https://www.performanceartweekaotearoa.com/open-call/
PAWA link for reference
10TH – 14TH NOV Wellington, New Zealand
Curating Performance art Archive Exhibition and Video Documentation from 2020 to 2021
with 12 Performance Artists Videos
Curatorial Reference Text SPACE: MEDIA: VOICE –
“What term should be used to describe the division which keeps the various types of space away from each other [. . .] Distortion? Disjunction? Schism? Break? [. . .] the term used is far less important than the distance that separates ‘ideal’ Space, which has to do with mental (mathematico-logical) categories from ‘real’ space, which is the space of social practice. In actuality, each of these two kinds of space involves, underpins and presupposes the other.”
(Lefebvre 1991: 14)
Space is all around us. We inhabit it, live, love and work in it. In fact, we are made up of the same elements of which the Space and objects around us is made. But often, we take it for granted. However, like everything else that exists, Space has its own peculiar character.
Philosophers have always studied Space and Time together, as a continuum. Time operates upon Space and changes its character. We see this happening daily. At night, under the cover of darkness we often can not recognise the same Space we may have traversed in the day. Even some thing as banal as losing one’s keys at home, for example, teaches us something about Space. We often say it will ‘turn up’. But the object remains where it was. It is us who, having forgotten the spatial relations between objects, the Ideal definition of Space in Kantian terms, can not locate the keys we have ourselves misplaced. When we remember the relations between objects better, and look accordingly, the misplaced keys ‘turn up’. In the Ideal sense, Space and Time are functions of human consciousness.
In a Marxist sense, Space is an organising principle, informed by the relationships between modes of production prevalent in society. “According to Marx, the sphere of production is primary and determinant over the other spheres of social life. This production takes place in space, which is socially constructed over time by the power relations existent in society. Spatial features (both physical and social) enact possibilities and restrictions, affecting every dimension of everyday life. Moreover, no matter how precisely reality is depicted by objective descriptions, it is also determined by precedent social processes and associated discourses, inasmuch as for Marx individuals are constrained and enabled by the historical unfolding of the forces of production. The social context can thus rearrange power relations through the production of a new space.”
The second important consideration is regarding its historicity, which allows us to see Space as a Palimpsest – this is especially true for a city like Delhi where In_Process has done a lot of work. As a city that has been built and rebuilt many times over, it epitomises the idea of a Palimpsest. Lately, In_Process has also worked in Chandigarh, which, as a planned Post-Colonial city, where a centralised idea of Space, deriving from the state, was imposed, which also substituted as a code for the advent for modernity. But traditionally, any space is organised as per the needs and desires of the people, involved in their trades and professions, or through certain markers of identities such as religion and caste in a country like India. In_Process members belonging to Kashmir have also performed there, where a strong hegemonic idea of Space can be discerned, with military facilities and installations dotting the landscape, especially in the capital Srinagar.
Space is extending and evolving in time and historicity. Through Lefebvre’s idea of Space, we mark the social production of Space with its approach to Time. Time can also be understood in the way Jean-Paul Sartre sees it: “World time” or the Time in which we witness all that is happening around us with effect on our corporeal aspect as body or being. “(A) temporal vision of the world and of man will dissolve into a crumbling of befores and afters. The unity of this crumbling, the temporal atom, will be the instant…The instant is indivisible and non-temporal since temporality is a succession but the world dissolves into an infinite dust of instants.”
The beauty of this disappearance in current time is observed in the Anthropocene Epoch and our current socio-political situation is witnessed by the masses – made up of bodies and voices, capable of resistance. All these elements first appear as the product of power and state, as in space consuming simultaneously the body and the marks/residues left by it, leaving behind the blackhole of memory imbued with resistance.
The idea of performance art is now marked by the time and history with COVID-19 as to how it changed the perception of space. First is the ephemeral aspect of the medium (Performing Body) – grid and glitch, pause and freeze, repeating in loops. The projection of the body now becomes the new idea of the body in morphological reality, an interpretation of how technology is injected in the human veins. The idea of space and state power, and manipulation of the media as a tool of projecting and diverting issues, and muting the voices which may pass through new loops of resistance. This project is in the form of Formalistic and as ‘Anti-from’, a paradoxical method to reflect on the time and the medium, that which will be the method of execution of the Performance art archive in the form of Media and Sound (anti-Voice of Medium performance) where media becomes the post-reality of corporeal action in virtual and ‘live’ action. In_process through ”Hypothetical space” has questioned the idea of Public space and in media and in performance art.
The ’live’ art is now beaming as a Live telecast using the video medium. From here we wanted to extend the practice not only in theory or discussion on the screen of a computer, laptop, or a smartphone but also as action and reaction in space, sound and body in terms of live streaming and as a practice of performance art in space and real time zone that may add more to practice of Live art. “Our encounter with objects in space forces us to reflect on ourselves, which can never become ‘other,’ which can never become objects for our external examination. In the domain of real space the subject-object dilemma can never be resolved.” (Morris 1993c: 165)
Space is what envelopes us in a physical dimension from micro millimetres to light years. Space is also hypothetical; a thought; a perceived existence. In addition, it is also a place of mental freedom or confinement. Borders demarcate spaces. Is it true that within the borders there is commonality and uniformity? Does an affinity and similarity exist beyond borders? To ascertain the role of space and its understanding by human mind, there is a necessity for the recognition and utilisation of media.
Media becomes the conduit and the platform for transfer of ideas, dreams and lives. Today, media exists in both physical and virtual form. The important indicators for a successful medium are its freedom, its non-binary approach, and its unbiased voice.The Voice gains precedence over any other form of expression by an individual, a community, and a species. The freedom with which a voice emanates and is heard marks a basic human need and a fundamental right.
Artist Names:-
- Aakshat Sinha (New Delhi, India)
- Bhisaji Gadekar (Goa, India)
- Ikagar (Punjab, India)
- Inder Salim (New Delhi, India)
- Jihyoung Park (Punjab/South Korea)
- Kulpreet Singh (Punjab, India)
- Madhu Das (Mumbai, India)
- Mamata Sagar (Karnataka, India)
- Naresh Kumar (Bihar, India)
- Paramesh Jolad (Karnataka, India)
- Rohan Dumbre (Delhi/Mumbai)
- Parvez (India/Switzerland) Rohan Dumbre (Delhi/Mumbai)
- Umesh Kumar Singh (Bihar, India)
Ideation by – B Ajay Sharma
Text By – Aakshat Sinha, Abhimanyu Kumar and B Ajay Sharma
Text Edited by – Abhimanyu Kumar
Design by – Prabhjoj Singh, B Ajay Sharma, Saaqi Butt
Curation- In_process collective (B Ajay Sharma/ co curation Aakshat Sinha/ Abhimanyu and Sameer Meshram )
Curatorial Assistant – Vanshika Sarin
in_process collective
Gallery View –
References:
https://books.openedition.org/enseditions/3830?lang=en
https://www.reed.edu/reed-magazine/in-memoriam/obituaries/2019/robert-morris-1958.html
Friedberg, A. (2004). Virilio’s screen: The work of metaphor in the age of technological convergence. Journal of Visual Culture, 3(2), 183-193.
in_process Live Art Practice 