It is common for art exhibitions to include animating events such as artist talks, where audiences can discover more about the artist and their working methods, the thinking and doing behind the project, the various challenges and discoveries involved in developing the work, and so forth. Often these artist talks take the form of a …
One of my favourite ways to talk with someone is while walking together. The shared forward momentum almost automatically generates an intimate connection between the walkers, attuning their moving bodies in a rhythm of complicity. That same momentum can also propel the conversation, contributing a sense of flow. Walking together is often an important part …
—Sent via email to the curator, November 2, 2021. For me, the most important aspect of Body Maintenance is the rhythm. That is why I dribbled the ball in the room.The calm and well-paced sounds from the ball always made me relax and feel “sane. Also having relations and conversation with people is the second …
As the KinesTHESES curator, I am interested in the tactile-kinesthetic propositions Body Maintenance offers for an audience of thinking bodies, and how these propositions activate and influence participants’ self-conception. This entry of the Toolkit offers some background information on why I invited Sakiko to be a part of KinesTHESES, and how, having experienced Body Maintenance, …
Sakiko Yamaoka prefaced her KinesTHESES project, Body Maintenance, with these words: “I, personally, don’t like to do or watch any sports, but we can use the tools of sport for other intentions. For example, art performances.” Consequently, her project for KinesTHESES took place at a downtown Toronto basketball gymnasium on a sunny summer Sunday afternoon. …
8. Sakiko Yamaoka’s Body Maintenance : Description, digital photos and video recordings Read More »
I recently attended a free conference (hosted on Zoom and livestreamed on YouTube) examining the conservation of performance works. “Performance: The Ethics and the Politics of Care — # 1. Mapping the Field” was addressed primarily toward the art conservation community, and expressly aimed at locating the discourse of conservation within a broader field of the …
The name of this curatorial project is a play on the term “kinestheses,” which comes from the phenomenologist philosopher Edmund Husserl. Husserl was deeply attuned to the close connection between life and movement. He described living beings first and foremost as animate organisms, and accorded a foundational importance for human consciousness in what he called …
In terms of professions, I define myself first as a performance artist, but that label is closely followed by at least two others: performance curator and, more recently performance theorist. This confluence of roles is no accident; it reflects how I discovered that there was such a thing as performance art in the first place. …
5. Para-sites of Performance Art: Some Brief Thoughts on the Role of Artist-Curator Read More »
While the live situation may enable the phenomenological relations of flesh-to-flesh engagement, the documentary exchange (viewer/reader <—> document) is equally intersubjective.(Jones 1997: 12) Art historian and theorist Amelia Jones has written extensively about the uneasy relationship between live, body-based art practices and the documents such practices produce. Despite the heavy investment of both performance scholars …
4. You Are Here (“you had to be there…”): Experience and Representation Read More »
For me [performance has] always been about breathing the same air, and being in the same room, and feeling your pheromones and your cells and your energy vibrations and all of that very corporeal, very tactile-kinesthetic kind of stuff. Archives are […] remains that […] the actual bodies aren’t there any more. To me that’s …