The KHOJLIVE08 SYMPOSIUM
Live Art : Doubletake
VENUE:
Alliance Française, Delhi
72 Lodi Estate,
New Delhi-03
Tel. +91 11 43500200
front_desk@afdelhi.org
The symposium will pose and help to answer questions about the role / forms of support for artists / critical frameworks / curatorial contexts and artistic concerns within the arena of performance art / live art.
The presentations will be followed by a moderated panel discussion and questions from the audience.
SESSION I (11AM -1PM)
Encounters (indeterminacy)
Chair: Geeta Kapur
Speakers (20 min each):
Boris Nieslony (Germany)
Daniel Brine (Live Art Development Agency, U.K.)
Sonia Khurana (New Delhi)
Discussion
SESSION II (2PM - 4PM)
Contexts (relational acts)
Chair: Manick Govinda (Live Art UK)
Speakers: (20 min each):
Ray Langenbach (Malaysia)
Varsha Nair (Thailand)
Steve Cohen (South Africa)
Discussion
Moderator: Ray Langenbach (Malaysia)
Panel:
Maya Rao (New Delhi)
Nikhil Chopra (Mumbai)
Doug Fishbone (UK)
Khairuddin Hori (Singapore)
Jean Cristophe Lanquetin (France)
Hassan Khan (Egypt)
Bios of Speakers
SESSION I: Encounters (indeterminacy)
Chair: Geeta Kapur
Geeta Kapur is a critic and curator living in New Delhi. Her writings include artists' monographs, exhibition catalogues, the book Contemporary Indian Artists (Delhi, 1978), and a set of widely anthologised essays on art, film and cultural theory in national and Third World contexts, published under the title When was Modernism: Essays on Contemporary Cultural Practice in India (Delhi, 2000). Another collection of essays, framed by a critical contemporaneity and titled Iconographies for the Present (Delhi, forthcoming 2007), deals with representational, mediatic and curatorial practices within (Indian) metropolitan culture. Her curatorial work includes, besides several exhibitions in India, the co-curated Bombay/Mumbai for the multi-part exhibition, Century City: Art and Culture in the Modern Metropolis, at Tate Modern, London, 2001; and subTerrain: artworks in the cityfold at the House of World Cultures, Berlin, 2003. She was a member of the International Jury of the 51st Venice Biennale and of the 9th Dakar Biennale, 2006.
Boris Neislony (Germany)
Boris Nieslony is recognized as one of the most prolific and significant contributors to performance art. Born in Cologne, Nieslony has worked extensively as a performance artist, curator, archivist and independent scholar; staging various installations, interventions and artist projects since the 1970s. He is the founder of Black Market International, a performance group that meets regularly in various configurations to realize group performance projects and ASA, a foundation for self-organizing a network of performance artists and theorists.
Daniel Brine (U.K.)
Daniel Brine is Associate Director of the Live Art Development Agency. Based in London, the Live Art Development Agency is one of the key organisations for the support and development of Live Art and performance practices in the UK, working to create new frameworks, contexts and strategies in which to produce, promote, document, critique, and champion the concept of performance.
Performance projects curated by Lois Keidan and Daniel Brine at the Agency include: Live Culture, Tate Modern, 2003; Variety Acts, De La Warr Pavillion, 2005; Performing Rights London QMUL 2006, Vienna Tanzquartier 2007 and Glasgow NRLA 2008. They have also curated symposia at venues as diverse as Soho Theatre, Whitechapel Art Gallery and Arnolfini. Agency edited publications include Exposures, 2002, China Live, 2005 and Programme Notes, 2007. www.thisisLiveArt.co.uk.
Daniel Brine will outline the work of the Live Art Development Agency - its resources, professional development initiatives and curatorial projects - as a model of working to stimulate and strengthen Live Art practices and the infrastructures that supports them.
Sonia Khurana (New Delhi)
Sonia Khurana did her post graduate in art the Royal College of Art, London and a short course at the Film and Television Institute in Pune, and in 2002, a 2-year Research residency at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam. She now lives and works in New Delhi. Sonia’s art practice embraces areas in-between video, elements of performance, text, photography, drawing and installation. She is interested in exploring mainly two areas of experience: interiority, or embodied
experience, and the dynamics of identity. Sonia travels and exhibits widely ; most recent participations have been at the Newark Museum, Kunstmuseum Bern, Rose Museum, Boston, Film Festival Rome, ‘Performa 2007’, through Gallery Elga Wimmer, New York, Brooklyn Museum [ for ‘Global Feminisms ] Davis Museum, Wellselly, Daimler Chrysler Contemporary, Berlin, Arario Beijing, and a recent solo show, titled : ‘Still/Moving Image’, at the Gallerie Phillipe Jousse in Paris, 2007
Sonia will present issues that are particularly relevant to her practice:
- Much of my performative video work is predicated on the idea that video extends the impact of performance.
-
The performative in the everyday when incorporated as an element in live performance, video equipment can alter the experience of performance in a ‘live’ space.
- Using my Body/self as a site for such interaction to take place, but also by situating my body/self into various sites where such negotiations can take place.
- The pain of performing.
SESSION II: Contexts (relational acts)
Chair: Manick Govinda, Live Art UK
Manick Govinda is Head of Artists’ Advisory Service at Artsadmin, where he developed the artists’ bursary and the decibel Visual Arts Awards schemes. His role at Artsadmin has allowed him to work closely with a range of artists including Franko B, Zarina Bhimji, Robin Deacon and Zineb Sedira. More recently he has developed strategic initiatives with Creative Partnerships London East.
He is also a commissioning editor for [a.n] The Artists Information Company and was a Talent Scout for NESTA’s Creative Pioneers Programme. He has edited two publications for Artsadmin, Performing Difference and Research in Process (published by liveartmagazine), and was co-commissioning editor of Art for Whose Sake? published by Creative Partnerships. He was commissioning editor for Curated Space and Radical Positions, published by [a.n].
Previous employment included working for The Paul Hamlyn Foundation where he was instrumental in setting up the foundation’s Awards for Artists scheme, supporting many innovative arts programmes and partnerships between the arts sector and schools. He also undertook a feasibility study for the English National Opera’s Baylis Programme’s 4-year education/community residency in the London Borough of Southwark. He began working in the arts in 1986 as an outreach worker for a community based Asian arts project in Newham, a borough where he developed a number of high profile initiatives such as the Newham Mela – a large scale South Asian Arts Festival which attracted up to 25,000 people. He was also a founding editor of Bazaar, a pioneering South Asian arts and lifestyle magazine, in the 80s.
He is a member of The Manifesto Club, a Fellow of the British American Project and a Trustee of Wysing Arts, The Pacitti Company and a Director of [a.n] The Artists Information Company
Manick Govinda will begin the session by talking briefly about what the Live Art UK consortium is and give an overview of the network’s activities over the last two years. He will then talk briefly about live art contexts and relational acts.
A strategy of Live Art has been about blurring the boundaries between the artist's work and the audience. The traditional notion of the artist making the work in privacy and then showing it to the public, to be consumed by the public, has been challenged by artists' desire to engage directly with its audience, or the public. The work cannot happen without the involvement of others. LAUK offered 2 commissions by British artists whose work involves what people or particular communities of interests bring to it.
Terms such as relational aesthetics and post-autonomous art are the new buzzwords. In the relational act how far can the artist let go and allow for the death of the author? Are relational acts or participatory processes a form of exploitation, taking advantage of the unequal relationship between disadvantaged groups and the privileged artist?”
Ray Langenbach (Malaysia)
Ray Langenbach: Originally from Boston, living and working in Kuala Lumpur and Helsinki, Langenbach "performs theory, " focusing on cognitive phenomena & propaganda. Langenbach is Professor of Art Research and Theory at the Finnish Academy of Fine Art, and Visiting Professor at the Finnish Theatre Academy. In Malaysia he serves as Co-Heads of the Department of Performance + Media, Sunway University College and is Senior Fellow at the School of Art, University of Western Sydney.
’Contemporary Performance Art In a Transforming Public Sphere’ Ray Langenbach will lay out a position on performance art as a global phenomenon related to larger cultural and trans-cultural economies under late-capitalism, and then the problems encountered in the local organising and production of performance art events in multi-cultural societies
Varsha Nair (Thailand)
Born in Kampala, Varsha Nair's solo and collaborative works have been exhibited internationally and in Thailand where she lives. Exploring issues of home and displacement, Nair continues to document the changing environment of Baroda where she grew up. She has presented at Saturday Live, Tate Modern (2006), and National Review of Live Art, Glasgow and Perth (2006, 2005, 2004). Editorial board member of the web art journal Ctrl+P, since 1997 Nair has also curated and co-organized art events and been invited as speaker at various international symposia.
Varsha Nair will present her experience of working in various media, drawing, painting, video and installation, taking it further via the performative process and exploring the possibilities of an alternative art practice. Referencing her own culture, and past and present circumstances her current artistic concerns include the economy of use of materials including body movements in performance.
Steven Cohen (South Africa)
Steven Cohen is a performance artist and mixed media artist from South Africa. Traditionally trained in the liberal arts, Steven’s work has mainly centered on issues of Queer theory. He has performed and exhibited extensively since 1997.
“I was born and raised in South Africa where identity was critical to how you were treated socially and legally. Where the colour of your skin was cause for discrimination. As a Jew, I have a cellular consciousness of religious persecution. As a queer, I know what it means to be unwelcome in a heterosexual world, and to survive an Aids holocaust.
I use identity politics as a basis of artistic production. As a queer, white, Jew I use my insider/outsider body to construct performances which challenge social structure. I present myself as a glamorous monster, using elements of drag, sculpture, dance and performance ion galleries, museums, theatres or in public. I consider what I do visual art.
I would like to talk about my particular practice which involves public nudity, the provocation of the public, the police and figures of authority, the use of the entire body in making art – from the brain with horror and terror in performance – how to console you and scare myself…. and the inverse of that.”
PANEL DISCUSSION
Maya Krishna Rao (New Delhi)
Maya Krishna Rao works with theatre and performance in different ways. She creates shows from improvising with live sound and camera. She does stand up comedy and also uses participatory theatre as a means of teaching and learning in the classroom. Her shows have traveled extensively and she has also been invited to create collaborative shows in different countries. Maya's training in Kathakali is a source of inspiration in her work.
Nikhil Chopra (Mumbai)
Nikhil has been working in the medium of live art since 2002, when he created his first character, Sir Raja. Sir Raja I (2002) and Sir Raja II (2003) were performed in Columbus, Ohio. His video, film and photo works have been exhibited in several group shows. Nikhil studied at M. S. University, Faculty of Fine Arts, Baroda from 1997-99. He completed his BFA from the Maryland Institute, College of Art, Baltimore, in 2001, and an MFA in painting from the Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio, in 2003. He returned to India in 2005 and currently lives and works in Mumbai.
Khairuddin Hori (Singapore)
Hori has explored and presented works and concepts through various mediums and across diverse disciplines such as theatre, painting, sculpture, installation and performance art. His multifarious practice has seen him in several incarnations. As Associate Director of Teater
Ekamatra, a local Malay-language theatre company, he is known to direct and create daring productions. He also co-organizes "Future Of Imagination 3", International Performance Art Festival in Singapore.
Jean Cristophe Lanquetin (France)
JC Lanquetin is a scenographer and an artist based in France. He teaches at the Strasbourg Decorative School of Art. He has run many scenographic projects around the world including in France, Cameroon, DRC, and Syria. He has worked for theatre (Philip BoulayŠ), contemporary dance (Faustin Linyekula, Opiyo OkachŠ), and performances (Eleonore Hellio & Joachim MontessuisŠ). He has developed the Urban Scenography Process, with Francois Duconseille. His current artistic projects (below) are influenced by the mikilist of DRC Congo and the questions about the possibility of travelling. The mikilists, especially in Kinshasa, are people who travel, who have seen the world (particularly Europe), seen landscapes.
Hassan Khan (Egypt)
Hassan Khan works with image, sound, text, space and situation. Selected solo shows include Gezira Art Center, Cairo (1999), Galerie Chantal Crousel, Paris (2004), A Space Gallery, Toronto (2005), Gasworks, London (2006) and Le Plateau, Paris (2007). Khan has also participated in the Istanbul (2003), Seville (2006), Sydney (2006), Thessaloniki (2007) and Contour (2007) biennales amongst other international group shows. As a musician he has composed soundtracks for theater and performed his own pieces in venues including Melkweg (Amsterdam), Lydmar (Stockholm), Babylon (Istanbul), Whitechapel (London), Cairo Jazz Club (Cairo), KBB (Barcelona), Strange Fruit (Beirut), SESC Sao Paolo (Sao Paolo) Podewil and HAU3 (Berlin) 205 Club (New York) and Point Ephemere (Paris). Khan is also published widely in both Arabic and English. He lives and works in Cairo, Egypt.