BODY MEMORY - BODY VISION
Body Memory - Body Vision: Performance Works
Ron Athey, Cassils, Dragonfly, Arshia Fatima Haq, Sebastian Hernandez, Sherman Fleming, rafa esparza, Lila de Magalhaes, Christopher Richmond, Ni Santas, Denise Uyehara, Xina Xurner.February 15th – March 15th, 2021
The Guggenheim Gallery at Chapman University is honored to host BODY MEMORY BODY VISION – Performance Works, a virtual exhibition that takes place over the course of February and March 2021, co-curated by Danielle Cobb, Olivia Collins, Nicole Daskas, Lucile Henderson, Marcus Herse, Hannah Scott and Natalia Ventura.
Members of the Art Department’s DEI Committee, student gallery assistants and the gallery coordinator have co-curated this exhibition to present artists and artist collectives whose practices are vital to furthering diversity, equity and inclusion. Each week we will highlight two artists or collectives and release additions to the growing exhibition accompanied by student writing from interviews and personal notes to poetry.
Performance wants to be partaken in and a virtual exhibition can hardly replace the understanding of bodies interacting in the real world; the fleetingness of the moment and the impact that intense experiences have, the smells, the sounds, the feeling of proximity to other bodies and how we negotiate shared spaces cannot be captured via documentation. However, this show takes the notion of space and who occupies it as its cue. Addressing the ongoing underrepresentation of marginalized groups in the institutionalized and free market art world, the exhibition shows a selection of performance works by BIPOC and genderqueer artists. Questioning the status quo of visibility within this framework and actively contributing to changing that status is one aspect the contributions share. Another one is the deliberate step outside of this structure beyond art world internal discourses, in offering visions relevant to communities and social realities.
Body Memory Body Vision – Performance Works presents 15 artists who create a distinct range of actions and whose aesthetic scope is manifold and cannot be subsumed under one criterion of expression - stylistic unity is beside the point. The commonality is making ways of being and thinking visible that are invisible or actively suppressed; it is the invitation to see the complexities and scope of society’s heterogeneity beyond the assumed binaries that still guide mainstream culture’s decision-making in philosophical and therefore social, political and economic terms.
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PREVIEW
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CYCLIC
A performance by Ron Athey, Cassils, and Fanaa
ON VIEW: Monday, March 15, 2021 at 12:00PM PST until Tuesday, March 16, 2021 at 12:00PM PST
We are honored to host this groundbreaking collaboration between artists Ron Athey, Cassils and Fanaa. For a period of 24 hours, beginning on Monday, March 1, 2021 at 12:00PM PST until Tuesday, March 2, 2021 at 12:00PM PST visitors of our virtual exhibition will be able to view the film Cyclic, which documents (while unfolding on its own terms) the performance of the same name.
On December 1, 2018, The Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA Tucson) first presented Cyclic to an international audience of over 230 attendees in the uniquely resonant “lung” of Biosphere 2, a site which simultaneously evokes utopian and dystopian possibilities. This new, collaborative work presented in conjunction with the exhibition at MOCA Tucson “Blessed Be: Mysticism, Spirituality, and the Occult in Contemporary Art”, presented actions which highlighted the value of lives often deemed disposable, or even incomprehensible. Triangulated within a circle, alternately illuminated and concealed, the artists worked against light and dark, visibility and invisibility to bring their creative forces and subjectivities together in this performance that continuously unfolded in a triptych of tableaux vivants. MOCA TUCSON
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