Author: admin

Canada

http://cathygordon.com/

Cathy Gordon is an interdisciplinary performance artists living and working in Toronto. Her work has been presented at The Design Exchange, Ontario Science Centre, Harbourfront Centre, Buddies In Bad Times Theatre, The Drake Hotel, The Theatre Centre, The Music Gallery, Theatre Passe Muraille and The Queen West Art Crawl, as well as many site-specific pieces. Currently she is the Managing Director of The Theatre Centre (established 1978, Toronto) and is responsible for curating and producing the mega art-party Block In One Spot and co-curates the biennial Free Fall festival (a national festival of progressive performance). Upcoming presentations include Loss In Lansdowne (Toronto Free Gallery) this August and Bouncing Bride (Nuit Blanche) this October. Cathy is the winner of the Ken McDougall Emerging Director Award and 2008 Harold Award.

Canada

Rachel Gorman has presented her performance work at the Winchester Street Theatre, Buddies in Bad Times Theatre, and Artword Theatre. Rachel has created several site-specific pieces, and is currently exploring mixed-race identity through dance on video. Rachel has been a member of the Canadian Alliance of Dance Artists since 2001.

Canada

Ayumi Goto is a performance apprentice, currently based in Toronto, traditional territories of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, Huron-Wendat, Anishinaabe, and Missisaugas of the Credit First Nations. Born in Canada, she identifies as Japanese-diasporic and often draws upon her cultural heritage and language to creatively challenge sedimented notions of nation-building, cultural belonging, and activism. Inspired by collaborative work, she also explores inbetweeness, land-human relations, and (beyond) space-time beingness. She has served as the art facilitator at the Downtown Eastside Women’s Centre in Vancouver, Traditional Coast Salish Territories. Ayumi has performed in London, England, Berlin, Germany, Naha, Okinawa, Kyoto, Japan, and within and outside of artistic institutions across this land currently called Canada. Ayumi has a Ph.D. in Communication Studies at Simon Fraser University. In her thesis, she investigated and presented a practice-based sense of collective responsibility and creative critiques of reconciliation through forming a personalized performance art training in response to the art works and lives of Cree Métis multi-media artist, Cheryl L’Hirondelle, Siksika interdisciplinary artist, Adrian Stimson, and Tahltan performance artist, object maker and best friend, Peter Morin. Ayumi is currently a Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Ontario College of Art and Design University in Toronto.

b. 1977, Poland

Arti Grabowski graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Krakow, Poland, where he obtained a Diploma (MA) with distinction of the Multimedia Department of Professor Antoni Porczak. He also holds a degree of the Universidad Castilla la Mancha in Cuenca, Spain. 

At present he is a teaching assistant at the Department of Intermedia – Studio of Performance art run by Professor Artur Tajber. He is one of the most appreciated performance artists of his generation. In 10 years of his artistic activity he realized over a hundred of actions—always strong, full of energy and sense of humour, as well as thoughtful criticism. 

His work has been included in many of the most Performance Art Festivals, Theatre Festivals, Video Art Festivals in Europe, Asia, North and South Amercia. For the last several years he has also collaborated with Body Snatchers Alternative Theatre.

Canada

Alicia Grant is a choreographer and dancer working in various constellations with other makers in Toronto and Berlin. After earning a BFA from York University, her work in performance, video, and sound design has been presented in Canada, USA, and Europe from stages to swimming pools to abandoned factories to galleries. She is one half of WITCHTITS along with Zinzi Buchanan, and has worked alongside Zoja Smutny, Andrea Spaziani, Ellen Furey, Anna Fitoussi, Ivan Björn Ekemark, Jacinte Armstrong, and Inky Lee, amongst others. She has shared why-am-i-alive dance practices at Studio 303 in Montreal, Love-In in Toronto, Ponderosa in Stolzenhagen and TanzFabrik in Berlin. Interested in power dynamics, transformation, and intimacy, Alicia is currently working on saxophone solos and a fantasy travel noise album.

Canada

Iris Fraser-Gudrunas is a multidisciplinary artist and filmmaker. As a DJ and party-thrower she haunts art openings and artist run venues such as Double Double Land as well as events like AGO first thursdays and Electric Eclectics. She’s also known to take a simple gig and transform it into performance by employing a group of improvising male back-up dancers, outfits commissioned by artists along with a slew of installations and environs to create the right mood. That mood is sensual and optimistic and very committed to dancing.

Canada

Tagny Duff is an artist, curator, producer, writer and researcher. She holds a PhD from the Humanities Program at Concordia University. Her background is in media art with a focus on video, performance, biological art, net art, social sculpture and installation. Her research/creation interests focus on visual culture, viral media, interdisciplinarity, art/sci production and collaboration, post-studio art practice, and the relation between art, science and technology. Topics of interest include surveillance and biopolitics; queer(ing) culture and temporality; posthumanisms and changing perceptions of bodies; waste creation and ecology; scale, duration and spacetime; performance, liveness and documentation. Recent published texts include, FFWD, RWND and Play: Performance art, video, and feminisms in Vancouver, published in Caught in the Act: an anthology of performance art by Canadian Women (co-edited by Tanya Mars and Johanna Householder, YYZ Books); and an essay entitled Codpieces: Phallic Paraphernalia Revisited published in From Ironic to Iconic: The Performance Works of Tanya Mars (2008), a book in FADO Performance Art’s Canadian Performance Art Legends series (edited by Paul Couillard). Duff’s installations, web based and networked projects, offsite performance and video works have been presented in artist-run centres, performance and media art festivals, and universities across Canada, the United States, Cuba, Costa Rica, Germany and Finland.

UK

www.polarproduce.org

Teresa Dillon’s body of work includes locative-based performance, site-specific installation, sound art, and academic and applied research. She is the Director of Polar Produce, producing events and collaborations including N.I.P. research and touring network; UM: International Festival of Experimental Media (Portugal) and OFFLOAD programme. Her work has been shown and published internationally and she holds a PhD in creative collaborative processes using music technologies from The Open University, UK.

USA / Mexico

www.dinodinco.com

Dino Dinco is a performance art curator and maker, film and theater director, arts educator and writer. His work has been exhibited in solo exhibitions in Paris, Los Angeles, and San Francisco, and in group shows in London, Paris, Los Angeles, Santiago de Compostela, Antwerp, São Paulo, Guadalajara, Mexicali, Hamburg, New York, and Chihuahua. Dinco’s documentary film, Homeboy, explores the lives of gay Latino men who were gang members. His award-winning short film, El Abuelo, features queer Xicano San Antonio poet Joe Jiménez. Commissioned by the Fashion in Film Festival at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, the film premiered at the Tate Modern and has screened internationally. Dinco is writing a book manuscript on contemporary performance art in the major cities of the west coast of North America. His areas of research include experimentation with performance spectatorship and presentation through praxis, as well as the relationship between performance documentation and scholarship. He is currently a Lecturer in the Visual Arts Department of UC San Diego.

Ireland / Canada

www.lindaraedornan.ca

Linda Rae Dornan is an interdisciplinary artist creating video, installation and performance art, and writing. Her work explores visuals, performativity and embodied text about place, memory and being. Language, materiality and ephemerality are the threads woven within her work. Her visual explorations using language have become increasingly non-narrative, evoking interior space, memory and loss. Her performances incorporate words and silence in a durational format. She has won the Strathbutler Award and the Linda Joy Award, has been the recipient of many grants, and has exhibited/screened works across Canada, the United States, China and Europe. She lives in Sackville, New Brunswick, Canada.

Canada

www.kristyndunnion.com

Kristyn Dunnion ‘s dystopic Tarry This Night made CBC’s top 20 fall fiction list and Bitch’s November must reads. The Dirt Chronicles (also with Arsenal Pulp Press) was a 2012 Lambda Literary Award finalist and ALA Over the Rainbow selection. Recent fiction appears in The New Guard, Cosmonauts Avenue, and The Tahoma Literary Review. A performance artist and local musician, Dunnion’s provocative work incites critical questions about identity, justice, and power.

Canada

Julie Fiala is a feminist artist/activist working predominantly in performance and installation. Over the last two years, Julie has worked with marginally housed communities, women, and Queen’s University janitors to explore themes such as sex and class privilege, as well as notions of public/private space Recent credits include speaking at the Agnes Etherington Art Centre’s Active Practices Symposium and co-curating ARTHappens2, an evening of performances, happenings and events at Modern Fuel Artist-Run Centre. Previously, she was Modern Fuel’s Program Director.

Germany

http://janine-eisenaecher.de

Janine Eisenächer is a conceptual performance artist, based in Berlin/Germany, who develops concepts for group/duo/solo performances and site-specific interventions in public space. She works solo and in various constellations (e.g. in the performance art-duo Eisenächer/Harder CLAIMS), mostly on serial and research oriented performance art projects related to the topics of identity, work, gender-specific questions, (post-)colonialism and economic structures in artistic work itself.

In her performance work Eisenächer uses body, objects, text, sound and video, and she currently explores her artistic practice in the field of sound and installation. Eisenächer is a founder member of (e)at_work, a Berlin-based artistic and scientific production platform that explores object and activity related interview methods for the interaction with audiences in public space and within the art context. She is also a founder member of the performance network Emanuelle, founded as Berlin n@work. Eisenächer’s artistic practice includes curatorial and organizational work for Performer Stammtisch, a network for professional performance artists and monthly performance art and Live Art event in Berlin. Herein, she investigates forms of writing and speaking about performance art. In addition to that, Eisenächer is board member and tutor of the art association Flutgraben e.V., where she researches and develops models of organizing artistic work and alternative formats of education with a particular focus on performance art practice. Janine Eisenächer studied Theatre, Comparative Literature and Philosophy at Freie Universität, Berlin.

Turkey / Germany

www.ekici-art.de

Nezaket Ekici is an internationally recognized performance artist. A student of Marina Abramovic (MFA, Hochschule für Bildende Künste Braunschweig, 2004) and a member of IPG (Independent Performance Group), Nezaket’s work has been presented at International Festivals, galleries and events around the world including Germany, Spain, Switzerland, Istanbul, Italy, Taiwan, Holland, France. In 2007 she performed at the 5th International Festival of Contemporary Dance & Eros with IPG in an event entitled The Erotic Body at the 52nd Venice Biennale.

The images Ekici creates in her work are from the everyday environment, presented with either a theatrical sensibility or the beauty of minimalist sculpture. The simple act of eating grapes is attacked with intense energy, a hoola hoop (performance video Hullabelly) is given a political spin, and the signals room in the subway is converted into the world’s smallest concert hall for 5 days (Sala dei Concerti, performance installation with 40 musicians).

Iran / Canada

www.rah-eleh.com

Rah Eleh is a video, net and performance artist. Her work focuses on and critiques the visual stereotypes and performative aspects that shape female gender identity and national and ethnic identity. She is interested in how race, gender and nationalism are performed from multiple layered perspectives: exilic, decolonial, queer and diasporic. Rah is a Phd candidate at Die Angewandte in Vienna, and has lectured and exhibited extensively internationally at institutions including: NYU Tisch, The New School, Alfred University, Venice Biennale (ECC, Palazzo Mora), Images Festival (Toronto), Museum London, Carleton University Art Gallery (Ottawa), Williams College Museum of Art (Williamstown, MA), Miami Art Basel, Nieuwe Vide (Haarlem, Netherlands), Pao Festival (Oslo, Norway), and Onassis Cultural Center (Athens, Greece). Rah is represented by VTape, Canada’s leading artist-run distributor for video art. 

Canada

Felipe Diaz is a Regina based artist whose practice includes painting, installation, video and performance. Felipe explores issues of identity as it is formed along political, cultural and social lines. He has worked for a variety of organizations including the Saskatchewan Filmpool, New Dance Horizons and, currently, the Dunlop Art Gallery. Felipe is currently finishing his Masters of Fine Arts at the University of Regina.

Canada

Deanna Ferguson’s collection of poems The Relative Minor was recently published by Tsunami Editions of Vancouver. Her work has also been published in absinthe, Front, hole, Jag, Raddle Moon, Writing, West Coast Line and the anthology East of Main (Pulp Press).

Canada

Keith Fernandes is an arts management student at the University of Toronto, majoring in Drama. His recent credits include an original adaptation of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, and an original clown performance entitled The Golden Ball, which was awarded Best Production at the University of Toronto Drama Festival.

b. 1953, Canada

http://margaretdragu.com/

Margaret Dragu is a warm-hearted, fearless and indomitable spirit who has left her mark across disciplines and across the country. Dragu’s astonishing output of work spans back to 1969 and includes forays into theatre, film, video, writing, choreography and above all, performance art. Her performances span relational, durational, interventionist and community-based practices.Margaret Dragu is a 2012 recipient of a Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts.

Italy

www.francescafini.com

Francesca Fini is an interdisciplinary artist living and working in Rome, Italy. Her live works often address social and political issues, and are a mixture of lo-fi technology, homemade interaction design devices, and live audio and video. Primarily interested in video and live art, she also creates artworks assembling performance art ‘relics’.

“I am basically a performer. The action of a body, generally mine, in space and time is essential in my work. My videos and my tangible works are the chapters of a never-ending story of which I am the protagonist. I believe that all art should be “gesamtkunstwerk”. My body, the ship on which I make this long exploration, has always been a battlefield. Former anorexic, eternal feminist, still and always a lone wolf in search of the moon between the branches of the trees.” ~Francesca Fini

Canada

Artist Alissa Firth-Eagland graduated from the Ontario College of Art and Design Integrated Media Dept. in 2003 where her studies focused on curatorial practice, critical writing, performance art and conceptual video art production. Committed to critical analysis and discussion, she is currently exploring the curator’s commission as an artistic practice. She uses curatorial practice to create space for innovative methodologies & fringe trajectories, commissioning experimental works from artists. She’s recently organized exhibitions for Tranz<—>Tech 2003 Toronto International Media Art Biennial, the first annual Toronto Alternative Arts Fair (2004) and The 2004 Junction Arts Festival. The Junction Arts Festival exhibition Sorry for the Inconvenience (co-curated by Firth-Eagland and Emelie Chhangur) was recently nominated for 2004’s Best Curated Exhibition at the Toronto Untitled Art Awards. From April 2005 to March 2006 she will be working and conducting independent research at the Walter Phillips Gallery as she has been invited to participate in a Curatorial Work Study position through the Banff International Curatorial Institute.

Canada

www.theafitzjames.wordpress.com

Anthea Fitz-James is one-part academic, one-part journalist, and one-part theatre maker. She holds a masters degree in Theatre Studies from York University (Toronto), a Bachelor of Journalism from the University of King’s College (Halifax), and a Bachelor of Honours English from McGill University (Montréal). Her work and interests usually have something to do with craft, feminism, and explicit body art. She is interested in how textiles and nudity perform on stage. Her performance work explores alternative feminisms, embodiment, and the place where theory and practice meet. Recent performances including Needle Piece (an endurance piece in which she explored the gendered divide between tailors and seamstresses) and NAKED LADIES (a lecture meets dance-of-the-seven-veils) combined personal narrative, history, and performance theory to question why women get naked on stage.

Canada

https://erinflynn.ca/

Montréal-based dance artist Erin Flynnhas toured across Canada & Europe with Trip Dance and Le Groupe de la Place Royale. She is currently embarking on her fourth season with Corps Secrets. She teaches at the University of Montréal and is a member of the multimedia collective Vertice, which presents the third edition of the Pixel Projects in 2005. Her performance, Alcove, will be featured in April 2005, at Tangente.

b. 1966, Poland

Dariusz Fodczuk is one of Poland’s most recognized performance artists. He has presented his works in over 200 festivals and solo exhibitions in Europe, Israel, Thailand, Singapore, Canada and USA. Apart from performance work he also works in painting, sculpture and video art. He was a co-organizer of the Interakcje International Art Festival in Piotrków Trybunalski, as well as the organizer of the Bielsko edition of Interakcje, and the curator of the performance section of Global Communication International Festival at the Elektrownia Culture Center, in Radom 2009. He is the originator of the Bielsko Festival of Visual Arts in Bielsko. Fodczuk works at the Studio of Performance and Audiovisual Art at the Art Academy in Szczecin, Poland.

Canada

http://www.sophiecastonguay.ca/

Sophie Castonguay studies the subjectivation of gazes and cultural conditioning. She creates devices using the voice of the artist as an outside voice for the piece. Using narrative modes she attempts to create interference in the reception of the work and forces the spectator to question their position. Her work has been shown in Europe (Paris, Cologne, Basel) and in Quebec (L’œil de Poisson, Axe Néo-7, La Centrale, Dare-Dare, Dazibao). She holds a master’s degree in creation from UQÀM’s École des arts visuels et médiatiques (2007).

Brazil / Canada

Born in Sao Paulo, Brazil, Henri-Louis Chalem has lived in Québec City since 1985. As a multidisciplinary artist and cultural worker, he has worked in many media, including video, music, installation and performance. A fervent promoter of art in public space, his work is based on reflections about how others see it and the social function of art. Since 2007 he run in European little town with company UBUS THÉÂTRE, ambulant multidisciplinary puppet theatre His work has been presented in Quebec, Colombia, France, Taiwan, Morocco, Mexico, Croatia, Poland, Romania, Uruguay, Argentina , Cuba, Brazil.

Hong Kong / Canada

May Chan was born in Hong Kong and she immigrated to Canada in 1963. Chan studied painting and drawing at Concordia University in Montréal, graduating in 1967. She earned a degree in art education from Queen’s University in 1976 and an M.F.A. from York University in 1984. Chan currently is based in Kingston, Ontario, working as a visual artist and writer and performance artist, but is perhaps best known as a performance artist. Her work is characterized by a steadfast, careful observation of everyday details and a keen eye for the expressive elements of personal history, which she uses to bring the audience into her way of perceiving. She has presented work extensively in Canadian artist-run centres over the past 25 years.

b. 1962, Taiwan / Canada / USA

www.milliechen.com

Millie Chen and Evelyn Von Michalofski have collaborated since 1990 while concurrently pursuing individual practices. Their performative interventions—situated in retail stores, an ethnological museum, and sight-seeing meccas—engage olfactory, tactile and gustatory materials in the context of examining notions of history, tourism, the body and cultural difference. Chen has exhibited widely in Canada, the U.S., the Netherlands, Japan and Mexico. She teaches at the State University of New York at Buffalo and explores associations between the sensual and symbolic qualities of common yet potent materials such as bread, hair, rice and spices. 

USA

www.staceyannchin.net

Staceyann Chin is a spoken-word poet, performance artist, and activist. She is of Chinese-Jamaican and Afro-Jamaican descent and her work often discusses her struggles of growing up as lesbian and multiracial in Jamaica. She uses her work to question the oppression and the limitations of identity, race, class, sexuality and belonging. Her work has been profiled in more than 21 newspapers, journals and magazines such as the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Guardian and the Pittsburgh Daily and her poems can be found in numerous publications. She has been interviewed and featured on CNN, 60 Minutes and the Oprah Winfrey Show as well as several other cable network television programmes. She is the author of The Memoir: The Other Side Of Paradise.

Canada

http://nathalieclaude.com/

Nathalie Claude is a Montréal based actor, director, dancer, choreographer, writer, musician, clown, artistic coach, and dramaturg. As an actor she has over 50 professional theatre, dance, film and television credits. Her solo collaborative creations have toured across Canada, USA and Europe and garnered prizes and extensive media attention.

In the last 30 years she has been performing with Omnibus, Le Pool, Carbone 14, Pigeons International, Brouhaha Danse, Théâtre PÀP, Théâtre Il-va-sans-dire, Créations Diving Horse, Montréal Danse, Nouveau Théâtre Expérimental, Sybillines, Imago Theatre, The Other Theatre, Buddies in Bad Times Theatre and Cirque du Soleil, touring in over 20 countries. She has appeared in several Canadian films, and television series, and for 6 years played a lead character on Quebec’s beloved sitcom, KM/H. In the fall of 2008 Nathalie won Best Actress at the MECCA awards  (Montreal critic circle awards) for her role as  Emily the “Pig” in the Imago Theatre production of The Baroness and the Pig. 

She is a member of Momentum; a Montreal theatre company comprised of 9 artists with distinctive visions. They are united in the shared desire to create contemporary works, and transcend the boundaries of the discipline. Her own creations with the company include, the critically acclaimed Les Filles de Séléné (1999-2001), La Fête des Morts co-created with Céline Bonnier (2002-2004), and Limbes/Limbo (2004) a co-creation with the dancer Lin Snelling.

Nathalie has also created six physical theatre solos including: The Sadness Trilogy (1999-2003); The Madness Trilogy and others. From 2001 to 2006 she wrote, directed, and performed five bilingual vaudevilles, for the sapphic and old-fashioned cabaret created by Miriam Ginestier: Le Boudoir. And between 1995-2001, she was a member of the musical collective: Les Secretaires Percutantes (The Percussive Secretaries) comprised of 7 actress-percussionists playing in kitsch costumes, with caustic humor, feminist joy and wild rhythms. “The secretaries” (Nathalie Claude, Mireille Leblanc, Suzanne Lemoine, Sylvie Moreau, Brigitte Poupart, Dominique Quesnel, et Isabelle Villeneuve) performed in many bars, cabarets, festivals an events of all kinds, including: Les Francofolies, Just For Laughs, Nuit d’Afrique, Black and Blue, and did an hommage at Gala les Olivier in 2001, for one of Quebec’s revolutionnary female artists: Clémence Desrochers.

In 2009 she was invited by the  Montreal  Museum of Fine Arts to co-design  the largest-ever retrospective of works by the celebrated pre-Raphaelite British artist, John William Waterhouse (1849-1917): The Garden of Enchantment. Then in 2010 she directed the opera by Gertrude Stein, Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights for the Theater Department of Concordia University in Montreal.

She is also a very active and in-demand MC for cabarets and festivals of all genres, and was for 4 years (2008-2012) an artistic coach for actors, characters, and clowns for Cirque du Soleil. From 2012-2015, she toured with Cirque du Soleil’s Amaluna, in which she created and played the male clown Jeeves.

UK

www.lenkaclayton.co.uk

Lenka Clayton is a UK born conceptual artist whose work exaggerates and reorganizes the accepted rules of everyday life, extending the familiar into the realms of the poetic and absurd. In recent projects she has searched for and photographed the 613 people mentioned in a single edition of a German newspaper; collected, hand-numbered and redistributed 7,000 stones; filmed one person of each age from 1-100; and re-edited the 4,100 words of President Bush’s televised “Axis of Evil” speech into alphabetical order. She and writer Michael Crowe are currently writing a hand-written letter to every household in the world. Her son Otto was born in 2011.

Canada

For 8 months in 2010, Kitty Neptune taught a group of 4 students how to pole dance. Her students, an unlikely bunch to be so taken with the pole, were speedy studies. They took on the challenge of learning a craft that is part acrobatics and part exhibitionism with dazzling results. The Pole Club had their first “Class Recital” in front of 150 of their friends. The crowd went wild and an annual event was born. Pole Club now operates as more of a collective. Each student, having found their own style and strength, strives to learn “new tricks” from each other. As well as surfing online for what the champions are doing and spurring each other on to try more difficult moves. Pole Club is Kitty Neptune, Charissa Wilcox, Axle Blows, Shanna Miller, and Shane MacKinnon.

Canada

http://zerofunction.com/

Daniel Cockburn is a video artist, writer and closed caption editor. He has been making monologue-based film/video works since 1999. His works have been exhibited at various venues Canadian and international, including: Media City; Cinematexas; Images Festival; Cinematheque Ontario; Rendezvous With Madness Film Festival; Video Art Plastique; 25HRS; The Venice International Short Film Festival; Moving Pictures Festival of Dance on Film & Video; Kasseler Dokumentarfilm und Videofest; and the Portland Documentary and Experimental Film Festival.

Ireland

www.amandacoogan.com

Amanda Coogan’s practice concentrates on durational performance installation, and group performance made in collaboration. She has performed and exhibited her work extensively in Ireland (The Irish Museum of Modern Art, Hugh Lane Gallery) and internationally in Amsterdam (Van Gogh Museum), Barcelona (Galeria Safia), New York (PS1) and Paris (Centre Culturel Irlandais) and at The Venice Biennale and the Liverpool Biennial. She was awarded the Allied Irish Bank’s Art prize in 2004.

Most recently she has been working with the Dublin Theatre of the Deaf on a work entitled, I Told You to Wash and Clean Your Ears, which combines live art and community arts to tell the story of the 1972 protest by the Deaf community in Ireland against the shooting of Eamonn McDevitt by the British army. The work primarily uses Irish Sign Language, and highlights the recognition of ISL and the rights of Deaf people.

USA

Andrew Cook is a teacher in the Falun Gong movement in Chicago.

1963–2018, Spain

https://www.maria-cosmes.stidna.org/

Maria Cosmes’ work focuses on the relationships, interpersonal relationships, links and ties with one another. Using rope, string, thread, rubber bands, Cosmes builds her performance in collaboration with the audience, each performance is informed by time, space and place. As an anthropologist, she is particularly interested in these differences, and at times, similarities.

Carlos Pina and Maria Cosmes have collaborated on many works since 1998 under the name Collective Stidna, most notably the series, To Leave The Closet. The works in this series ranged from installation to performance and urban intervention. To Leave The Closet focused on both personal and societal psychotherapeutic imagery, informed by both Maria and Carlos’s own experiences in treatment, asking the question, “If so many people in our society need medication, who is the ill? The people or the society?” The aim of the Stidna Collective, through these works and others, is to create a forum for the artists to relate to each other and the audience on an intimate, person-to-person basis, not as a nameless faceless collective. This aim was in keeping with the earnest and cathartic nature of the works in the series To Leave The Closet, which sought to unveil and cast light on the shadow of judgment, fear and misunderstanding around madness and taboo. Not only are Pina and Cosmes long standing collaborators, they also work together on eBent International Performance Art Festival which takes place each year in Barcelona and Madrid.

Canada

www.sylviecotton.ca

Sylvie Cotton is a multidisciplinary artist living and working in Montréal. She has studied literature, arts and museology. Her work, which includes installation/situation and performance, focuses on the relation between social and individual identities, and between public and private spheres. Her projects take place in the street or other public spaces, including galleries and festivals. Sylvie Cotton is also an author of narrative texts and critical articles and has written for esse Arts + Opinions, a Québec art magazine, among others.

b. 1969, UK / Finland

www.johncourtnow.com

John Court has been living in Tornio, Finland, since 1997. As a durational performance artist, time is one of the most important elements in Court’s work. Often, he performs for 8 hours, the length of a working day. Other times he performs throughout an entire event or during the opening hours of the specific venue (museum, institution), in which the event takes place. Lately he has been interested in letting the objects and materials that he uses in his performances determine the duration of his work. He does not consider his performances as a solo piece, since the element of collaboration is inherent in them, be it through his engagement with curators, organizers, artists, viewers, objects, spaces and time.

Court’s works are responsive to the site and often the continuous, repetitive action creates a rhythm that runs parallel to that of the site. In all his works, he is fundamentally concerned with drawing or writing, as drawing connects line, movement, space and time. He has exhibited extensively in Scandinavia, and has been invited to perform at major events such as, 2017: UP-ON Live Art Festival (Chengdu China), SIGNAL Festival (Brussels, Belgium); 2016: Beijing Live (China): 2015: Viva! Art Action (Montréal, Canada) ; 2014: 7a*11d International Festival of Performance Art (Toronto, Canada), DigitaLive (Guangzhou, China); 2012: SpaceX Gallery (Exeter, UK); 2010: Guangzhou Live Art Festival (China), ANTI Contemporary Art Festival in Kuopio, Finland); 2005: Venice Biennale (Italy); 2004: Liverpool Biennial (UK).

UK

Glyn Davies-Marshall is a performance and installation artist whose work has been presented throughout the UK as well as in Germany and Russia. He currently works as a Senior Lecturer in Performing Arts and Stafford College.

“From the early 1990s my work has dealt with my own symbolic order, colloquialisms, the words of my father, the stigma of a Northern upbringing and a persistent habit of perceiving situations in an overly romantic fashion. There have been developments and issues that have subconsciously infiltrated my practice and train of thought that have now become fundamental facets within my work. These include colonialism, dictatorship, the plight of those who are seeking asylum and a recollection of a place that I once called home.” ~Glyn Davies-Marshall

Artist Andre Stitt describes him this way: “An artist who combines a unique understanding of process combined with the manipulation of objects and materials to create strange and secretive juxtapositions of reality. His work resonates with humour and gut wrenching pathos.”

Canada

http://brianjosephdavis.com/

Brian Joseph Davis is a video artist and writer. His work has recently screened at the Geografias Suaves Video Festival in Mexico and his film Arrival won first place in the DFAIT IN Video Competition. It will open the new Canadian Embassy in Berlin in April 2005. His book Portable Altamont will be published by Coach House Books in Fall 2005. He also writes for Eye Weekly and Broken Pencil. His video work uses documentary to examine social groupings as imaginings and the documenting of them as impossibilities. He’s currently working on a feature length biographical documentary that only utilizes psychics hired from the backs of newspapers. He turns affirmations into negations for breakfast.

Canada

Alexandrose Dayment identifies as a human version of an elf. Formerly he worked as a bar supervisor at Signs Restaurant in Toronto. In his spare time, Alexandrose enjoys interacting with nature, cooking, and being involved with creative projects. English is not his first language and since he is culturally Deaf, he uses sign language to communicate – more specifically, American Sign Language (ASL). Alexandrose is kind-hearted, down-to-earth, gentle person with a special fondness for the colour green. He enjoys volunteering his time in the Deaf, Queer, and Disabled communities. He is involved with Supporting Our Youth (SOY) and Ontario Rainbow Alliance of the Deaf (ORAD). He strongly believes in volunteering and giving back to the community. Don’t ever doubt Alexandrose—he can always find creative solutions to your problems that would just make your jaw drop—his brilliance will amaze you!

b. 1967, Mexico

www.robertodelatorre.com

Roberto de la Torre lives and works in Mexico City. He studied at Escuela Nacional de Pintura, Escultura y Grabado “La Esmeralda” in Mexico City, where he is currently a professor in Visual Arts. He has participated in various national and international art festivals throughout North and South America, and in Germany, China, Spain, Finland, Japan, India, England, Poland, Portugal, and Russia.

The monograph of his work, De la mordida al camello, Roberto de la Torre / Selected Work 2000-2005, was published in 2015 and his work appears in various other local and foreign media. He participated as a tutor in the Scholarship Program for Young Artists at the National Fund for Culture and the Arts (FONCA) in the area of alternative media from 2010-2011, where he is currently part of an on-going program (2012-2015) to support the National System of Art Creators in the area of alternative means.

b. 1979, Belgium

http://alicedevisscher.wordpress.com

Alice De Visscher lives and works in Brussels, Belgium. She has been working exclusively in performance since 2006 and has presented her work in Belgium, Germany, Austria, Singagpore, Thailand and Canada.

De Visscher is interested in the image of her body, the structure of a space, and the properties of certain materials. In her work she is looking for unusual, quite minimal actions which stimulate the interpretations made by the audience. She uses her body, objects and space intuitively to create images that challenge expectations, and open new meanings. 

b. 1969, Germany

www.bbbjohannesdeimling.de

BBB Johannes Deimling uses everyday objects to create a living image (agierte Bilder) reflecting a society full of contradictions, sentimentality, stupidity, creativity and cooperation. Finding ideas and suggestions from the banality of daily life, Deimling transforms topics such as patience, will, war, religion and transportation into physical images. The artist’s head is often a focus in the work, as an integral part of a living sculpture or as material in the performance.

Since 1988, BBB Johannes Deimling has worked as an artist in the fields of performance art, video, installation, drawing and music. His work has been presented at events and festivals in Europe, Israel, Canada and Cuba. Since 1998, Deimling has devoted much of his practice to lecturing on performance art at various academic institutions including: F+F (Switzerland) and Academy of Arts (Estonia). In 2006, he co-founded Port Performance – Forum for Performance Art, with artist Angelika Fojtuch. He is the founder and Director of PAS | Performance Art Studies, established in 2008.

Canada

www.shawnadempseyandlorrimillan.net

Collaborators since 1989, Shawna Dempsey and Lorri Millan are among Canada’s best-known performance artists. They were catapulted into the international spotlight in their 20s with the performance and film We’re Talking Vulva. Since then, their live work and videos have been exhibited in diverse venues as far-ranging as women’s centres in Sri Lanka to the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. This Winnipeg-based duo has created installations (such as Archaeology and You for the Royal Ontario Museum) and books (such as Bedtime Stories for the Edge of the World, Arbeiter Ring Press). To most, however, they are known simply as the Lesbian Rangers of Lesbian National Parks and Services. Their humourous, feminist and provocative works have been acclaimed as “one of the high-points of contemporary Canadian artistic production” (Border Crossings Magazine). Performance documentation and artifacts are held in the collections including the National Gallery of Canada, the Canadian History Museum, the DIA Centre and numerous university libraries across North America.

Canada

www.danieledennis.com

Danièle Dennis’ experiences as an African-Canadian woman inform her practice and prompt her investigation of racial, cultural and identity issues primarily through performance, material exploration and installation. She actively attempts new ways to disrupt and dismantle social norms and constructs, employing repetition and process-based experimentation to the use of everyday and often abject elements such as hair and food. Her work seeks to trigger within the viewer critical thought, self-reflection, and dialogue around uncomfortable yet relevant subject matters.

Dennis obtained her Honours Bachelor of Arts from the University of Toronto Scarborough in 2015, with a Specialist in Studio Art and a minor in Art History. She was born and raised in Montréal and currently works in Toronto. Dennis is also a co-founder of Y+ contemporary in Toronto.

Canada / USA

www.nativeartdepartment.org

Native Art Department International (NADI) is a collaborative long-term project created and administered by Maria Hupfield and Jason Lujan. It focuses on communications platforms and art-world systems of support while at the same time functioning as emancipation from essentialism and identity-based artwork. It seeks multiple strategies of infiltration by comprising a diverse range such as curated exhibitions, video screenings, panel talks, collective art making and documenting, and an online presence, however all activities contain an undercurrent of positive progress through cooperation and non-competition.

France

www.guillaumedesanges.com

Guillaume Désanges is a free-lance curator and art critic, co-founder of Work Method, a Paris based agency for artistic projects. Member of the editorial board of Trouble, he collaborates with the magazines Exit Express and Exit Book (Madrid). He coordinated the artistic projects of Laboratoires d’Aubervilliers (2001-2007). In 2007-2008, he was curator at Centre d’Art Contemporain La Tôlerie. From 2009-2011, he is the guest curator at centre d’art le Plateau-Frac Ile de France, Paris. Désanges teaches at Ecole des Beaux-Arts de Clermont-Ferrand.

Switzerland

www.claudiabucher.com

Claudia Bucher studied sculpture at the City & Guilds of London Art School and Fine Arts at the Lucerne School of Art and Design. Since 2001 she has been working as a freelance artist in the mediums of Performance Art, Installation, Drawing and Printmaking.

“I perform in order to engage with my thoughts – and my questions, too. I think in images. I focus on the space surrounding me, myself as sculpture within that space, and on how an action can change the relationship between my body and my environment. As I interact intensively with a material in the here and now, a transformation occurs. I‘m interested in the moments of transition—when beauty changes into ugliness, when clean becomes dirty, when gentle turns aggressive—and the opposing associations they evoke.” ~Claudia Bucher

Cuba

www.taniabruguera.com

Tania Bruguera produces political artworks through installations and performances. In January 2003 she opened Arte de Conducta, an artistic–pedagogical project in Havana. Her work has been shown at several international exhibitions including Documenta XI, the 49th and 51st editions of the Venice Biennale, the V and VII Havana Biennale, and the 23rd Sao Paolo Biennale, among others. She has had solo shows at the Kunsthalle Wien, Casa de las Americas, and Museo de Bellas Artes. Tania Bruguera was a participant in Documenta 11 (Germany) as well as in several biennales such as Venice (Italy), Sao Paolo (Brazil), Shangai (China), and Site Santa Fe (USA). Her work has also been exhibited at The New Museum of Contemporary Art (USA); The Museum of Contemporary Art of Chicago (USA); Boijmans van Beuningen Museum (The Netherlands); Museum für Moderne Kunst (Germany), among others. In 2000 she received the Prince Claus Prize (The Netherlands).

Her work is part of the collections of the Museum für Moderne Kunst (Germany); Daros Foundation (Switzerland); JP Morgan Chase Bank (United States); Museum of Modern Art, artist book collection (United States); Bronx Museum (United States). Bruguera was featured in Fresh Cream (Phaidon, England); Performance Live Art Since 1060’s (Thames and Hudson, Ltd., England); Art Tomorrow (Terrail, France); Holy terrors: Latin American women perform (Duke University, USA); Corpus Delecti -Performance Art of the Americas (Routledge, England), among others. She has been written about in The New York Times, Le Monde, The Village Voice, Newsweek, Chicago Tribune and Los Angeles Times, and reviewed in Art News, Artforum, Flash Art, Art Nexus, The Nordic Art Review, Beaux Arts, Performance Research, Kunstforum among others.

She is the founder / director of Arte de Conducta, the first performance studies program in Latin America, hosted by Instituto Superior de Arte in Havana and she has taught at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, USA.