Helen Carmel Benigson: Anxious, Stressful, Insomnia Fat

Helen Carmel Benigson
Anxious, Stressful, Insomnia Fat
Carroll / Fletcher

«...the flatness prescribed by the Internet onto the body» [...MORE...]

«These weight‐loss support group members then became avatars – digitalized versions of themselves within her videos, questioning the dematerialisation of the body through coding and information.» [...MORE...]

Helen Carmel Benigson (b.1985, London) was recently involved in Platform, a residency programme at Sheffield’s Site Gallery and the LUX Associate Artist Program. Recent solo exhibitions include: Performa.13 After Hours, New York; Going to Africa via a Machine Called a Sunbed, Meantime Project Space, Cheltenham and the Irma Stern Museum, Cape Town; and Palm Trees and Poker Players at UCA, Farnham and Breathe Harder, a site-specific performance at Yorkshire Sculpture Park. Recent group exhibitions include: Ericka Beckman: Image games – work in context at Tate Modern, London; Videonale.14 at the Kunstmuseum, Bonn, Lagos and Odessa; Videocracy at The Centre for Contemporary Art, Tel Aviv and The House in the Sky at Concrete, Hayward Gallery, London. In 2014, Benigson was awarded a Clarendon Scholarship to support her DPhil at the Ruskin School of Art, University of Oxford.

Marina Abramović: White Space

Marina Abramović
White Space
Lisson Gallery

Getting into Marina's works...

Hannah Perry: Horoscopes (Déjà Vu)

An emotional performance at Serpentine Galleries' Park Nights 2014, generated, manipulated and developed by Hannah Perry.

Yvonne Rainer: Dance Works

Yvonne Rainer
Dance Works
Raven Row

Marina Abramović: 512 Hours

Marina Abramović
512 Hours
Serpentine Gallery

I went to see Mariana at the Serpentina... and, I went to see Mariana at the Serpentina. 512 Hours by Marina Abramović, at the Serpentina, is a live tableau where the artist uses people instead of oil. A life size canvas in where the artist brings to life and wanders about bare life. A triptych about being! On the left panel we sit; on the central one we stand; while on the panel on the right we walk. (Other possible combinations might occur throughout time). The dynamics provoked by people being reminds me of a painters impression on the ink on the canvas, with it's particular texture, size, movement, pressure and different colours combining and relating with each other on a harmonious way.

No time devices, like watches, are allowed in the tableau. One has to become lost to time. So, definitively, this is not a surrealist painting. Take our own rhythm and slow down do the barest of it all. Just be being there: standing, walking, sitting, laying down, or counting seeds.

The audience participates in a performance about audience participation in the conception of the art work. However, the audience performative participation is, in contrary to previous performances delivered by the Serbian-born artist, more controlled by the artist and her "dwarfs". Although it requires a participation it is more like an authoritative state rather than a democratic one leading our decision on towards the outcome of the dynamics driving the conditions for the opening of possibilities.

Being it what it is, the need to be present as audience so the performance about audience participation occurs is a requirement. A necessity for the artist but not for the audience in itself. One is what one is without the need to have to go to mass concentration places to be what one is. Generalisations are good. But they are just that, generalisations. The particulars are what makes the being be, not the whole. As a part of a whole body - being audience - we, as individuals stop being a singularity, with our own voice, and have to follow the democratisation idea in where the majority has a ruling voice. However, in 512 Hours the ruling voice of the minority is the deciding voice just like in an democratic state... and, I should had gone directly to the closest sorority in town and have a truly audience participation and actively engage in a more penetrative way. I should had gone to a sorority and, instead, went to see Mariana at the Serpentina...

PS. The artist, as the author, is present all throughout the performative performance about audience participation.

Eddie The Eagle Museum - Tijdsdocument

A London

at Ping

Andy Warhol had photography running through his whole practice. From the screen prints of famous people, to the soup cans, he used photography in a diaristic way taken one to three films a day. A combination of expressions about life; an interest in the non-hierarchical of contemporary life and everyday life things, and also on the reproducibility of the image. His work alludes to the reproducibility of the image, like a wall of mirrors, of photographic reproduction. By stitching images together (like the ones of the ice cream van, in the photo below) he produces a unique art work. With a sculptural quality. With him we see "famous" people laying together with, positioned on the same level of recognisable objects, brands, those desirous things/wants that define the society where we find ourselves immersed in on an historical level. He said things about life, sex, playing, felling both ways with music and things we can't say about food and about you, it is about two, three, the night and day be together.

at Rum Kitchen

Andy Warhol's Ice Cream van photographs at The Photographers' Gallery

JOANA BASTOS: Oscar | CAM Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian

Export Cars to Mars? - a world vision contest

Alice Theobald: They Keep Putting Words in My Mouth! An Operetta of Sorts performance

Sounds funny but it is quite wordily therapeutic, being in a position of 'not knowing' - «I don't know, anymore!» We are not told what it is, they don't know either!

...

Alice Theobald: They Keep Putting Words in My Mouth! An Operetta of Sorts

Alice Theobald
They Keep Putting Words in My Mouth! An Operetta of Sorts
Pilar Corrias

«Alice Theobald draws upon a mixture of pop and underground cultural references as she develops multifaceted performances using music, installation, and video. Theobald’s performance and video works point to the substance of their fabrication through playing with the metaphorical potential of language, sound, and movement while directly addressing accepted concepts of spectacle and emotion.» [PR]

Ken Okiishi: Gesture/Data

Ken Okiishi
Gesture/Data
Pilar Corrias

«Ken Okiishi takes up and troubles the vocabulary of the media that he uses. His works hover over and within the relationships between matter and memory, perception and action of a digitally networked culture. Using video, performance, and installation he creates moments when language and images begin to fall apart. As Okiishi subverts the material claims of the media, the glitches that occur illuminate spaces for the production of something other than what has already been.» [PR]

Bodily perceptions

Touch Wood 2
1) Protein Dance Company / Luca Silvestrini, 2) Tiffany Gibson & Virginia Munday, 3) Joelene English, 4) Vania Gala
The Place

Plastique Fantastique: All the Fantasies of the People

Plastique Fantastique
All the Fantasies of the People
IMT Gallery

«Plastique Fantastique is a group that investigates aesthetics, the sacred, politics and popular and mass culture through comics, performances, texts, assemblages and installations. It is envisaged as a group of human and inhuman avatars delivering communiqués from the extreme past and the future. Its works are baroque, transformative, express a subversive urgency and are frequently site-specific and participatory.»

«The list of individuals that make up Plastique Fantastique change dependent upon the circumstances. As a group it was originally conceived of by Simon O’Sullivan as the architects of the exhibition New Life at Chisenhale, London, a 2004 exhibition by the artist David Burrows. In Plastique Fantastique’s manifesto O’Sullivan proposed a group whose intentions are to shift potential participants “from work time (utility) into sacred time (play)” by executing practice as ritual. Since the appearance of the manifesto, the story of Plastique Fantastique has been narrated through their comics.» [...]

Ariana Reines performance at Modern Art

newsfromlondon201306

The Queen Elizabeth II 60th anniversary of her coronation, at Westminster Abbey, ceremony is a performance acted in the space of symbolic order; it is a meaningful act performed in the space of social reality. From a typical rainy day in the Kingdom to a traditional sunny day in London. This moment represents and projects 60 years' of commitment, spectacle and allegiance to god, to the kingdom and to the people and of public service to the kingdom and to the people. The best news, though, is that I have just got hold of an iPhone5. As Jeremy Deller has putted in an interview, published on the Financial Times's Lunch with the FT (August 2nd 2013), by Emily Stokes, about the Queen: “one of the great performance artists of our time – just a totally blank canvas”."

New Pope Elected: Francis I

Whats' ##### with the Art Book Fair? [Writing Performance]

The variable that make everything perfect came!

To continue! To be continued on to another level of engagement and commitment!

Whats' ##### with the Art Book Fair?

21 Minutes

21 Minutes directed by Vania Gala in The Bonnie Bird Theatre at the Laban.
A piece about apathy, liveness, affects and disaffects.