Live Action är en av Europas stora performance-festivaler. I den fjortonde upplagan får vi möta 10 fantastiska konstnärer från Iran, Frankrike, USA, Spanien, Finland, Storbritannien, Kina, Polen, Palestina och Sverige.

 

Eftermiddagsprogrammet ’Common Ground’ presenteras på Stadsbiblioteket och i Brunnsparken och är en manifestation av en av festivalens grundpelare - kulturell demokrati. På 3:e Våningen presenteras kvällsprogrammet både i blackboxen och den vita utställningshallen.

 

Årets tema är yttrandefrihet och vädjar till alla att aktivt försvara demokratiska värden - frihet, jämlikhet, mänsklighet, respekt, tolerans och solidaritet. Värden karaktäristiska för performancekonsten och alla konstnärer som medverkar i Live Action 14.

 

Fri entré till hela programmet
Torsdag, Fredag, Lördag på 3:e Våningen i Sockerbruket kl.19:30-22:30.

Fredag kl.12:00-14:00 Stadsbiblioteket 
Lördag kl.12:00-14:00 Brunnsparken.

 

Mer info: liveaction.se

 

Medverkande konstnärer:

Shirin AAbedinirad, Iran

Loïc Connanski, Frankrike

GREBNELLAW, Sverige

Valentin Torrens, Spanien

Dread Scott, USA

Roi Vaara, Finland

Wladyslaw Kazmierczak, Polen

Ewa Rybska , Polen

Raeda Saadeh, Palestina

Martha Wilson, USA

Jianjun Xi, UK/Kina

 

 

Shirin AAbedinirad, Iran

Lives and works in Tehran

 

Shirin Abedinirad was born in 1986, in Tabriz, Iran. In 2002, she began her artistic activities with painting. She studied graphic design and fashion design at Dr. Shariaty University in Tehran, where her research focused on conceptual art and the ways in which it overlaps with fashion design. Around this time, she started engaging in performance art pieces around Iran, confronting issues of gender, sexuality, and human compassion. She has also put on public shows in Spain, Turkey and India. Since 2012, Shirin has been making video art, exploring the notion of self and identity with moving images. She studied under critically-acclaimed Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami. In both her performance pieces and videos, she designs her own costumes, props, and sets.

 

In March 2014, Shirin was selected for a one-year scholarship with United Colors of Benetton’s Fabrica research center. During her time in Italy, Shirin worked in Fabrica’s Editorial Department, and published an original book "Fashion & Conceptual Art" (Nazar Publication).

 

Currently based in Tehran, Shirin has continued focusing on her performance, installation, and video art projects.

 

http://www.shirinabedinirad.com

 

 

---------------------------

 

Loïc Connanski, Frankrike

Born in 1958, lives and works in Paris.

 

Video artist since more than 20 years, Loïc Connanski is quite unclassified as a contemporary artist. He is also rather disturbing. A true Duchamp expert, his work method of is one of derision. Connanski's technique of auto-filming is close to that of Nelson Sullivan, the New York based video artist. He is the anti-thesis of the political correct in that he always says what he thinks, quite directly.

 

Connanski is also what he says himself an "ego hunter", hunting the egos of the art world, and asking them the simple questions around their work when he had a monthly TV-program, Mensomadaire, on the French national broadcasting company Canal+. He is an intellectual who works with the negation of the intellectual discourse. Since more than 10 years he has been working with performance, although one also can see his video work as performances in front of a camera. He has a corrosive humour where the pre-dominating quality is his love for language. His preferred target is television, around which he procedes with a complete demontage of appearances and the "labyrinth of illusions".

 

http://loic-connanski.blogspot.com

 

 

---------------------------

 

GREBNELLAW, Sverige

 

Grebnellaw is an imaginary population that comes to life through the elemental magic of sounds in electronic music performances¨ as well as out in public spaces in ad hoc ‘tableaux vivants’. Grebnellaw is the cosmic seed sown in early spring that brings to life new beings, forms, plants, animals, and humans. It’s an ongoing creative process that uses  pop music, visual art and performative elements to address contemporary issues. It also acts as a liberating force from social pressure and prejudice with ad-hoc performances that happen in the moment. The performances are site-specific, uses the “three-minute-pop song” format and a red and white color code to communicate an easily recognizable style.

 

With a special version for Live Action 14, Grebnellaw will activate themselves in a musical environment in which a stream of consciousness will take place in a frantic hyper-room with strobe lights, inflatables and live vocals.

 

Surrounded by the audience, an endless process of dissecting and meticulously reassembling identities will create diversity from the binary and explore fluid modes of existence. Reaching for subatomic landscapes, unseen fields of nonlocality, and quantum interfaces will serve as a blank canvas for investigating a place of growth, self-repair and rest from digital loneliness.

 

https://grebnellaw.xyz/about

 

 

---------------------------

 

Valentin Torrens, Spanien

Born in 1951, lives and works in Barcelona.

 

Valentin Torrens is an internationally recognized performance artist, theorist and teacher. Since the early 1990’s, he has performed in thirty countries in Europe, North and South America and Asia, presenting his works as one-man actions in international festivals and exhibitions. In the last seven years he has also organised the territorio Perfomance in the important multi-disciplinary Periferias festival in Huesca and the Territoris Nomades in Barcelona, Spain, both festivals providing exceptional venues for many performance and intermedia artists from around the world. Valentin has also conducted many workshops of performance and published artist books and catalogues. He is presently editing Performance Pedagogy a book that includes documentation and course material from over 40 teachers and programs engaged in the research and teaching of performance art genres

 

… In recent artist statements he describes his performance work in short annotated and highly allegorical phrases which have become his signature form of writing that perfectly matches his innovative public performance actions. He writes of the use of ‘shade like mind projections’ and the “dematerialized body.” He produces what he terms, “fusions of the presence of the action” and its “semantic projection” and of promoting “a spatial separation of the intellectual planes in the perception.” Torren’s employs his body as a purveyor of the potential for meaning making, whose senses are generated in the mind of the audience. He produces ‘games’ from elements of the action, alternately separating these elements, ‘fusing’ them, placing them in opposition, constructing ‘zero sum’ propositions and investing them in what he terms “the ‘luck’ of turns and twists.” He creates actions that are suggestive of formulations, indecisive, yet deliberate, often emphasizing potentiality. He describes his actions in Platonic terms as “the shade of the real thing in the ideal. Only the shade can reach the magnified dimension of the ideal.” “The subject is what it adapts and consumes in the interchange.” The artist explores a “double code” between the real and its representation/ illusion of the artist as his own shadow figure, and the context itself as a shadow, which necessarily transforms both artist and context. Torrens leavens this with humour and liminal play which short-circuits the logic of language and the conscious and subconscious formations in the audience's mind. The “Action [is] under dim light, stressing the direct perception.” 1.

 

Valentin Torrens’ creative process is characterized -- tempered by -- not necessarily what he will do; not that is “what if…” but a “whatever” privileging of potentiality and of means without ends which aligns him with the contemporary philosophy of Giorgio Agamben who has employed Melville’s Bartelby the Scrivener as the exemplar of ‘pure potentiality.

 

(Bruce Barber, excerpts)

 

http://valentintorrens.com

 

 

---------------------------

 

Dread Scott, USA

Lives and works in New York.

 

Dread Scott makes revolutionary art to propel history forward. His work is exhibited across the US and internationally. In 1989, his art became the center of national controversy over its transgressive use of the American flag, while he was a student at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. President G.H.W. Bush called his art “disgraceful” and the entire US Senate denounced and outlawed this work. Dread became part of a landmark Supreme Court case when he and others defied the new law by burning flags on the steps of the U.S. Capitol. Dread’s studio is now based in Brooklyn.

 

His work has been included in exhibitions at New York’s MoMA PS1, the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Jack Shainman Gallery, NY, and Gallery MOMO in Cape Town, South Africa. His performance work has been presented at BAM in Brooklyn and on the streets of Harlem, NY. Work is in the collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Brooklyn Museum. It has been featured on the cover of Artforum magazine and the front page of NYTimes.com. Dread is a recipient of a 2018 United States Artists Fellowship and grants from the Creative Capital Foundation and the Open Society Institute. He works in a range of media from performance and photography to screen-printing and video.

 

Dread plays with fire—metaphorically and sometimes literally—as when he burned $171 on Wall Street and encouraged those with money to add theirs to the pyre. His work asks viewers to look soberly at America’s past and our present. Writing about a recent banner project, Angelica Rogers wrote in the New York Times “…it was difficult to look away from the flag’s blocky, capitalized type. ‘A Man Was Lynched by Police Yesterday.’ It shouted the words so matter-of-factly that I felt myself physically flinch.”

 

He is on the board of the New York Foundation for the Arts and is an Academician in the National Academy of Design. Dread is currently working on Slave Rebellion Reenactment, a community engaged performance that will reenact the largest rebellion of enslaved people in American History.

 

https://www.dreadscott.net

 

 

---------------------------

 

Roi Vaara, Finland

Born in 1953. Lives and works in Helsinki and Budapest.

 

Roi Vaara is an internationally acclaimed pioneer of performance art in Finland. His work is site and situation specific made live and deals with existential issues.

 

Vaara has done performances since 1979 and he has performed over 500 times mostly with unique, experimental works. Since 1988 Vaara has been active in an influential performance collective Black Market International whose mode of operation of its durational performances is based on free and open exchange of ideas. His art has been presented in numerous international exhibitions and performance art festivals in about 50 countries.

 

In 2001 Vaara organised the biggest performance art festival in the world, the EXIT festival in Helsinki. Anybody willing to perform was invited and about 300 artists from 34 countries did so. Vaara studied at the University of Arts and Design in Helsinki during 1972–75 and at Jyväskylä University 1977–78. He was awarded with Ars Fennica Award in 2005 and with Pro Finlandia honorary medal in 2010. He has lectured and held workshops in art colleges, universities and academies since 1989.

 

 

---------------------------

 

Wladyslaw Kazmierczak, Polen

Born in 1951, lives and works in London.

 

Educated at the Academy of Fine Art in Krakow, Kazmierczak started with performance art in 1974 and became a pioneer in performance in Poland. He was also the curator and organizer of the first national performance art festival in Krakow in May 1981.

 

He initiated and curated the international performance art festival “Castle of Imagination” in Poland 1992 – 2006 / 15 editions. The artist states "To be a performer is an attitude towards the world and oneself, not towards art. The struggle of Performance is a silent, heroic fight for the freedom of expressing momentous and significant ideas."

 

Working together as a duo with Ewa Rybska, they have produced a number of political performances based on aspects of freedom which is limited everywhere. Even paradoxically in the democratic countries. Their performances are focuses on themes such as political hypocrisy and issues of oppression. They often use irony and an nihilistic attitude in their performances. Especially against the institutions and idols of fashionable values and artificial icons in art and culture.

 

Ewa Rybska & Wladyslaw Kazmierczak started art as duo performers in 1997. Since then they have created over 150 performances in Slovakia, Italy, Germany, Czech Republic, Belarus, Ireland, Slovenia, Mexico, Indonesia, Canada, Korea, France, USA, Israel, Finland, Estonia, Spain, Great Britain, Sweden, China and Poland (21). They are living in exile in the UK from 13 years.

 

 

---------------------------

 

Ewa Rybska , Polen

Born in 1958, lives and works in London.

 

Educated at the College of Art and Design, Minsk Mazowiecki, Poland, Ewa Rybska was a curator at the Baltic Gallery of Contemporary Art in Poland 1996 – 2006. She specialised in monitoring the art of young artists in Poland helping them with their early artistic careers.

 

Working together as a duo with Wladyslaw Kazmierczak, the duo have produced a number of political performances based on aspects of freedom which is limited everywhere. Even paradoxically in the democratic countries. Their performances are focuses on themes such as political hypocrisy and issues of oppression. They often use irony and an nihilistic attitude in their performances. Especially against the institutions and idols of fashionable values and artificial icons in art and culture.

 

Ewa Rybska & Wladyslaw Kazmierczak started art as duo performers in 1997. Since then they have created over 150 performances in Slovakia, Italy, Germany, Czech Republic, Belarus, Ireland, Slovenia, Mexico, Indonesia, Canada, Korea, France, USA, Israel, Finland, Estonia, Spain, Great Britain, Sweden, China and Poland (21). They are living in exile in the UK from 13 years.

 

 

---------------------------

 

Raeda Saadeh, Palestina

Born in 1977. Lives and works in Jerusalem.

 

Photographer, installation and performance artist Raeda Saadeh was born in Umm Al-Fahem, Palestine. She received her BFA and MFA from the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design in Jerusalem, and spent one year as an exchange student at the School of Visual Arts in New York. She has been awarded the bronze Chimera at ICASTICA the first International Arezzo Biennial of Art (2013); and the “Young Artist of the Year” prize by the AM Qattan Foundation, Ramallah (2000).

 

Her work is in the permanent collections of the Victoria and Albert Museum, London; Fonds Regional d’Art Contemporain de Lorraine, Metz, France; and Magasin – Centre National d’Art Contemporain de Grenoble, France.

 

”The occupying force has many facets: it can take the shape of physical tangible realities of the everyday, such as in a wall of concrete, a fence, a checkpoint, a curfew, a barrier of stone – or it can reassign it’s force unto a face of a child, a home, a language, and cultural, traditional expectations. There are limitations on her personal freedom as well: the woman, the mother, the lover, the guide, the protector. She seeks justice and longs for change. She is not blind to the opponents around her and pushes forward with enduring strength – and at times, she feels that it is almost as if she has to assume a sort of madness in her behavior so that she can live unharmed by oppression, in an attempt to always protect those she loves from negative forces of fear.”

 

 

---------------------------

 

Martha Wilson, USA

Born 1947. Lives and works in New York.

 

Martha Wilson is a pioneering feminist artist and gallery director, who over the past four decades created innovative photographic and video works that explore her female subjectivity through role-playing, costume transformations, and “invasions” of other people’s personae. She began making these videos and photo/text works in the early 1970s while in Halifax in Nova Scotia, and further developed her performative and video-based practice after moving in 1974 to New York City, embarking on a long career that would see her gain attention across the U.S. for her provocative appearances and works. In 1976 she also founded and continues to direct Franklin Furnace, an artist-run space that champions the exploration, promotion and preservation of artists’ books, installation art, video, onliine and performance art, further challenging institutional norms, the roles artists play within society, and expectations about what constitutes acceptable art mediums.

 

https://www.marthawilson.com

 

 

---------------------------

 

Jianjun Xi, UK/Kina

Lives and works in London and Beijing.

 

Born in Nantong, Jiangsu Province, Jianjun Xi is a seminal British Chinese artist, working in different art media like performance but also installation, sculpture, video and painting. He graduated in 1986 from the Central Academy of Craft Art (now The Academy of Arts & Design of Tsinghua University). Jian Jun Xi is one of the founders of“Concept 21(观念21)” - one of the first performance art groups in China.

 

In 1987, he moved to Great Britain. In 1988, invited by Delfina Studio Trust (DST), he worked in London for 2 years, and in 1992, he was invited by a residency program to Cité International in Paris to work in France for 2 years. In 1995, Xi got an M.A. from Goldsmiths’ College, University of London.

 

In 1999, Xi and artist Cai Yuan established “MadForReal” art group, which started a series of creations in performance art. These two artists implemented very influential performance art works in prestigious art institutions in both Europe and the US. Among the works, “Two Artists Jump on Tracey Emin's Bed”and “Two Artists piss on Duchamp’s Urinal” were praised by authorities in western art as ”The most creative and advanced performance art today”. They have exhibited their solo and group work in galleries and professional art institutions in more than 20 countries, including Tate Modern, Berlin Art Palace, Beijing Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, Malmo Contemporary Art Museum in Sweden,etc. Xi’s works are collected by individuals and art institutions like China Minsheng Art Museum, Australia White Rabbit Gallery, and British Museum.

 

Jian Jun Xi is president of the UK-Chinese Arts Association, as well as th the co-founder of “China Performance Art Research Center”. In 2006, he was awarded the Jackson Pollock Art Prize. In 2013, Xi established “China Live Art Website”, and in 2015, Phoenix Art awarded him the “the most appealing artist”. Xi has actively participated in the exchange of culture and art between China and the UK. Xi has invited many renowned curators and artists to China, and endeavored to promote the cultural and artistic communication between the two countries.