In 2016, we invited Vancouver-based artist Margaret Dragu to create a daily livestream during the 11th 7a*11d International Festival of Performance Art, which resulted in the production of VERB FRAU TV Season 5: 7a*11d. She loved it so much, she decided to return for our 2018 edition to interview a number of our visiting artists and colleagues for VERB FRAU TV Season 7. Season 7 is now available for viewing!
VERB FRAU TV = (streaming/screening) + (online/in-house) since 2011. VERB FRAU TV = proof anyone can be a TV station and/or a live streaming broadcast provider by using cheap $$$ low-fi & DIY technology. VERB FRAU TV = an invitation to perform and talk about making art. VERB FRAU TV = video art + reporting + performance + laughter + (often) yoga + cooking. VERB FRAU TV = rock’n’roll, + quick & dirty+ fly-by-seat-of-your-pants.
VERB FRAU TV: Season 7 = 15 artists reading texts that “drew them to the dark side”. VERB FRAU TV: Season 7 = 15 artists reading texts that made them become artists… and sharing their stories about why.VERB FRAU TV: Season 7 = “finding the secret story of the artists” while they read their chosen stories. VERB FRAU TV: Season 7 = 3 Director’s Cut episodes from VERB FRAU TV: Season 6 LIVE! Biennale 2017 + 1 other Vancouver episode + 11 artists from 7a*11d Festival 2018.
VERB FRAU TV: Season 7
Andrew James Paterson — engages in playful questioning of language, philosophy, community and capitalism in a wide range of disciplines, including video, performance, film, music and writing. His recent publications are Collection Correction and Not Joy Division.
Arahmaiani – grapples with contemporary politics, violence, a critique of capital, the female body, identity politics and religion. Since 2010, she has been working with Tibetan monks in the Tibetan Plateau to address environmental issues.
Cindy Mochizuki – creates multimedia installations & performances employing fiction, archive, drawing, animation, food, sculpture, improvisation, miniatures, memory and magic.
Elvira Santamaría – makes interventions, exhibitions, process art, and durational performances that touch upon memory, change, transformation, entropy, catastrophe, violence, grief, regeneration that reflect upon her relationship to Mexico in the North American context.
Francisco-Fernando Granados – has a multidisciplinary critical practice spanning performance, installation, drawing, digital media, public art, community-based projects, writing, curating, teaching and cultural theory.
Francesco Gagliardi – is a performance artist, writer, filmmaker, experimental music performer, teacher of drama/theatre/performance/philosophy and an absolutely fabulous cook.
Fiona Griffiths – is a teacher, choreographer, actor, clown, fitness professional, body worker and registered nurse. Her recent work was shown in On Display Global, an annual worldwide performance event to commemorate International Day of Persons with Disabilities.
Golboo Amani – creates performance and social practice work that expand sites of pedagogy to include the streets, backyards, homes and public transit. Her work is critical of social systemic patterns offering non-hierarchial pedagogical experiences that speak to collective agency.
Hank Bull – is one of the Eminences Grises of 7a*11d Festival 2018. Bull says, “Performance can fill a large space with little means. Radio as a time-based sculpture in space, for example. Global networks create another type of stage, with performers and audiences, readers and writers, artists and viewers all crossing the line, becoming each other. We live in a rapidly accelerating hothouse bio-culture, highly plastic, ready to transform itself or explode at any moment. The next revolution will be born of a spontaneous internal combustion of the human imagination.”
Jinhan Ko – is an artist and writer. He is one of the founding members of artist collective Instant Coffee, a service-oriented group that helps to facilitate artists projects. Ko actively engages in a social practice that brings people together for performances, lectures, concerts, public art and other participatory activities.
KC Wei – explores the liminal space of music, video, writing and curation to create “popular esoteric art that makes popular things strange again”. KC explains, “There’s a political responsibility I feel in making art. I want it to do some good in the world, be a space locally that can feel new and out of the routine, that doesn’t need to become something other than itself.”
Leena Raudvee – makes drawings, mixed media and visual exhibitions as well as performance often creating/facilitating space for other artists to make art with and around her, too. Raudvee deconstructs contemporary societal issues by exploring women’s bodies across speculative edges and in liminal spaces through research-as-process and doing-as-aktion.
Makiko Hara — Since the late 90s, Hara has curated numerous exhibitions, art projects and festivals (in and totally outside of museums and institutions) in Asia Pacific Rim. Her cultural aktions bridge the two continents through her conjuring of opportunities for collaborative contemporary art practices.
Sandra Vida – is one of the Eminences Grises of 7a*11d Festival 2018. Vida describes her early performance and installation work as “claiming space and presence, literally placing myself within the frame… I search for alternatives; you might say my work is about alternatives. Working in artist-run culture (at the local, regional, and national level for many of my art-making years) sprang from the same impulse.”
Shaun Dacey – is currently the Director of The Richmond Art Gallery. He has curated and produced exhibitions, educational initiatives, off-site projects and residencies, as well as public and youth programming, for many public and parallel galleries.
VERB FRAU apologizes to viewers & artists for a few sound boo-boos… but… VERB FRAU is studying with the wonderful artist Brady Marks… so … Season 8 [coming soon from Berlin/Copenhagen] will sound much better !!!
Viewers can find all the previous seasons of VERB FRAU TV at http://www.vivomediaarts.com/category/verb-frau-tv/
VERB FRAU = grateful to all of the artists in-front-of and the artists behind the camera(s), LIVE! Biennale, 7a*11d Festival, VIVO, DWI: Dragu Worker International & Canada Council for the Arts.