[Fall 2010] Historic performances are currently being updated in different forms: exhibitions, appropriations, remediations, and re-enactments. These practices raise a number of questions about the status of performance documentation (photos, videos, and films in particular) and how it is interpreted, addressed here through multiple recent examples. ÉDITORIAL DOSSIER EXPOSITIONS LECTURES PAROLES Purchase this issue
Ciel variable 86 - PERFORMANCE | Editorial
Authors: Jacques Doyon
[Fall 2010] by Jacques Doyon MoMA’s major retrospective of the work of Marina Abramović marks museum institutions’ full recognition of the field of performance. In a way, this exhibition is the logical outcome of a movement of reactualization of historic performances that has been underway for more than a decade and to which Abramowic has […]
Ciel variable 86 - PERFORMANCE | Essays
Authors: Anne Bénichou
[Fall 2010] documents [de] PERFORMANCE Historic performances are currently being updated in different forms: exhibitions, appropriations, remediations, and re-enactments. These practices raise a number of questions about the status of performance documentation (photos, videos, and films in particular) and how it is interpreted, adressed here through multiple recent examples. DAVID TOMAS Tim Clark. Reading the […]
Ciel variable 86 - PERFORMANCE | Essays
Authors: David Tomas | Artists: Tim Clark
August 15, 2016 [originally published in Fall 2010] — Tim Clark. Reading the Limits” was produced by the Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery at Concordia University. On one level, the exhibition was a retrospective devoted to Tim Clark, a Montreal-based performance artist who produced a series of important works between 1977 and 2003. On another level, it was designed to reopen the question of the contemporary status of the artist and the interstitial – post-1970s/contemporary academic – function of the artwork…
Ciel variable 86 - PERFORMANCE | Essays
Authors: Barbara Clausen | Artists: Daniel Guzman, Kelly Walker, Luis Felipe Ortega, Seth Price
August 10, 2016 [originally published in Fall 2010] — A man walks into frame and presses his body into a corner. The camera zooms in on him as he forces his entire body into the confines of the triangular space that he has created. He shifts his hips and squeezes his arms and hands into the small space left between his body and the corner. His movements are slight, yet strenuous; there is a sexual, yet suppressed, almost violent tension in his striving to be absorbed by the architecture.
Ciel variable 86 - PERFORMANCE | Essays
Authors: Cyril Thomas | Artists: Eva et Franco Mattes, Joseph DeLappe, Lynn Hershman Leeson
August 8, 2016 [originally published in Fall 2010] — It is obvious – given the statements and actions of the SecondLife Liberation Army, the 3D reconfiguration of the Guantanamo prison filmed by Nonny de la Peña, Liberate Your Avatar by Paul Sermon, works by Agnès de Cayeux, and the productions of Nicolas Boone – that SecondLife, created by LindenLabs, is a territory and space that is widely used by artists, filmmakers, playwrights, and musicians…
Ciel variable 86 - PERFORMANCE | Essays
Authors: Mario Côté | Artists: Françoise Sullivan
August 3, 2016 [originally published in Fall 2010] — In October 2005, my chance meeting with the multidisciplinary artist Françoise Sullivan at the café of the Royal Museums of Fine Arts in Brussels led to the idea of reviving, almost sixty years later, an early masterpiece of modern dance: Danse dans la neige.
Ciel variable 86 - PERFORMANCE | Essays
Authors: Anne Bénichou
August 1, 2016 [originally published in Fall 2010] — In 2004, at Dazibao, “Performance et photographie: Point and Shoot” explored the close connections between performance and photography. In this exhibition, performance images were envisaged beyond their documentary function, as works in their own right. In 2007, the Leonard & Bina Ellen Gallery at Concordia University presented “9 Evenings Reconsidered: Art, Theatre, and Engineering, 1966,” an exhibition devoted to the eponymous evening of experimental performances held in New York in 1966…
Ciel variable 86 - PERFORMANCE | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Jean Gagnon | Artists: Pascal Dufaux
July 11, 2016 [originally published in French only in Fall 2010] — You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page.
Ciel variable 86 - PERFORMANCE | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Elizabeth Matheson | Artists: Esther Shalev-Gerz
July 7, 2016 [originally published in Fall 2010] — Within participatory arts there is often an implicit, yet compelling, assumption that media and public attention to issues that figure into public art attest to their social significance, while lack of interest evidences their irrelevance. That which is not spoken of, it seems, is assumed to have little or no consequence. However, as Esther Shalev-Gerz knows, it is often silent moments, ones that not only shape private lives…
Ciel variable 86 - PERFORMANCE | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Virginie Doré Lemonde | Artists: Emanuel Licha
July 5, 2016 [originally published in French only in Fall 2010] — You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page.
Ciel variable 86 - PERFORMANCE | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Stephen Horne | Artists: Moyra Davey, Roy Arden
June 29, 2016 [originally published in Fall 2010] — True to its title, this exhibition consists of photographic images grouped thematically by way of their subject, “living things.” In this case, the sample extends from images of algae in a pond, to a dog’s foot, to a family portrait. What these photographs all have in common is that they are “of” some “thing,” they all depict a living thing (with the exception of one dead rabbit)…
Ciel variable 86 - PERFORMANCE | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Mylène Joly | Artists: Shirin Neshat, Shoja Azari
June 28, 2016 [originally published in French in Fall 2010] — You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page.
Ciel variable 86 - PERFORMANCE | Exhibition reviews
Authors: James D. Campbell | Artists: Bettina Hoffmann, Carlos & Jason Sanchez, Chih-Chien Wang, Eve K. Tremblay, Milutin Gubash
June 23, 2016 [originally published in Fall 2010] — This exhibition highlights narrative disruption and its consequences in five mature bodies of photographic and video work, and demonstrates how the uncanny seeps in and out of those ruptures in an auratic and seismic way, even as meaning and dénouement are delayed. Works by Bettina Hoffman, Carlos and Jason Sanchez, Milutin Gubash, Eve K. Tremblay, and Chih-Chien Wang…
Ciel variable 86 - PERFORMANCE | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Matthieu Brouillard | Artists: Donigan Cumming
June 21, 2016 [originally published in French in Fall 2010] — You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page.
Ciel variable 86 - PERFORMANCE | Exhibition reviews
Authors: John K. Grande | Artists: Laurent Guérin
June 16, 2016 [originally published in Fall 2010] — World Press Photo included his [Laurent Guérin] photographs of street children in India in a show held at the Maison de la Culture Frontenac in Montreal in 2004. These photographs – in which all the chaos and beauty of India, from street life to more contemplative imagery, are captured – became the book Hindi Pop.
Ciel variable 86 - PERFORMANCE | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Sylvain Campeau | Artists: William Eggleston
June 14, 2015 [originally published in French only Fall 2010] — You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page.
Ciel variable 86 - PERFORMANCE | Book Reviews
Authors: Claude Baillargeon | Artists: Benoit Aquin
June 7, 2016 [originally published in Fall 2010] — According to journalist Patrick Alleyn, Aquin’s co-traveller and collaborator of choice, this scourge constitutes “one of the most severe environmental disasters of our time.” In 2006, intending to raise public awareness, the two gained the sponsorship of the Canadian International Development Agency and made the first of three journeys to the affected areas…
Ciel variable 86 - PERFORMANCE | Interviews
Authors: John K. Grande | Artists: Edward Burtynsky
June 2, 2016 [originally published in Fall 2010] — Edward Burtynsky […] has captured iconic images of human intervention in the landscape in works of a scope and scale that evidence how the activities and the layerings of nature and culture change a place. His recent books include China, Quarries, and Oil…