GUTTMAN, k.g.

pas sûre what’s moving what
Launched January 28, 2026

pas sûre what’s moving what is a performance inspired by the work of Passing (2000) by artists Leena Raudvee and Pam Patterson.

Passing is a performative act of almost two hours, recorded on video in one-take with minimal edits. It is a lusciously slow and constant experience of time that poses a challenge to the attention span of an audience twenty-five years later.

The complicity between Raudvee and Patterson is quite mesmerizing, and I can appreciate that these two artists have been collaborating for over 40 years, (15 years at the time). Collaborating demands an expertise of generous responsiveness- seemingly simple!

The weather is warmish, the performance flows from indoors to outdoors, the wind and the birds compose the unseen soundscape. Passing involves, among many actions, quietly and methodically climbing and descending a staircase, transporting dark grey stones, placing fragments of words on paper on the floor and under rocks, gently tugging scraps out of one’s hair. One performer witnesses the other’s actions, and then adds on as if following a mysterious code. Their co-presence is unknowable -I’m not quite sure if they are revealing or concealing something as they go about their tasks.

My performative response, pas sûre what’s moving what (2025), is similarly filmed in one take, (videography by Kinga Michalska) for approximately 30 minutes, passing through the rooms in my home in Tiohtiá:ke/ Mooniyang/ Montréal. The work is minimally edited to sustain a sense of the expansive roll out of time with the wandering camera.

pas sûre what’s moving what is the first work I have done in collaboration with my daughter (age 7 years). Before we started, we discussed the loose path we would take through the rooms of our home, in and out, and how to explore the furniture and objects that we find. I have to surrender my solo way of performing and instead support, echo and find a way to be with the collective curiosity that we generate. At times, it is the objects, pet, and rooms that insist on the meaning-making, and at times my child makes the meaning. Her bodily presence expresses everything she knows so far, as does mine.

The site where performance in situ happens initially vibrates with the usual way of doing and seeing things . But quickly, the way Raudvee and Patterson move in performance creates an uncertainty or glitch against the general atmosphere of “purposeful action” or a “typical productivity” of 401 Richmond St. W, Toronto. I find this uncertainty very striking, very haunting, a super power of sorts of in situ performance practice, to transform whole atmospheres into places less recognizable. Performance builds worlds.

Passing sharply reminds me that in our settler-colonial late-capitalism context of so-called Canada, we as audience are fully embedded into naturalized or dominant ways of seeing and of inhabiting spaces. In taking up Raudvee’s and Patterson’s work, I share an obsession to perform other ways of inhabiting and seeing a site, and to dwell with the indeterminacy and potential of place.

k.g. Guttman (she/they) is an interdisciplinary artist and an educator, a solo mama, a shape-shifty dancer, a lover/maker of experimental performance, and a graduate of Leiden University’s PhD program in artistic research methodologies. k.g. is a white settler of Jewish and Irish descent, based in Tiohtiá:ke/ Mooniyang/ Montréal. She learned French as an adult and her young bilingual child corrects her constantly and keeps her humble. Their recent projects focus on site-specific performance, attending to personal and local memory, as well as broader settler colonial forces at work. Their process involves dance/ movement practices, defined as an inquiry into aliveness, of imagining ways of knowing and remembering. As an educator, k.g. has taught in the Department of Contemporary Dance, Concordia University, was a guest professor at the Royal Academy of Art in the Hague, and a guest at Toronto’s dance collective the Love-in, 2013-2015. They were the 2023-25 Artist-in Residence faculty at Concordia University in the Intermedia area of Studio Arts, and taught courses in video, performance art, and installation practices. In the context of Concordia University, an institution which is situated on the land stewarded by the Kanienkehá:ka nation, k.g. has had the opportunity to engage in continuous learning of decolonial pedagogy with educator Donna Kahérakwas Goodleaf. Past exhibitions and performances include work at Verticale Centre d’artistes, VIVA! Art Action Performance Biennale, Dazibao Centre Art, and LaCentrale in Tiohtiá:ke/ Mooniyang/ Montréal, Musée d’Art de Joliette, TPW Gallery, Blackwood Gallery, and Dancemakers, Toronto.

References/Resources

The following references were cited or suggested during Paul Couillard’s interview with k.g. Guttman, Pam Patterson and Leena Raudvee (Artifacts):

“What if art acts?” (a phrase cited by Paul near the beginning of the interview)

What if art acts? This question is at the core of Pam Patterson and Leena Raudvee’s twenty years of collaborative work Presenting performances, interventions, and exhibitions under the group name Artifacts, the two have engaged in a collective practice that is insistently feminist, rooted in the everyday, and focused on their relationship to each other and the world around them. An anagram of “if art acts,” Artifacts refers to the merger of visual art and performance, with a nod to the idea of art’s active potential as a transformative force. At the same time, the name refers to the physical nature of art, the traces and residue that even an ephemeral gesture leaves behind. Artifacts’ work reflects both of these meanings, offering a dense layering of idea, process, object and lived experience.” (352)
from Couillard, Paul, “Pam Patterson and Leena Raudvee: What if art acts?” Caught in the Act: An Anthology of Performance Art by Canadian Women edited by Tanya Mars and Johanna Householder, YYZ Books, 2004, pp 352 – 359.

Peter Boneham: American-born Canadian choreographer, dance educator and artistic director
“a creative practice that’s very much melded with my academic and teaching work” (Pam Pattterson): Pam’s diverse practices as a creator, organizer, researcher, and teacher  are highlighted on her blog, including as the Director of WIAprojects, a multi-faceted feminist arts-informed research and practice program
Banff Centre: arts and culture educational institution based in Alberta, Canada, best known in the 1980s for its artist residency and workshop programs
Wellington: an unincorporated community of approximately 2,000 people located in Prince Edward County in eastern Ontario, Canada
“I’ve also diverged into my own practice where I’m dealing very much with mobility issues” (Leena Raudvee): see in particular her projects Finding Balance (2025), Precarious Lines (2023) and Precarious Gestures (2022)
Kinga Michalska: Polish queer filmmaker and visual artist born in Łódź and currently based in Tiohtiá:ke/ Mooniyang/ Montréal and videographer for pas sûre what’s moving what
Canadian Women’s Studies: feminist quarterly journal founded with the goal of making current writing and research on a wide variety of feminist topics accessible to the largest possible community of women
Monty Python’s Flying Circus: British television sketch comedy series that aired from 1969 to 1974 on the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) network Whose routines included the Fish Slapping Dance
Women’s Cultural Building: feminist cultural organization and women’s collective founded in Toronto in 1981
Donna Haraway: Distinguished Professor Emerita in the History of Consciousness Department and in the Feminist Studies Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz; the reference Pam Patterson was particularly thinking of when she brought Haraway  up in the conversion was “Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene: Making Kin”, Environmental Humanities vol. 6, 2015, pp. 159-165
“[B]eings enact their openness as and through their being, that is, by how they act.” (107) from “Things, Assemblages, Worlds: Locating Vibrancy Beyond a Subject-Object Relationship (A Tale of Disposition)” Imaginations: Journal of Cross-Cultural Image Studies 14:2 (2023), ed. Monique Tschofen & Lai-Tze Fan, pp. 101-126.
Tania Bruguera: Cuban artist and activist who focuses on installation and performance art
“Erin and I did a performance together” (Pam Patterson): Dance with Chairs (1998), a performance by Pam Patterson and her daughter Erin Oughton presented as part of Yoko Ono Birthday Party, a fundraiser organized in support of the 2nd 7a*11d International Festival of Performance Art
Crossing the Street: 1989 exhibition and performance by Artifacts at Hamilton Artists Inc., a Canadian artist-run centre based in Hamilton, Ontario
history vs. historiography: distinction made by Pam Patterson between history as a record of events and historiography as a practice that approaches a record of events as imbricated within particular methodological and theoretical frameworks
“One of the performances we did, which I actually hate” (Pam Patterson): Listening: On the Architecture of Aging (2017): Artifacts performance for Made of Walking in La Romieu, France
Aidana Ríco Maria Chávez: Venezuelan performance artist currently living in Argentina
Margaret Tyzack: late English film, theatre and television actress (1931-2011) who appeared in the 1977 Stratford Festival production of Henrik Ibsen‘s play, Ghosts, as Mrs. Alving
Andrew Pommier: Canadian artist and illustrator based in Sudbury, Ontario
Louise Liliefeldt: Toronto-based performance artist and painter
Zab Maboungou: Montréal-based choreographer, dancer and founding artistic director of Zab Maboungou / Compagnie Danse Nyata Nyata, a Montréal-based contemporary dance company
Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen: American movement artist, researcher, educator and therapist
Lake Huron: one of the five Great Lakes of North America, bordered on the north and east by Ontario and on the south and west by the U.S. state of Michigan
Alexander Del Re: Chilean-based performance artist and curator; the performance Pam Patterson describes (“one day performance and both of us were literally at different parts of Ontario”) was perhaps part of  4 Cardinals/4 Cardinales, a global event held on September 27, 2003, organized under the auspices of Perfopuerto.org by Alexander Del Re and Leonardo González Castillo
Sandbanks Provincial Park: one of Ontario’s most popular provincial parks noted for its sandy beaches and the world’s largest freshwater baymouth sand dune system
V. MacDonnell Gallery: Toronto-based commercial gallery that operated between 1999 and 2001
Walter Benjamin: Marxist philosopher and literary critic based in Germany (1892-1940) whose texts include “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”
“And of course, Paul, the work you did at that time with your strands in that huge installation piece” (Pam Patterson): Trace Elements, a 24-hour durational performance presented at YYZ Artists Outlet (December 21-22, 1999) as part of the FADO Performance Art series TIME TIME TIME