Latest news with #performanceart
The Guardian
3 days ago
- Politics
- The Guardian
He's been hanged, stabbed and cut in galleries – now artist Carlos Martiel is being buried alive
In 2022 in a Los Angeles gallery, Carlos Martiel placed a noose around his neck and suspended his nude body from a rope tied to the ceiling. The piece was titled Cuerpo, Spanish for 'body', and the photographs and footage alone are shocking, mournful and distressing, as volunteers take turns holding his body aloft to prevent the real risk of asphyxiation. In conceiving the work, the Cuba-born, New York-based Afro-Latinx artist viewed hundreds of photographs of public lynchings from across the US – a brutal history of normalised extrajudicial violence that has moved artists from Billie Holiday to film-maker Steve McQueen. Those lynchings were also a kind of public performance: of terror, dehumanisation and white supremacy. 'I couldn't put into words everything I thought and felt during the development of the work; it was a very profound and intense experience for me,' Martiel says, over email. 'When I was finally taken down and went into the gallery director's office to rest, I cried inconsolably for about 20 minutes. That had never happened to me before.' In June, Martiel will present the video of his Cuerpo performance at Dark Mofo festival in lutruwita/Tasmania. He'll also premiere a new live performance titled Custody, which reflects on 'police brutality, incarceration, and death of racialised bodies' globally, including within First Nations communities in Australia. For two hours, Martiel will stand naked and restrained in a large hourglass structure in Hobart's City Hall, as sand rises to subsume and compress his body. For many years, Martiel's flesh and blood has been his means of expression. For 2009's Marea, he was buried up to his neck on a Havana beach as he waited for the tide to rise; in 2010's Espíritus acuartelados, he struggled to free himself from under the combat-booted foot of another performer. For 2017's Continente, he had nine small diamonds embedded in his skin and then lay in a New York gallery while a white man cut them out. While many of his works are documented in photography and video, he believes that there are some things that can only be expressed through live performance, that the empathetic nature of performance unlocks something between audience and artist that a sculpture or painting can't. The content of his work, he says, is informed by 'the contradictions and nonconformities that living in the Cuban context generated in me'. Born in Havana in 1989, in a time of economic crisis and social upheaval at the tail end of the cold war, Martiel witnessed the intersecting realities of race, inequality, homophobia and government repression from a young age. 'Ideas become clear for anyone under that breeding ground,' he says. Art became 'an escape route, a refuge, a firearm, and a means to express myself freely in that scenario'. Martiel developed his particular brand of art while studying goldsmithing at Havana's Academy of Fine Arts, when he started making drawings using a dilution of blood, iron oxide, vinegar and charcoal. 'Clandestinely, I had to go to public clinics and ask the nurses to take my blood to use it as paint later,' he says. 'At first, they helped me in the process, but given how often I went, they stopped doing it, which frustrated me.' He cut out the intermediary, and started exposing his body to physical and psychological extremes, influenced by Cuban and Cuban American artists such as Tania Bruguera and Coco Fusco, as well as Marina Abramović, Regina Galindo, Paulo Nazareth and Ayrson Heráclito. Initially, lacking money or access to Havana's conventional art spaces, Martiel started out by mounting public performances and interventions. But as his profile grew, he was invited into some of the art world's most prestigious spaces. In 2021, as part of his Monument series, he stood naked with his hands cuffed behind his back in the middle of the Guggenheim Museum's iconic white rotunda. While his body of work is steeped in the context of his home country of Cuba and his adopted home of the US, the questions he addresses are, sadly, transnational. Sign up to Saved for Later Catch up on the fun stuff with Guardian Australia's culture and lifestyle rundown of pop culture, trends and tips after newsletter promotion 'In all the places I've visited, I always find a colonial past conditioning the present, where the same bodies are oppressed,' he says. 'I'm referring to the less fortunate human groups who have been and continue to be the victims of capitalism, colonialism, fascism, and racism.' In conceiving his new performance for Dark Mofo, he was mindful of Australia's 'necropolitics' and history of violence. While developing Custody, Martiel was in touch with Caleb Nichols-Mansell, a Tasmanian Aboriginal artist and cultural adviser for Dark Mofo, who he says 'shared a lot of information with me about the story and specifically about the situation First Nations people face there regarding deaths in police custody. That conversation greatly influenced how I approached the issue.' While Martiel's work is often confronting, he isn't driven by shock value or merely replicating the trauma and subjection inflicted on marginalised bodies. 'The topics I address are painful … but I never fall into the aesthetics of shock or gratuitous pain,' he says. 'The elegance of visual language and the transmission of knowledge through art have always been vital to me.' And while many of his works have referenced past and historical traumas, his work is as much a response to the present. 'It's sad to look back on the past, but even more heartbreaking to observe the present and see everything we're witnessing daily,' he says, invoking Trump's America, Ukraine and Palestine. 'If this isn't colonialism at its finest, I don't know what is. Every day, I believe less in justice; all I have left is the consolation of poetic justice, which I allow myself to profess through art, my main avenue of expression, struggle, and resistance.' For Martiel, it means his experience in that Los Angeles gallery in 2022 has only deepened in meaning. 'With all that we see daily in the world, I think it encompasses many more meanings than I felt at its execution. Maybe it is wrong for me to say it, but I think it makes more sense every day that passes.' As part of Dark Mofo festival, Carlos Martiel's video Cuerpo will be exhibited at The Old Bank, Hobart, from 5-8 June and 12-15 June; the artist will perform Custody from 7.30-9.30pm on Saturday 14 June at City Hall
Vogue
5 days ago
- Entertainment
- Vogue
Meet Esben Weile Kjær, the Danish Artist Who Constructed a Castle in a Parking Lot in Willamsburg
Yes, Esben Weile Kjær is 6'5' with blue eyes, but he's a man in fine art rather than finance—and the world is better off for it. The ascent of this 33-year-old Dane has been breathtaking, but the artist, a man at ease with himself, is taking it all in stride. His latest adventure takes place in a parking lot in East Williamsburg, where, at the invitation of Amant, he constructed Shell, a concrete-covered wooden edifice that Frankesteins together, he explained on the phone, 'a castle and a factory and a war bunker and a brutalist playground [and] a Soviet bus stop.' The hollowness of the building is intentional; part of its function was as a proscenium for a one-night only performance. On the far side of Shell, to a soundtrack by fellow Dane Loke Rahbek (known as Croatian Amor), Kjær recently gathered 1,000 white roses and four local performers, who joined him in running out from the castle to strew flowers on the ground and attach some of them to their bodies with packing tape. The chorography had a dance-like-nobody's-watching vibe, which saw the group writhing, bending like Gumby, air boxing, and 'eating' flowers, while sparkle machines intermittently shot columns of light into the appropriately dramatic cloudy sky. 'I love that they put glitter into the air around the trapped performers and the brutalist castle,' Kjær said, going on to explain that the roses, more than being 'a symbol for a new beginning,' were an insistence of one, 'even though it can be hard in the times we live in now.' Kjær studied sculpture at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, but he comes from music and works across genres and media. (Fashion-friendly, he's collaborated with Ganni.) Although the artist often engages with architecture (at times as a kind of set design), his work is anything but static—especially his site-specific performances. To this attendee, the production for Shell in Brooklyn had a distinctive Euro flair—quite apart from the musical performance, arranged in collaboration with the Berlin-based art center Trauma. Crenellated towers aren't native to the United States, nor are the WWII and Cold War bunkers that Kjær referenced, although the satellite dish was familiar. 'I think the sculpture is sending something out, communicating something,' he said. Its message? Affirmative, positive, and rooted in notions of togetherness. Even outside of his group performances, Kjær addresses the latter theme through his examination of nostalgia, a kind of collective memory that runs counter to the hollowness and isolation of the digital age. Indeed, Shell is designed to alter your course and make you engage—even if only for a moment.
The Guardian
22-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Manchester to host world premiere of Marina Abramović's Balkan Erotic Epic
Marina Abramović is an art world superstar well known for challenging visitors' awkwardness at sex and nudity by, for example, asking them to squeeze through a doorway between a naked couple. This year, she will take it to a new level in what she is calling the most ambitious work of her long career – an immersive erotic epic featuring performers re-enacting ancient and unashamedly sexual rituals. Manchester will be the venue for the world premiere of Abramović's Balkan Erotic Epic. It is, Abramović says, a reflection on how 'in our culture today, we label anything erotic as pornography'. There will be a cast of 70, including dancers, musicians and singers, with the production unfolding across 13 scenes. Anyone flustered by the closeup sight of breasts, bottoms, vaginas and penises should probably start drawing up alternative plans for October. The scenes will include Scaring the Gods, a recreation of a centuries-old ritual in which Balkan village women would try to keep the rain away by running to the fields, lifting their skirts up and baring themselves to the heavens. Fertility Rite will re-enact a fevered ritual where naked bodies writhe against the ground in 'a desperate call for fertility'. Massaging the Breast explores a ritual where women do just that, gesticulating over graves to awaken the earth. Abramović has described the work as the fulfilment of a long-term dream. 'Balkan Erotic Epic is the most ambitious work in my career,' she said. 'This gives me a chance to go back to my Slavic roots and culture, look back to ancient rituals and deal with sexuality in relation to the universe and the unanswered questions of our existence. 'Through this project I would like to show poetry, desperation, pain, hope, suffering and reflect our own mortality.' Belgrade-born Abramović, 78, is one of the world's most distinguished artists with a career spanning five decades. She is seen as a boundary pushing pioneer of performance who has regularly used her own body to test the limits of physical and mental endurance, often having to be rescued from peril by audience members. She has explored Balkan erotic rituals in film before, but the project premiering in Manchester is a new, much more ambitious work. In an interview last year, Abramović acknowledged that British people have a peculiar sensibility about certain things. 'You're so puritan about everything, about nudity, about sexual organs,' she said. She revels in challenging that. At her blockbuster retrospective at the Royal Academy of Arts in London in 2023 she re-staged a work called Imponderabilia featuring a naked couple in a doorway it would have been rude for visitors not to squeeze through. The question for many was whether to face the naked man or the naked woman. Some went through, apologising. Others were nonchalant, as if it was something they did all the time. Balkan Erotic Epic is produced by Factory International and will be staged at Aviva Studios. The artistic director and chief executive, John McGrath, said it was an honour, describing Abramović as 'one of the most influential artists of our time'. He added: 'This new performance work offers an unmissable opportunity for audiences to experience the next chapter of her creative life – bold, immersive and on a scale that's totally unprecedented.' Audiences will be invited to navigate the performance as they wish with the possibility of 'pop-up encounters' of 'intimate performances, feverish dances and haunting songs'. It is based on folklore and ancestral traditions from regions taking in Romania, Bulgaria, Greece, Albania, Serbia, Kosovo, North Macedonia and Montenegro as well as Roma and Traveller cultures. The idea is that 'erotic' is not something that should be seen as taboo, but more as 'a vital spiritual and life force'. After Manchester, the production will be seen in Barcelona, Berlin, New York and Hong Kong. Balkan Erotic Epic is at Aviva Studios 9-19 October. Tickets currently on sale for Factory International members and will be available for the general public on 29 May
The Guardian
22-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Eva, one half of performance art duo ‘from the future' Eva & Adele, has died
Eva, one half of the pioneering German performance art duo Eva & Adele, has died, her partner has announced. 'Eva returned to the future today,' a post on the pair's Instagram page said on Wednesday. 'She has left this world and stepped on to the eternal stage. Her faith in the power of art was never-ending.' Marked out by their extraterrestrial shaven-headed looks and surreal frocks, the duo have been a mainstay on the Berlin art circuit since 1991, when they started to attend gallery openings where they claimed to have landed in a time machine from the future. Their performance art adhered to the motto 'wherever we are is museum' and was non-stop: 'We don't just go and do a performance in a gallery and then stop being Eva & Adele afterwards,' Adele told the Guardian in 2011. The duo never revealed their real names or ages, choosing instead to define their age by the length of their relationship. 'After 34 years, one month, and 10 days, the longest performance in the world has come to an end today,' Eva & Adele's Munich-based gallerist Nicole Gnesa said in a statement. In the UK, Eva & Adele were best known for their surreal appearances as The Eggheads on Channel 4's late 90s programme Eurotrash, to which the pair contributed sketches featuring odd rituals, such as putting banana skins or fish on their heads. 'It was video art,' said Eva. 'Video art but for six million viewers.' According to German news agency dpa, Eva died in Adele's presence at their apartment in Berlin's Charlottenburg district, after undergoing surgery on her lumbar spine. 'We were together night and day, for decades,' Adele told dpa. 'Eva had enormous strength and discipline. Art was the highest good on Earth for her. But she wasn't just strong, she was also especially tender and sensitive.' Adele said she would continue to work as a solo artist, aiming to complete a long-term project spanning 201 canvases. 'Eva told me that until the end: 'Please keep on working.''
CBC
21-05-2025
- Entertainment
- CBC
When chronic illness is your full-time job
Five days before curtain time for her one-woman show, Noella Murphy is finessing a detail, specifically, "putting some folded flowers into pill bottles," she says. It's a prop for Flower Bed — a performance that blends clown performance, puppetry, visual art and theatre — but it also feels like a tidy encapsulation of Murphy's approach to life: finding small moments of beauty while living with long-term illness — and seeing the inherent effort required by both. "I don't have an end date to my illness," says Murphy, a multidisciplinary artist who lives with chronic illness in Halifax. "I feel like even just having seen more examples of how people live through these things, it would have helped me understand a bit more." Flower Bed aims to do just that, by exploring Murphy's chronic pain and overlapping diagnoses (she's been "sick for many years with chronic pain and sort of a medical mystery," as she puts it) in a piece that aims to be considerate of its subject matter while still being fun to watch for spoonies (a term for people who live with chronic conditions, based on the concept that everyday tasks are harder for them) and healthy folk alike. "I draw when I'm stuck in bed, and often I find it hard to think through pain," Murphy says, "So drawing something that I see is the easiest, and often I draw flowers." The inclusion of many of these drawings in Flower Bed feels both straightforward and meta: these very drawings chronicle — through their existence — the inherent unpredictability of her conditions, and how planning ahead often comes with an asterisk. The best example of this is that this show itself has been years in the making, having been pushed to 2025 after Murphy was too ill to perform it in 2024. But when Murphy takes the stage on May 9 and 10, it'll be worth the wait: Flower Bed is billed as "creatively explor[ing] what life is like when your full-time job is Living With Pain." It's part of the Mayworks Festival, a festival focused on working people and the arts, and how work shapes our lives. The play introduces another vision of labour to its audience: the work of managing a long-term illness, and simply living through one while being confined to a bed for months on end. "I think the thing that interests me about Mayworks is that it's not just about labour, but about all the groups who are most in need of equity and respect and who feel underserved by society," says Murphy. "I would definitely group ill people in that too, since our needs are constantly brushed aside. Beyond that, for an ill person to meet the bare requirements that it takes to be a human — getting out of bed, going to work, leaving the house, keeping social engagements — it takes a huge amount of labour, physically and mentally, which I don't think most people realize." Just like a plot of perennials, Murphy has been prepping fertile ground for this show, letting the ideas take root: First, Flower Bed was envisioned as a silent film. Then, earlier works she made of flowers sketched while sick became stand-alone visual art shows. "My health journey has not been the easiest," says Murphy, explaining why adding an element of clown performance to the show was important. "And so I, being a trained clown, I was drawn to this weird juxtaposition between these serious subjects, but then looking at it through a sort of a humour and a lighter view." In its final, blooming form, Flower Bed offers a view of the grief and absurdity Murphy feels are inherent in navigating an unending illness like hers. "I have definitely gone through phases with my friends and my family, of them discovering a bit more of why I sort of disappear and them going, 'Oh, it is really bad,'" Murphy says. She adds it's not so much about educating people on chronic illness as it is delivering a representation of people living with long-term conditions. "I was a drama queen when I was a kid, and I struggled with a lot of things," she says. "So, I even found it hard to believe myself when I was so sick. I think part of it is just talking about it, and I hope that the play brings up more conversations."
