged performance-for-camera, and all directorial and editorial control has been given to the respective filmmakers.


The participating artists represent a broad range of approaches and perspectives, from film studies to folklore, history, portraiture, doodling and documentary. These acclaimed artists include: Saskia Olde Wolbers, Dryden Goodwin, Nichola Bruce, Andrew Kötting, Trine Nedreaas, Uriel Orlow, Jem Finer, Sarah Pucill, Gary Stevens, Tal Sterngast, Tom Paine, Zöe Brown and Judith Goddard.


The project aims in part to address the outstanding question of documentation in the practice of performance – that of how the live, the unpredictable and the unrepeatable can be transmuted into a state of permanence, how the recording in turn affects the ‘original’, and how those recorded forms serve to locate live work in the wider contexts of fine art and public discourse.


Taking an interdisciplinary approach to these questions, 12 Shooters is an ambitious work about the live and the long gone, the nature of collaboration, and the precariousness of the work of art. In presentation it is introduced by Farquhar with a set of abbreviated, low-tech performances.