2o minutes at Basilica Cattedrale Patriarcale di San Marco, May31, 2013, Infr’ Action Venezia Performance Festival
watergun, ink-wash painting, ink
I kneel on a piece of traditional Chinese Ink Wash Painting without clothing, holding a water gun in my right hand. The gun is filled with black ink. I lift the gun, point to my head and shoot. And then I lift the gun again, this time, I point to my heart and shoot. The action of shooting at my head and heart will be repeated until the ink on the water gun runs out.
performed by Paula Duffy, Vikou Qi’anne, and Mistress Sugah, and cyranova
photo by Eric Tschaeppeler
Two hours at Art Mur, Montreal, March 23, 2013
A ballerina, a monk, and a dominatrix with her slave
A combination with classical dance, ritual, and BDSM
A performance blurs boundaries between high art and low art, religion and fetish, private and public, striving to install a model for social transformation that possibly could create a new way to look at utopia.
Absent Husband is a performance that consists 12 pieces of 70’’ x 40” photographs exploring failure in marriage through reconfiguring personal memory in order to mend and translate emotions. In photographs, wife is on the left and husband is on the right. Absence is a form of presence. The wife wears the husband’s clothing to present his absence. The couple’s separation is revealed through dividing the husband and the wife in two photographs but in the same settings. In fact, the husband is the wife, and the wife is the husband. They are like a mirror not only reflects each other, but also is each other’s destiny. The white background functions as a healing light that soothes the trauma of loss; this empty background provides a purified void space where ordinary everyday marriage life flow like a dream.
These photographs are evidence of constructed reality that blurs boundaries between private and public, between subject and object, and between art and life. The body in this work is a deeply felt expression of subjective reality that I use to confront with the pain and loss. This work transcends personal experience and reality. It is an embodiment of a melancholic longing for an unrecoverable past and a memento mori constantly reminding the inexorable passage of time.
two hours at Ancienne Ecole Des Beaux-Arts, Montreal, March 23, 2012
photo by: David Romero, Video by: Pirouz Nemati, Edit by: Zohar Melinek
performers: Alida Esmail, Karoline Lebrun, Emily Schon, Kendall Savage, Eliane Abdellahi, Paula Duffy, Danielle Doiron, Emilia Gallo, Janaki Banting, Elisabeth Racine, Anna Mayberry, Zoe Roux, Emilie L-Choquette, Alexandra Cote, Allie Blumas, Maude Thibault Morin, Claire Evans, Lili Monette-Crepo, Alexandra Cote, Katrina B, and who those i unable to name.
Sixteen females wear red mouthpieces and white bath towels, standing in a row and facing the same direction. They repeat three still gestures: standing, kneeing, and lying on the floor. The performers hold each gesture for five minutes and then move to another gesture.
The gestures in the performance are inspired by gargoyle, a legendary stone-carved grotesque with a spout that normally is designed to convey water from a roof. Mouth serves as the opening for food intake and in the articulation of sound and speech. However, when performers wear the mouthpieces, or when women’s mouth is forced to open, the mouth loses its function. In fact, it silences and disables the women because they are unable to talk when their mouths are widely pulled open. This performance explores another side of the unseen and unspoken—the vulnerability, struggle, shame, and suffering that we are uneasy to share and expose while examining multifaceted struggles of a woman associated with identity, gender, and sexuality in order to reveal the struggle and conflict rooted in oppressed individuals and groups.
