8–15 December 2012
Opening: Saturday, 8 December 2012, 7pm
Palazzo Bembo
Riva del Carbon, San Marco 4793
Venice, Italy
Hours: Sunday 9–Saturday 15 December, 10–10pm
The 1st Venice International Performance Art Week, under the title “Hybrid Body-Poetic Body,” will take place in Venice from December 8th to December 15th, 2012, showcasing works by 31 international artists. Pioneers alongside established and emerging ones will trace an itinerary of still vivid past influences and current tendencies in the field.
Consisting of a dynamic program of live performances, installations, photographic and video documentation, daily artist talks, and meetings with the participating artists, researchers and curators, the event focuses on concepts such as authenticity, interconnectivity, empathy, struggle, love, political and social habits, and how the Self relates to them.
The purpose is also educational. The 1st Venice International Performance Art Week is in fact conceived as a long-term project, aiming to promote series of workshops and seminars on Performance art issues along the year on international scale, in cooperation with other cultural institutions of the city, such as the Academy of Fine Arts. Already for this first edition, 40 students of the Academy of Fine Arts of Venice have been selected and invited to present their works and researches on the topic during the Art Week.
Two-way communication between artists and audience is the key for this discipline, for proposing experience and investigate cutting edge ideas in different branches of the human activity.
Performance art is life itself, it doesn’t represent or portray. It rather analyses how and why people and their surroundings evolve or devolve, to generate reflection. Because it is ephemeral and because the artist’s own body is the primary medium, Performance art holds an unquestionable vital potential: it steps beyond conventional borders to create an immediate impact by engaging directly the viewer emotionally and intellectually. Finally, it requires both artists and audience to be responsive here and now to position oneself. Anything becomes matter of process and presence.
The selection of Live art performances responds to a precise curatorial line to avoid the risk of ending in another hypertrophied platform of global art. If the concern is also aesthetics, the objective is to analyze thoughts and ideas on space, time and existence: questions of form and substance in continuous transformation, and where however the artist’s body is always the primary instance. When the artistic value matches human qualities, it is possible to scan new carriers of meanings about how to live this life with more care, and to address it for positive change by producing challenging expressions. In such context; concepts such as lasting and endurance, persistency, necessity and trial, resistance and awareness are not confined anymore to the realm of abstraction, but become tangible because they experienced as real.
Artists: Yoko Ono (Nutopia), VALIE EXPORT (Austria), Hermann Nitsch (Austria), Jan Fabre (Belgium), Ilija Šoškić (Montenegro/Italy), Boris Nieslony (Germany), Jill Orr (Australia), Lee Wen (Singapore), Gonzalo Rabanal (Chile), Helena Goldwater (UK), Snežana Golubović (Serbia/Germany), Jason Lim (Singapore), Manuel Vason (Italy/UK), Joseph Ravens (USA), Prem Sarjo (Chile), Suka Off (Poland), Nelda Ramos (Argentina), Shima (Brazil), BBB Johannes Deimling (Germany/Norway), VestAndPage (Germany/Italy), Santiago Cao (Argentina), Francesca Fini (Italy), Francesco Kiàis (Italy/Greece), Wanda Moretti | Il Posto (Italy), Gabriela Alonso (Argentina), Alvaro Pereda Roa (Chile), Andrea Morucchio (Italy), Macarena Perich Rosas (Chile), Marcus Vinicius (Brazil), Weeks & Whitford (UK), David Dalla Venezia (France/Italy), Zierle & Carter (UK).
Curator: Andrea Pagnes (VestAndPage)
Co-curators: Blair Todd (The Exchange and Newlyn Art Gallery, UK) and Gabriela Alonso (Zonadeartenacciòn, Argentina).
Partners & Sponsors: Under the patronage of Regione Veneto, the City of Venice, and Fondazione di Venezia with generous support of Consorzio ConCaVe, Riviera and Archivio Bonotto, the event is organized in collaboration with Studio Contemporaneo, Venice Open Gates, Academy of Fine Arts of Venice, Global Art Affairs Foundation, which hosts the event in its prestigious premises at Palazzo Bembo.
A comprehensive documentation of the 1st Venice International Performance Art Week, with a selection of theoretical texts on Performance art issues by international scholars, will be published in hard copy and digital copy after the event.
Program
Artists Talks & Presentations: Monday 10–Saturday 15 December 2012, 11–1pm
Live Durational Performances: Sunday 9–Saturday 15 December 2012, 3–7pm
Evening Program of Live Performances: Saturday 8–Saturday, 15 December 2012, 7–10pm
