Events

Biographies

Erin Aldana, University of California, San Diego

Erin Aldana is an art historian specializing in modern and contemporary Latin American art. She wrote her dissertation on the Brazilian artist group 3Nós3, which performed urban interventionist art projects on the streets of São Paulo from 1979-1982. She has worked at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, the J. Paul Getty Museum, and the Blanton Museum of Art in Austin, Texas. She has taught courses on Latin American, Mexican, and Chicano/Latino art at Southwestern University, the University of Texas at Austin, and the University of California, San Diego. Her published essays include examples in The Geometry of Hope: Latin American Abstract Art from the Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Collection and The Blanton Museum of Art Guide to the Latin American Collection. She is a recipient of the FLAS (Foreign Language and Area Studies) fellowship in Portuguese and the College Art Association Professional Development Fellowship. She is currently revising her dissertation into a book manuscript.

Mel Brimfield, Artist, London

Mel Brimfield's complex practice takes a skewed and tangled romp through the already vexed historiography of performance art, simultaneously revealing and inventing a rich history of collaboration between artists, dancers, theatre makers, political activists and comedians. Meticulously drawn and painted posters and programmes for fictional interdisciplinary cabarets, together with costumes and props, are produced alongside documentary-style films and live works that playfully associate performance art with significant cultural developments of the last 100 years. Low-end showbiz memoirs, sensationalist biographical documentaries and cheap-to-make TV clip programmes compiling lists of 'The 100 Top/Best/Greatest...' are referenced in the work alongside formal museological displays of performance ephemera and documentation. The second hand anecdotes and mythologies surrounding performers and their performances are expanded, distorted and completely supplanted by new fictions, with archival photographs and footage, and authentic ephemera being appropriated and recontextualised, or entirely invented at will.

She undertook a two-month residency in April 2010 at Camden Arts Centre to develop a film and large-scale performance based on her lecture at this conference - with Sir Frances Spalding, Italian Olympic gymnast Alice Capitani, dance troupe The Beaux Belles, comedy sketch group Clever Peter, jazz singer Gwyneth Herbert and composer Paul Higgs with four piece band.  Future shows include Locate at Jerwood Visual Arts with Aura Satz and Sarah Pickering in August 2010, and a solo exhibition at Yorkshire Sculpture Park in 2011.  She is represented by Ceri Hand Gallery

Bertrand Clavez, University of Lyon

Bertrand Clavez is lecturer at Rennes 2 University.  His work mainly focuses on action art of the fifties and sixties, with a clear emphasis on the Fluxus artists and realization.  Besides his scholarly work (he has just published a book dedicated to George Maciunas, George Maciunas, une révolution furtive at les presses du réel and was a grantee of The Terra Foundation for American Art and of the Getty Research Library), he is an organizer of and performer at fluxus concerts and exhibitions. He has organized about twenty fluxus evenings, and curated or co-organized several exhibitions (in Genova, Paris, Lyon and Annecy) with artists such as Alison Knowles, Ben Vautier, Ben Patterson, Emmett Williams, Eric Andersen, Larry Miller, Philipp Corner, and Geoffrey Hendricks.

Krysten Cunningham, Artist, Los Angeles

'3 to 4', which was shown for the first time at this conference, is an exploration of how we relate to the paradigms of Cartesian space, digital colour and physical objects. It includes 6 dancers and a Red, Green and Blue sculptural construction that is based on the XYZ vector system.   The dancers wear hand-dyed RGB costumes as they manipulate coloured rods into a variety of spatial formations. Their movements illustrate how the body navigates left and right, angles and geometrical objects in space. Her sculptural practice has been an ongoing examination of these systems and how the 4th spatial dimension can be understood in terms of 3-dimensional language. This is the first time Krysten has directly approached 'bridging the gap' between digital and real space, and examined  how we physically and collectively manoeuvre through this complex multiple dimensionality.  Shot in high definition video in the California desert, ‘3 to 4’ is approximately 9 minutes. 

‘3 to 4’ is the outcome of a 2008 Henry Moore Institute research fellowship.

Michael Dean, Artist, London

Writing and the delivery of writing into a state of physicality through performance, sculpture and photography, centres Dean’s research into the political properties of language pertaining to authorship and autonomy. Recent exhibitions, performances and projects include:

'The Floor is the Object', an independent project for Ancient&Modern (INDEPENDENT, New York)

'Sculpture Also Dies', Curated by Lorenzo Benedetti (Kunsthalle Mulhouse, France)

'DIALOGUE', under the auspices of Supportico Lopez Berlin. (FRAME, Frieze Art Fair, London)

'The Young People Visiting Our Ruins See Nothing but a Style' Curated by FormContent, (GAM Museum of Modern Art, Turin, Italy)

 

Irene Gerogianni, University of Thessaloniki

Irene Gerogianni is an art historian and critic. She studied Art History at the University of Glasgow and pursued postgraduate studies in Modern & Contemporary Art and Museum & Gallery Management at the University of Southampton and City University London respectively. She is currently a doctoral candidate at the Inter-university Postgraduate Programme in Museology of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki and the University of Western Macedonia. Her research on Greek performance art is funded by the Alexander S. Onassis Public Benefit Foundation and the ‘A. G. Leventis’ Foundation. Gerogianni is a frequent contributor to several art publications, such as artforum.com (New York), contemporary (London), and kaput (Athens), writing on contemporary art and cultural theory. She is a member of AICA, the Association of Greek Art Historians and the Association of Greek Museologists.

Jenn Joy, New York University

Jenn Joy teaches in the Sculpture Department at Rhode Island School of Design and in Fine Arts at Pratt Institute. She edited Planes of Composition: Dance, Theory and the Global with André Lepecki (Seagull Press, 2009) and her writing has been published in Movement Research Performance Journal, Studies in Gender and Sexuality, Dance Theatre Journal, TDR, Women and Performance, Contemporary, and NYC: Das vermessene Paradies Positionen zu New York (Haus der Kulturen Welt/Theater der Zeit). Recently, she has worked as a dramaturge for choreographers Chase Granoff and Jeremy Wade. She is a PhD Candidate in Performance Studies at Tisch School of the Arts/NYU and founded and directed jennjoygallery in San Francisco from 1997-2000.

Florian Kaplick

Florian Kaplick has studied Music Studies at the Conservatoire (Meistersinger-Konservatorium) Nuremberg, Musicology and Art History at Friedrich-Alexander-University, Erlangen, and is a medical doctor, specialising in Psychiatry (PhD).  He has been the recepient of the Scholarship of the State of Bavaria and the Scholarship of the Richard Wagner Society, as well as the Cultural Award of the City of Fürth.  His performance work is particularly influenced by that of Kurt Schwitters and dada, futurism and contemporary speech performance.  In 1992 he formed the vocal ensemble Viva Voce (1992) and has been a member of the Neruda-Quartett since 2004.  He regularly performs as a pianist, conductor and speech performer with a special interest in interdisciplinary collaboration (sound-word-visual).  He has recorded and broadcast as a pianist, conductor and speaker for Bavarian State Radio.

Pil and Galia Kollectiv, University of Kent

Pil and Galia Kollectiv are London based artists, writers and curators working in collaboration. Their work addresses the legacy of modernism and explores avant-garde discourses of the twentieth century and the way they operate in the context of a changing landscape of creative work and
instrumentalised leisure. They are interested in the relationship between art and politics and the role irony plays in its current articulation.  They often use choreographed movement and ritual as both an aesthetic and a thematic dimension, juxtaposing consumer rites and religious ceremonies.  They have had solo shows, Svetlana, at S1 Artspace, Sheffield, 2008 and Asparagus: a Horticultural Ballet at The Showroom Gallery, London, 2007.  They have also presented live work at the 2nd Herzliya Biennial, the 5^th Berlin Biennial and the 5th Montreal Biennial, as well as at Late at Tate Britain, and their work has been exhibited in Apocatopia, Castlefield Gallery, Manchester and Roll it to Me, Collective Gallery, Edinburgh. They are contributing editors at Art Papers and have written for many publications including Art Monthly and Mute. They work as lecturers in Fine Art at the University of Kent.

Malgorzata Lisiewicz, University of Gda?sk

Malgorzata Lisiewicz received her PhD from the University of Chicago in 2007 and M.A. from Bard College, Centre for Curatorial Studies, Annandale, New York in 1998. In 1995 she graduated in Art History from the Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznan and she also holds a GP degree which she received in 1988 from the Medical University of Gda?sk. She taught for several years at the Adam Mickiewicz University in Pozna?. From 1995 to 2003 she worked as a curator of contemporary art exhibitions. She was the director of the Laznia Center for Contemporary Art in Gda?sk in the period 2001-2003. Her publications include the book Polish Global Identity. National Gallery of Art Dilemmas at the End of the Twentieth Century.

Katalin T. Nagy, Eszterházy Károly College

Katalin T. Nagy studied Art History at Eötvös Loránd University, between 1967-1981.  From 1981-1996 she was Curator at the Hungarian National Gallery in the Department of Contemporary Art.  From 1994-2000 she was Chief Editor of the art magazine ’M?TEREMTÉS’ and from 2000-2002 Chief Curator at the Dorottya Gallery, Budapest (Ernst Museum), and in 2000 curated the national painting exhibition Dialogue in the Kunsthalle, Budapest.  Nagy worked as a freelance curator between 2002 and 2006 and curated the Hungarian exhibition of Mária Lugossy and József Gaál in  the European Cultural Capital, Cork, Ireland, in 2005.  Since 2006 he has been adjunct professor, Eszterházy Károly College, Eger Visual Arts Department.  Prizes he has been awarded include the Prize for Socialist Culture, for the oeuvre-catalogue and exhibition of Béla Kondor in the Hungarian National Gallery, 1994.  The Prize of the Hungarian Art Academy, for the film Nagybánya Painting, in 1998, the Golden Cross of the Hungarian Republic (for cultural work) in 2000 and in 2006 The Lajos Németh Prize (for the work made in the field of contemporary Hungarian art).  Curator of about sixty exhibitions on contemporary Hungarian art in Hungary and abroad, his writings have appeared in the Hungarian art periodicals and journals, Új M?vészet, Balkon, M?ért?, and Artmagazin.

Hayley Newman, Chelsea School of Art

Hayley Newman is Reader in Performance at Chelsea College of Art and Design. She has performed and exhibited widely and has had solo shows at Matt’s Gallery, London, The Ikon Gallery, Birmingham, The Longside Gallery at Yorkshire Sculpture Park and the Centre d’Art Contemporain, Geneva. Her work has shown in group exhibitions at Kunstmuseum, Lucerne; Montevideo, Amsterdam, Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago and Tate Modern, London.

Her recent work includes MKVH (Milton Keynes Vertical Horizontal, 2006), an event in which volunteers were driven around the Milton Keynes road grid until their coach ran out of diesel. The book MKVH (The Screenplay) documented this event and was written in the style of the original Easy Rider screenplay from 1969.  It is an edited transcript of conversations occurring between participants on the 39 hour trip. The book also includes diary entries, photos, drawings, radio interviews and local and national news stories and employs a cut-up technique that mixes fact and fiction into an occasionally seamless narrative.

Last summer she worked in collaboration with artist/writer Andrea Mason on the project Bankspeak a Capitalists Anonymous meeting in the city of London. For C.A. Hayley and Andrea organised a series of three clandestine meetings on the steps of the Royal Exchange. The project drew on the Alcoholics Anonymous 12 step program, and was seen as a ‘therapeutic intervention’ to help ex-bankers survive the current economic crisis.

She is currently working with Kaffe Matthews and Gina Birch (aka The Gluts) on their project Café Carbon, which they have just returned from performing on the streets of Copenhagen during the United Nations Climate Summit. Café Carbon is an eco-electro musical that consists of a menu of songs from which people can select starters, mains or desserts. She lives and works in London and is represented by Matt’s Gallery. www.hayleynewman.com

Monty Paret, University of Utah

Paul Monty Paret, PhD, is Assistant Professor of Art History at the University of Utah where he teaches courses on modern and contemporary art and visual culture. His current research projects concern the Bauhaus school of art and design, the relationship of sculpture to the visual and material culture of modernity, and issues of land use in contemporary art. Recent publications include the essay “Picturing Sculpture: Object, Image, Archive,” in Bauhaus Construct: Fashioning Identity, Discourse and Modernism, eds. Jeffrey Saletnik and Robin Schuldenfrei (Routledge 2009), and two focus essays on Oskar Schlemmer for the exhibition catalog Bauhaus 1919-1933: Workshops for Modernity (Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2009).

 

Heike Roms, Aberystwyth University

Heike Roms teaches performance studies at Aberystwyth University. She is the principal investigator on a two-year AHRC-funded research project, entitled “‘It was forty years ago today – Locating the early history of performance art in Wales 1965–1979”, which focuses on the historiography of performance art.

She has published widely on contemporary performance practice, particularly on work emanating from Wales, for publications such as Performance Research (for which she is a consultant editor), Inter, Frakcija, Cyfrwng, Live Art Magazine, Ballett/Tanz and a number of essay collections. Her volume, Contesting Performance (with Jon McKenzie and C.J.W-L.Wee), was published by Palgrave in 2009.

www.performance-wales.org

Stephanie Rosenthal, Hayward Gallery, Southbank Centre

Stephanie Rosenthal joined the Hayward Gallery as Chief Curator in December 2007, having previously worked at the Haus der Kunst in Munich for more than 10 years. She worked as assistant curator and co-curator on highly-praised survey exhibitions including Night (1998) and Objects in 20th Century Art (2000). She was appointed curator for modern and contemporary art in 2000 and curated: Haim Steinbach - North East South West (1999), Hand-Work (2000), Stories. Narrative Structures in Contemporary Art (2002), Abigail O´Brien – The Seven Sacraments (2003), Nic Hess – Good Morning Germany (2004) and Aernout Mik - Dispersions (2004), Allan Kaprow_Art as life (2006). She also curated the acclaimed exhibition Paul McCarthy. LaLa Land Parody Paradise which toured to the Whitechapel Gallery in 2005.  Rosenthal wrote her doctoral thesis on ‘The Colours Black in the New York School: Robert Rauschenberg, Ad Reinhardt, Frank Stella and Mark Rothko’ and she curated a show on the subject entitled Black Paintings. She has curated the Robin Rhode exhibition Who Saw Who at the Hayward Gallery for autumn 2008. In summer 2009 she presented the group exhibition Walking in my mind, which explored the inner workings of the artist’s imagination through the medium of large-scale installation art. Furthermore she is preparing a show about the relation between visual art and dance for autumn 2010.

Stephanie has contributed essays for books and periodicals on a wide range of contemporary artists and has been part of international advisary boards and symposiums about modern and contemporary art since 1996.

Aura Satz, London Consortium

Aura Satz is an artist and writer. She completed a theory/practice PhD at the Slade School of Fine Art, where she later held a Henry Moore Foundation Post-doctoral Sculpture Fellowship. She is a teaching fellow at the London Consortium (2005-present), and has taught at various art colleges across London.  She was a regular contributor to Tema Celeste, and has published in a variety of journals, including Performance Research, New Formations, New York Arts magazine, Journal of Visual Culture, and the Financial Times. Together with Jon Wood, she is co-editor of Articulate Objects: Voicing and Listening to Sculpture and Performance (Peter Lang publishers, 2009), and has published essays on tableaux vivants, iconoclasm, automata, phantom limbs and spiritualism. She has performed, exhibited and screened her work nationally and internationally, including FACT (Liverpool), Site Gallery (Sheffield), Galleria Civica di Arte Contemporanea di Trento (Italy), De La Warr Pavilion (Bexhill-on-Sea), the Zentrum Paul Klee (Switzerland), Tate Britain, Whitechapel Gallery, the Victoria & Albert Museum, Beaconsfield Gallery and Artprojx Space (London). She recently completed a film on gramophone grooves funded by the Wellcome Trust, which premiered as a film installation in collaboration with Aleks Kolkowski at the AV festival, Newcastle, and will be shown at the Wellcome Collection in December 2010. Her previous projects can be seen online at www.iamanagram.com.

Pierre Saurisse, Sotheby’s Institute of Art

Pierre Saurisse is an art historian and critic, and completed his PhD in France. He is a Consultant Lecturer in Contemporary Art at Sotheby’s Institute, in London, and an associate member of the research team “Art History and Criticism”, based at the University of Rennes (France). In 2007 he published a book on chance in European and American art in the 1960s (La mécanique de l’imprévisible, L’Harmattan, Paris). Other publications include articles on Allan Kaprow, Valie Export, Yoko Ono, and myths in performance. He is currently writing an article on darkness in early New York happenings. At the 2008 AAH Annual Conference, in London, Saurisse presented a paper about artists at work in films in the 1940s. This question of the image of the artist will be explored through more recent art on the occasion of his participation in the conference Image de l’artiste, which will be held in Paris this Summer. He will also participate in a conference on chance organized at the University of Aix-Marseille next June.

Gary Stevens, Slade School of Art

Gary Stevens is an artist who creates performances and video installations, working with a wide range of visual artists and performers from diverse backgrounds. His solo & ensemble works have been presented internationally in gallery, theatre, festival and public spaces. Recent live works include Ape (2007) Selected venues: Walker Art Gallery, Minneapolis, USA, National Review of Live Art, Glasgow, Molten States, GSK Contemporary at the Royal Academy, London. El Teatro, Tunis, Tunisia, Theatre 140, Brussels, Belgium, and British Council showcase, Edinburgh Fringe. and Not Tony (2004) Home, London; De la Warr Pavilion, Bexhill-on-Sea; CCA, Glasgow; Kettles Yard, Cambridge; Ovada, Ruskin and Oxford Brookes, Old Fire Station, Oxford; Whitstable Biennale) Centre d'Art Contemporain, Genève, Switzeralnd.

Video installations include: Slow Life, commissioned and first shown at Matt's Gallery, London in 2003,touring to Artefiera, Bologna, Melbourne Festival, Australia (2004) and as part of to be continued… / jaktuu, Helsinki Photography Festival (2005), Kettle's Yard, Cambridge (2005-6) Southampton City Art Gallery (2006) Centre d'Art Contemporain, Genève, Switzerland (2008), Wake Up and Hide, Matt’s Gallery, 2007. Ikon Eastside and Fierce! Festival Birmingham. Southampton City Art Gallery. Inn Motion Festival 2009, Centre of Contemporary Culture Barcelona.

He won a Paul Hamlyn Award for Visual Arts (1998), a Foundation for Contemporary Performance Arts Award (New York) in 1996 and a One to One bursary from the Live Art Development Agency (2005). He has taught in many art schools since 1988 including Goldsmiths, Wimbledon, Byam Shaw Schools of Art, and Middlesex University. Since 2007 he has been a part-time lecturer at the Slade School of Fine Art, UCL. He ran a regular monthly Performance Lab at Toynbee Studios for Artsadmin from 1999 to 2009.

Dan Watt, University of Loughborough

Dr Daniel Watt is a Lecturer in English and Drama at Loughborough University. His research interests include fragmentary writing, ethics and literature and philosophical and literary influences on theatre and performance in the 20^th century. He is currently working on a book, The Consciousness of Objects, with Rodopi Press. He is author of Fragmentary Futures: Blanchot, Beckett, Coetzee and has co-edited A Performance Cosmology, Theatres of Thought and Ethical Encounters. His other work includes book chapters on Deleuze and Performance, Edmond Jabès, Jacques Derrida, Puppets and Glossolalia and journal articles in Performance Research, RIDE, Journal for Cultural Research and Wormwood. He is associate editor of Performing Ethos and series editor of The Axis series. A collection of short fiction, An Emporium of Automata, will be published with Ex Occidente Press in May 2010.

John C. Welchman, University of California, San Diego

John C. Welchman is Professor of art history in the Visual Arts department at the University of California, San Diego. His books on art include Modernism Relocated: Towards a Cultural Studies of Visual Modernity (Allen & Unwin, 1995), Invisible Colours: A Visual History of Titles (Yale UP, 1997) and Art After Appropriation: Essays on Art in the 1990s (Routledge, 2001); he is co-author of the Dada and Surrealist Word Image (MIT Press, 1987) and of Mike Kelley in the Phaidon Contemporary Artists series (1999); and editor of Rethinking Borders (Minnesota UP, 1996).  He has written for Artforum, Screen, the New York Times, International Herald Tribune, and the Economist, and contributed catalogue essays for exhibitions at the Tate, Reina Sophia, MOCA, Los Angeles, the LA County Museum of Art, the Sydney Biennial, Vienna Museum of Contemporary Art, the Contemporary Art Gallery,Vancouver, the Ludwig Museum, and the Haus der Kunst, Munich. 

His current and recent book projects include editorship of the collected writings of Mike Kelley, a study of the Portuguese artist Vasco Araujo was published with ADIAC, Lisbon, in 2006, and a book on the drawings, paintings and related 2D work of Tony Oursler with JRP|Ringier in 2008. XX to XXI: Essays on European Art will be published by Akal, Madrid in Spanish, in 2009; and he is finalizing two books on the relation between art, film and the representation of faces (The Celluloid Face and Faces and Powers).

Welchman is founder and chair of the Southern California Consortium of Art Schools and editor of its publication series, which includes Recent Pasts: Art in Southern California from the 90s to Now, 2005; Institutional Critique and After, 2006; The Aesthetics of Risk ,2008; and Black Sphinx: On the Comedic in Modern Art, 2009.

Silvia Ziranek

ARE WE ALL? THEN I’LL. 

MY NAME IS. 

I, A FEMALE, WAS BORN IN, STUDIED AT, TRAVELLED IN AND.
AND AS FOR WORK: THROUGH WORD AND WARDROBE, MOT – WORT – AND GARDE-ROBE – KLEIDERSCHRANK NICHT KUEHLSCHRANK, HAVE INVESTIGATED ATMOSPHERE, ATTITUDE, IMAGE, IN/EQUALITY, SCALE, PURPOSE, CATEGORISATIONALISM, ISHNESS, FEMINISMUS, THOUGHTHOOD, BEING, BUYING, BREWING, BAKING, BURNING BOAT AND BUILDING BRIDGE, COLOUR, AND COCKTAILS, TEXT, AND TEXTILE, EMOTION, AND MILLINERY, AND, MAYBE, M(OR)E.
I TEND TO AND SO ON – I ARE OR (DECLINING SILENCE), RARELY DOWN TO MY LAST TEN TIARAS: ICI VILLA MOI. VERY MOI. VERY FOOD, INTERNATIONALISING WITH LIPSTICK WHILST CHASING SPACE, WHEN ANYONE CAN APRON, WHERE I DO SHOE, Z IN WHATEVER, SOON UPON AGO.

Ziranek describes through gesture, word and wardrobe how nowness affects howness.  Her sponsor for this performance was Better Badges.

Maxa Zoller, Lecturer in Moving Image Art, London

Maxa Zoller is a lecturer in moving image art at Goldsmith’s College, Sotheby’s Institute of Art and Kingston University. Maxa has a keen interest in marginal and interdisciplinary film practices, which focus around issues of the body, expanded cinema, the practice of female filmmakers, and experimental film from former Socialist countries. Since completing her Ph.D. on European experimental film in 2007 she has been organising workshops on moving image art at no.w.here, FACT and Oslo Academy of Art. In her capacity as a film curator Maxa has presented experimental film screenings at Tate Modern, Tramway Glasgow, Berlin Kunstverein, Rekord Gallery in Oslo and a Chris Welsby exhibition at Central St Martin’s. In November 2009 she organised a major screening of East and West German experimental film at Tate Modern. Zoller is a regular contributor to Art Monthly. Her research is published in a number of academic journals and books, including the exhibition catalogue X-Screen: Film Installations and Actions in the 1960s and 1970s (MuMoK Vienna 2003). She has recently curated her first object-based exhibition All that Remains… The Teenagers of Socialism at Waterside Project Space in East London.