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Upcoming on Sunday October 13th at 7:30pm

Claire Zakiewicz (live painting) and Peter Nagle (cello and voice).

Join them for this intimate gathering in Zakiewicz's studio, where a small audience will have the opportunity to watch the performance and meet the performers in a cozy setting. Refreshments will be provided.

Studio 39 (Basement)
60 Stanway Street
Hoxton, London N1 6RH


‘No matter how clear cut the edge between objects and events may seem, there is always a perspective somewhere that reveals one to be also the other.'- Peter Nagle, Phd Thesis final proof p.19, Here Comes Everybody: Strategies for a Transdisciplinary Creative Practice, 2024

Tickets available here


 

PAST PROJECTS

 

 

Live Mellifera is an ensemble of Claire Zakiewicz (live painting, texts and saxophone) and two of London's finest improvisational musicians: Emily Suzanne Shapiro (bass clarinet), Peter Nagle (cello and voice). For this performance we have a special guest from New York - Luisa Muhr (vocals and movement).

Join them for this intimate gathering in Zakiewicz's studio, where a small audience will have the opportunity to watch the performance and meet the performers in a cozy setting. Refreshments will be provided.

Studio 39 (Basement)
60 Stanway Street
Hoxton N1 6RH


‘No matter how clear cut the edge between objects and events may seem, there is always a perspective somewhere that reveals one to be also the other.'- Peter Nagle, Phd Thesis final proof p.19, Here Comes Everybody: Strategies for a Transdisciplinary Creative Practice, 2024

Tickets available here


 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Live Mellifera presents a collaborative performance by multimedia visual artist Claire Zakiewicz (London/New York) and some of London's most exciting improvisational musicians: Peter Nagle (cello and electronics), Emily Suzanne Shapiro (Bass Clarinet), Rachel Musson (saxophone) and, visiting from Washington DC, Abe Mamet, (French horn). Named one of New York's top ten artists 2018 by Art511 magazine, Zakiewicz's practice examines the physical and metaphorical relationships between sound and the creation of visual art in the context of performance, painting, drawing, music, photography and installation.

This one-time event will feature new approaches to the interplay between improvised sound, movement and painting. Built on the concepts of ephemerality and abstraction, the work explores immediacy, energy, time, motion, light, space.

An intimate audience of ten will be hosted in Zakiewicz's Hoxton studio, with refreshments and an opportunity to meet the artists afterwards.

TICKETS AVAILABLE HERE



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Boudicca's Daughters


Lookout viewable from:
Thurs Aug 31 - Sun Sept 3, 2023

Performance of Boudicca's Daughters:
Friday September 1, 7-8 pm

Video Projections:
Thursday 8pm - 10pm
Friday 8pm - 10pm
Saturday 8pm - 10pm

Recipe tasting: Saturday Noon - 4pm

Aldeburgh Beach Lookout, Suffolk, UK


 

Claire Zakiewicz in Sara Lane Studios, Hoxton
Photographer: Chris Freeman, 2023

 

You’re invited to join Claire Zakiewicz at her site-specific performance, Boudicca’s Daughters at Aldeburgh Beach Lookout as part of the Lookout Cookout series.
From August 30 - September 3, 2023 Zakiewicz will stage a compelling re-imagining of the story of Boudicca, her daughters and their fight for justice in the local Aldeburgh area two thousand years ago.

Zakiewicz will invite local women to sit for her, asking them to discuss some (or all) of the below themes, which have been selected for their strong resonance with the story of Boudicca:

Generation
Inheritance
Motherhood
Daughters
Death

This participatory approach to creating art is new for Zakiewicz, who until earlier this year, focused on large-scale performance paintings. Portraiture has become a new line of artistic enquiry and the Lookout residency will provide the opportunity to explore this in a fresh collaborative way.

Incorporating gestural mark making and the process of automatic drawing, Zakiewicz will also create a large-scale performance painting, which embodies the theme of the flow of time, drawing on the sketches Zakiewicz produced in her first residency at Aldeburgh in 2019. Similar to her performance Tinteretto’s Daughter, which used the Jungian process of Active Imagination, Zakiewicz will converse with Boudicca and her daughters whilst painting blindfolded to create a powerful and transformative installation and series of events. Her dialogues with local women whilst painting their (oil) portraits will be key to this new body of work and how she contextualises Boudicca and her daughters.

The project will also feature a cooking demonstration of Zakiewicz’s recipe from the Lookout Cookout cookbook, Strawberry Surprise Mess.

Just like good art, good food can be simple and comes from knowledge, practice, imagination and love. 39 artists (including Chris Orr RA and Maggi Hambling) who have participated in the Lookout Residency share their recipes and their art in the cookbook, LOOKOUT COOKOUT, which is available here.

 

During Claire Zakiewicz's first residency at Aldeburgh Beach Lookout , 2019

 

 

 

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ARTEATELIER is excited to present Tintoretto's Daughter, a site-specific performance painting and installation by Claire Zakiewicz, during the closing month of the 2022 Biennale of Contemporary Art. 

From October 27 through November 27, 2022 Zakiewicz will stage a compelling re-imagining of the story of Tinteretto’s daughter,  Marietta Robusti (also knows as Tintoretta).

In 2019, a chance encounter in Venice led to Zakiewicz to stay overnight at Tintoretto's house, where she conversed with the famous Renaissance artist in the liminal state between waking and sleep. Zakiewicz’s unexpected dream dialogue with Tintoretto inspired her investigation into his relationship with his daughter Marietta and her contribution to his work, her visibility as an artist and the secrets she kept.

The window of the gallery will provide the audience with an extraordinary lens onto an intimate performance, as the artist, blindfolded, channels Tintoretta, through an improvisational performance painting, accompanied by a musical composition produced in collaboration with young women artists. The soundtrack will filter through the public walkway, echoing 15th Century Venetian music, field recordings from streets of Venice, text, music and lyrics written by Zakiewicz and her assistants and collaborators and sounds from the work in progress inside the studio.

Incorporating dance, acting and automatic drawing, the artist will create a large-scale performance painting which embodies the flow of time, drawing on the work produced by Marietta in the sixteenth century: expressive portraits in which the dramatic lighting conjures her pioneering spirit. For Zakiewicz, Marietta represents the forgotten and intentionally obscured histories of women artists and their contributions. 

From 6:00pm to 11:00pm daily there will be a screening of Zakiewicz’s 2018 performance Perspectives In Motion, a collaboration with Venetian dancer Laura Colomban and Venezuelan performer Mariana Alviaraz. 

“When I was doing this performance there was an exhibition of Tintoretto’s work on the other side of Academia bridge. As I was drawing with my eyes closed I imagined conversing with Tintoretto and wondered about the longevity and impact of great art. The mark-making is a visual expression of movement-based active listening, imagination and attunement to the environment and objects. It’s an inquiry into how our movements continuously and subconsciously change, depending on what we hear, see, imagine, touch and interact with.”

The exhibition coincides with the closing month of Milk of Dreams: the 59th Biennale of Contemporary Art, 2022.

Collaborators:

@Rubydreww
@flosspopss
@lauracolomban
@marianalviarez

@markedwardsmithve
@chrisfreemangallery

 

Tintoretto's Daughter


San Marco 3209/A
Salizada Malipiero
30124 Venice, Italy

(1 minute from Palazzo Grassi)

Installation viewable through window at all times from:
October 27 - November 26, 2022

Performances:
October 27 - November 4
6pm - 7pm daily
November 5
5 - 6pm

November 25
5-6pm

Finissage
November 26
5:30 -6:30pm


 

 

Perspectives in Motion

Mariana Alviarez, Laura Colomban and Claire Zakiewicz

“When I was doing this performance there was an exhibition of Tintoretto’s work on the other side of Academia bridge. As I was drawing with my eyes closed I imagined conversing with Tintoretto and wondered about the longevity and impact of great art. The mark-making is a visual expression of movement-based active listening, imagination and attunement to the environment and objects. It’s an inquiry into how our movements continuously and subconsciously change, depending on what we hear, see, imagine, touch and interact with.”

 

 

Related to this project

 

 

Marginalia 18 by Peter Nagle presents a 44 minute improvisation created with artist Claire Zakiewicz in her studio. Claire's practice explores painting and drawing as an embodied live process, in collaboration with improvising musicians and dancers. For this session Peter used samples by Ruby Drew and Flora (Flosspopps) from a track made for Claire's performance painting/installation "Tintoretto's Daughter" in Venice based around Tintoretto and his daughter Marietta Robusti, and music by Tintoretto's contemporary Verdelot. Peter Nagle's full track can be listened to and purchased here: https://peternagle.bandcamp.com/album...

 

Performance documentation 'Embodied Patterns', 2022, Venice (photographer Mark Edward Smith)
click here to view series

 

 

 

 

 

A conversation with Tintoretto, 2018
Pastel and watercolour on watercolour paper
29.5 x 51" (75 x 130cm)

 

Zakiewicz’s fifth exhibition with Venice-based gallerist Anita Cerpelloni is inspired by the story of Marietta Robusti, the daughter of Tintoretto, who was nicknamed La Tintoretta (the little dyer girl). 

Since conventions during Robusti’s lifetime (1560 - 1590) dictated that women remained in the domestic sphere and not work as artists, Marietta and her female contemporaries relied on male family members for access to the art world. Despite these limitations, Marietta developed a reputation as an artist in her own right, challenging the subordinate place of women in the arts. Shortly after her death, writer Carlo Ridolfi described her as one of the most illustrious women of her time, having the same manner of skill as her father, while displaying "sentimental femininity, a womanly grace that is strained and resolute.” 

She developed her artistic skills by hiding her sex, dressing as a boy so that she could go everywhere with her father. Emperor Maximilian and King Philip II of Spain both expressed interest in hosting her as a court painter, but her father refused their invitations on her behalf because he couldn't bear to part with her. In 1578 he arranged for her to marry a Venetian jeweler and silversmith, Jacopo Augusta, to ensure she would always stay near him. While Robusti worked in her father's studio some sources relate that she worked on altarpieces as an assistant, dressed as a man. However, many of her artistic achievements were attributed to her father. Some believe that Marietta painted some of Tintoretto’s best works but the only painting that can be conclusively attributed to her is her Self Portrait (c. 1580; Uffizi Gallery, Florence), which depicts Marietta posed before a harpsichord, holding a musical text of a madrigal, "Madonna per voi ardo". After her early death, the decline in work produced by Tintoretto was ascribed to grief for his daughter, rather than the loss of a skillful assistant.

 

Double portrait, possibly Jacopo Strada (1507-1588) and a self portrait of Marietta Robusti dressed as a boy
Attributed to Marietta Tintoretto, c. 1567-1568 (1567 - 1568), Venice
Oil paint on canvas
99.5 x 121 cm

 

 

Related to this project:

 

 

Venice, May, 19, 2019
Control Variations in Improvised Drawing Practices: A White Paper, 2019
Lensculture

 

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A Draw to Perform project at Canning Gallery, London

Performances: Saturday 5 March 12:00 - 18:00
Exhibition: 6 - 20 March

Claire Zakiewicz, photo: Marco Berardi and Draw to Perform, 2022

 

Field of Action is an art project at the Canning Gallery, curated by Draw to Perform's founder and director Ram Samocha. The project will start on Saturday 5th March with a day of live drawing and painting performances by 14 local and international artists.

Booking required (donation only)
The audience will be able to drop in throughout the day, watch the various performances and participate in some of the action.

The remains of these performances will be installed and displayed in the gallery space for two weeks, allowing visitors the opportunity of looking at them not only in the context of live art products but also as independent works of art that were created live in the gallery space and not in the artist's studio.The day of performance and the following exhibition aims to open questions around the relevancy and the position of the artist's presence in our time, the creative process and the alternative ways of making art on-site. It also aims to explore the relevancy of the final product of art, its production and the options of sharing it today. It attempts to understand the impact of those objects as individual works of art suitable for display not only in the context of live art remnants but also as works which stand for themselves and hold appeal within of the contemporary evolving art scene.

As part of this project there will also be drawing performance workshops on Sat 12th and Sun 13th (10:00-12:00), and a panel discussion with participating artists on Sun 13th (15:00-17:00).

Participating artists:

Oliver Evelyn-Rahr - https://www.instagram.com/oliblivious/?hl=en
KV Duong - https://www.kvduong.com
Ram Samocha - https://www.instagram.com/ramsamocha/?hl=en
Claire Zakiewicz - http://www.clairezakiewicz.com
M. Lohrum - https://www.mlohrum.com
The Phantomat - https://www.thephantomat.com
Hanna ten Doornkaat - https://www.tendoornkaat.co.uk
Kirsten Lavers - http://www.kirstenlavers.net
Laura Greenway - https://www.lauragreenwayart.com
Laure Van Minden - https://www.laurevanminden.co.uk
Fu LE - https://www.cie-tetrapode.com/Fu_LE.U.htm
Carrie Mason - http://www.carrie-mason.com
Gerald Curtis - https://www.instagram.com/gerald.curtis87/?hl=en

 

Visiting hours:

Saturday 5 March
Day of live performances - 12:00-18:00
Sunday 6 March 12:00-18:00 

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Thursday 10 March 12:00-18:00 
Friday 11 March 18:00-21:00 

Saturday 12 March
Workshop 1 - 12:00-18:00, 10:00-12:00

Sunday 13 March
Workshop 2 - 12:00-18:00, 10:00-12:00
Panel discussion with participating artists - 15:00-17:00

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Thursday 17 March 12:00-18:00 
Friday 18 March 18:00-21:00 
Saturday 19 March 12:00-18:00 
Sunday 20 March 12:00-18:00

Canning Gallery, 11 Brunel St, London, E16 1EB

 

 

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There's no way I can know it, the object of the body, exhibition opening,
Photo:
Mirko Bofelli


Exhibition at HOXTON 253 art project space

253 Hoxton Street, London, N1

4-26 February 2022 / Wed - Fri 1-7pm, Sat & Sun 11-5pm

 

There's no way I can know it, the object, or the body


Sophie Seita & Claire Zakiewicz

 

Opening night & performance
Thursday, 3 February

Performance 6-7pm (booking required, free of charge)
Opening reception 7-9pm (no booking required)

 

 

The performance featured Claire Zakiewicz painting on canvas accompanied by composer and musician Kuljit Bhamra, playing the world’s first electronic tabla of his own invention. The music and painting was improvised, with the artists collaborating in real time.
The artwork produced during the performance has become part of the exhibition and on view throughout the run of the show.

 

Artists in conversation & performance

Saturday, 26 February, 5-6.30pm
(booking required, free of charge)



Sophie Seita, photo by Christa Holka

 

Sophie Seita presented a lecture performance, Reading the Rock, in response to her sound installation My Contact Aureoles (2020/2022), which was included in the show.

Following the performance Sophie Seita and Claire Zakiewicz were in conversation with HOXTON 253 curator Zsuzsa Benke sharing insights into their practices and the works in the exhibition.


 

 


Family art workshop for Hackney residents

Sunday, 20 February, 3-4pm

(booking required, free of charge)



Claire Zakiewicz 2019, photo by Mark Edward Smith

In this workshop for families, participants explored relationships between sound, words and drawing.

Topics included:

  • Drawing in response to words and sounds
  • Reading shapes on a page to make music
  • Where materials come from, how to use them and what they do (graphite, pigments, paper, found objects, etc.)

This was the first workshop connected to the exhibition currently on display at HOXTON 253, titled There’s no way I can know it, the object, or the body. It was led by the artist Claire Zakiewicz.
The workshop emphasised a spirit of playfulness and exploration. Participants was invited to experiment with spontaneous and intuitive ideas, embrace mistakes and imperfection, and focus on habits and repetition, voice, listening and curiosity.

No background knowledge or artistic experience is necessary and all are welcome.

Who is this workshop for?
This workshop is for children aged 7+ and adults. Under 18's must be accompanied by an adult. Priority access is given to Hackney residents.
The gallery has step-free access and is wheelchair accessible. Please don’t hesitate to contact us about any access requirements.




Queer writing and performance workshop for Hackney residents

Thursday, 24 February, 7-8pm

(booking required, free of charge)



Workshop Rupert Vilnius, 2021, photo by Violetta Pilecka

In this workshop, we took inspiration from queer, trans, and non-binary thinkers, writers, and artists, in guiding us towards a number of creative experiments, using:

  • writing
  • embodiment/movement (including: sitting, standing, walking, and simple performative gestures)
  • reading and discussion
  • sonic meditation

This was the second workshop in the context of the exhibition There’s no way I can know it, the object, or the body which was led by the artist and writer Sophie Seita.

Who is this workshop for?
Priority access given to Hackney-based queer residents aged 18-25.

 

Full Exhibition Description

‘There’s no way I can know it, the object, or the body, beyond what’s graspable. I read and write to seek comprehension, to solicit unravelling. Seize what seems pliable to that action, that attention’' - Sophie Seita, after the cooling, the igneous, which sets, has the potential to ignite, my contact aureoles (2020-2021)

This two-person show by Hackney-based artists Sophie Seita and Claire Zakiewicz explores the expressive possibilities of writing, drawing, and of writing-bodies, where expression or knowledge is always tied to a question of materiality. The works dissect forms of address, the possibilities for moving and being moved, through writing, painting, video installations, and performance. How can a work hold a moment, make it tangible, knowable?

Embedded in both ephemerality and abstraction, the exhibition also addresses ideas around immediacy and energy, time and motion, light and space, what’s observable and what’s imagined, what can be grasped and what remains projection.

Seita's video, text, and sound piece included in the exhibition touch (on) intimacy, commitment, and opacity, grappling with the difficulty of capturing feelings in writing. How do we give up the ‘safety of Abstraction’ and commit to the sayable, ‘without fear of simplification?’ ‘How can the simple be resonant with complexity?’ The included pieces also push these experiences of translation, of making-sense, into a realm of both play and meditation. Her work usually begins with reading, asking how the body can become a publishing platform, or how a performance can embody text, how we can be choreographed by language, and how we read differently with material. More broadly, she is interested in difficulty, repetition, rewriting, queer desire and kinship, how we can make new relational structures of feeling.

‘Sometimes we use language to interrogate certain ways of looking at objects and beings or ways of being in our bodies or for our bodies to be with others’
- Sophie Seita, Cloudiness (2021)

Zakiewicz’s paintings are created through live performances, in public and private spaces, and often in collaboration with artists of other disciplines.
Her practice explores the physical and metaphorical relationships between the performance of drawing and sound. She asks, 'how does sound perform in drawing? What is it to translate sound into image? Can we escape the confines of our prescribed patterns - whether our brain synapses or our muscle memory?' Her works examine conceptions of interconnectedness, isolation and the body as a carrier of data. Her cross-disciplinary processes explore methods of improvisation, the tension between failure and resolution, the balance between control and surrender and the cognitive processes that underlie our emotional relationship with art.

 

 

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Performance is Alive

Satellite Art Show, Miami 

1655 Meridian Avenue. Miami Beach,FL 33139


VIDEO SCREENING

7:30pm daily: Claire Zakiewicz (NYC, USA/ London, UK), Itinerant

November 30 - December 4, 2021

 

 

Performance conceived and directed: Claire Zakiewicz
Camera and editing: Claire Zakiewicz
Music: Lenna Pierce
Actor: Siw Laurent

To be itinerant is to travel on foot, connected to the ground while in motion. This work by performance painter Claire Zakiewicz includes a series of processes that explores the balance of control and surrender through experiments in remote painting and musical scoring. At the Itinerant Performance Festival in New York, 2018, she relinquished direct control of her drawing materials to a proxy, blindfolded performer Siw Laurent, and instructed Siw to use her training in shamanic techniques and deep body listening to respond to Zakiewicz’s improvised soundscape with improvised drawing. For the next step, through remote collaboration in 2020, Zakiewicz and Lenna Pierce created a new sound design for the edited video documentation of the original live performance to produce this new video work.

 

Satellite Art Show and Performance Is Alive continue their 5-year collaboration by exclusively spotlighting contemporary performance art and time-based media at this year’s Miami Art Week. Unlike any other fair, Satellite serves as a home to performers and offers guests a rare opportunity to engage directly with the artists. Performance artists return to live actions, some choosing to engage virtually and others performing at an interactive distance. As the week progresses, the fair installation evolves not only through the performances presented, but the performance artifacts that remain.

Alongside a robust daytime program, SATELLITE will also host invigorating and curated experiences with musical performances, drag shows and revitalizing classic underground performative parties. SATELLITE will be located just three blocks from Art Basel at the corner of Meridian and Lincoln Road. Returning to the curatorial team is Quinn Dukes of Performance is Alive and Satellite founder, Brian Andrew Whiteley.

Satellite Art Show radically re-envisions what an art fair should be. Expect over 30 live performance artists presenting fiercely challenging new works, drag shows, an interactive "Billy Joel / Piano Man" bar, a pop-up performative hippy bus and after-hours musical activations. Alongside a robust daytime program, SATELLITE will be hosting invigorating and curated experiences with musical performances, drag shows and revitalizing classic underground performative parties.

TICKETS: Day Pass $20 | Week Pass $40

Visitors are encouraged to purchase a week pass to experience the ever changing activations within the fair
Email info info@clairezakiewicz.com to request a free pass (subject to availability)

 

 

 

 

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Image: Claire Zakiewicz and Gerald Curtis, Writing the Future. Photograph by Cristina Schek

 

Writing the Future Screening


Watermans Art Centre

40 High Street, Brentford
London TW8 0DS

November 10, 2021

 

*TICKETS AVAILABLE HERE*

Artists Claire Zakiewicz and Gerald Curtis created ‘Writing the Future’ together in 2021.

Originally conceived as a new performance painting, ‘Writing the Future’ was commissioned by Creative People and Places Hounslow for ‘Future Visions’, an exhibition of works that signal a positive future for Hounslow High Street and its communities.

Writing the Future is a 45-minute performance that explores possibilities of interpretation, cooperation and collaborative practice methods to create an open outcome. The band Dirtagnan created the soundtrack for the performance.

The filmed documentation of the performance by videographer Cristina Schek will be screened in Watermans Studio 1, followed by a short talk and Q&A led by the artists.

The evening will finish with drinks and viewing of the Future Visions exhibition in the Riverside Gallery.


 

 

Claire Zakiewicz is an interdisciplinary artist living in London and NYC. She has a background in improvised and experimental music, which she incorporates into her performance drawing and painting practice. 

She was named in the New York’s top ten artists list in Art511 magazine in 2019. Zakiewicz has written a number of articles and essays on performing drawing. She contributed a chapter for The Aesthetics of Imperfection: Spontaneity, Flaws and the Unfinished (Bloomsbury), 2020. Her works have been shown at galleries, performance venues and institutions including Tate Tanks and Tate Britain, for the exhibitions Tweet Me Up (2011) and Label (2012), at Landmark, Bergen for the performance Engastromyths Quakers and Shamans (commissioned by Ny Musikk, 2009) and most recently she produced a collaborative performance painting titled Writing the Future for Future Visions, Hounslow (2021), funded by the Arts Council, England. Past residencies have included Bill Young’s Dance Studio (New York), USF Bergen, (Norway), The Mothership (New York), Point B Worklodge (New York) and Cill Rialaig (Ireland). Zakiewicz studied at Chelsea College of Art, Anglia Ruskin University and London Metropolitan University.

website: www.clairezakiewicz.com
instagram: @clairezakiewicz

 

Gerald Curtis has exhibited and performed nationally and internationally including Revolve Festival, Sweden and Lublin Performance Festival, Poland. His first solo show, Regeneration on Hounslow Heath (2019), was selected by Hounslow Creative People and Places to become part of their touring library programme. The exhibition incorporated a collection of photography, painting, video and performances. Most recently, he has collaborated with artist Claire Zakiewicz and Habib William Kherbek of the band Dirtagnan to produce a video performance, Writing the Future (2021) (forthcoming). Gerald Curtis is a recipient of the Time Space Money bursary from A-N and the Farnham Maltings No Strings Attached fund. Gerald graduated from the UCA, Canterbury with a BA (hons) Fine Art, 2009 and Royal College of Art, MA Painting (Performance Pathway), 2017.

website: www.geraldcurtisstudio.com
instagram: @gerald.curtis87


 

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Assembly #3: October 13, 2021

 

 

Some Loose Assemblies IV


Hundred Years Gallery

13 Pearson Street
London E2 8JD

Assembly #4: Ocotber 13, 2021

 

*TICKETS AVAILABLE HERE*

The live-art event series Some Loose Assemblies continues at Hundred Years Gallery on October 13 with performances featuring Birgitta Hosea, Carali McCall, and Claire Zakiewicz.

Each artist will present new works that explore the drawn line and drawing’s relation to the human body, time and space. The performances will draw on practices that prioritise the act of creation over the final results of those actions. Performance drawing has historically encompassed visual art, theatre, dance and music and all the artists incorporate interdisciplinary collaborations and crossovers in their practices. The three individual works will highlight the highly flexible emerging field of performance drawing, which is not confined to any one definition. 

There will be music by celebrated musicians in the international improvised music scene; Emily Suzanne Shapiro, Isadora Edwards, Caroline Kraabel and Keisuke Matsui.

Hosea and McCall recently co-authored Performance Drawing: New Practices since 1945 (Bloomsbury, 2020) and Zakiewicz contributed to The Aesthetics of Imperfection in Music and the Arts: Spontaneity, Flaws and the Unfinished (Bloomsbury, 2020).

The authors will be available to sign books at the event and a few copies will be available to buy on request.

We ask audience members to please wear masks downstairs. The full programme will be presented twice, at 7:00pm and 8:30pm. There will be maximum capacity of 10 people for each time slot. 

Audiences are invited to sign up for one of these two slots.

 

*TICKETS AVAILABLE HERE*

 

ARTISTS

 

 

Birgitta Hosea is a time-based media artist working with experimental drawing, performance and expanded animation to create durational images, live events, experiential installations and short films that expand the concept of the moving image out of the screen and into the present moment.

Recent exhibitions include National Gallery X; Venice & Karachi Biennales; Oaxaca & Chengdu Museums of Contemporary Art; InspiralLondon and Hanmi Gallery, Seoul. Included in the Tate Britain and Centre d’Arte Contemporain archives, she has received an Adobe Impact Award, a MAMA Award for Holographic Arts and an honorary fellowship of the Royal Society of the Arts. Currently Professor of Moving Image at the University for the Creative Arts, Farnham, she was previously Head of Animation at the Royal College of Art and prior to that at Central Saint Martins, where she completed a practice-based PhD in animation as a form of performance. She has written a number of publications on performance drawing and experimental animation, is co-author (with Foá, Grisewood and McCall) of Performance Drawing: New Practices Since 1945 (Bloomsbury, 2020) and co-curator of Performance Drawing 2021 (Centre for Recent Drawing, London, 2021).

Website: www.birgittahosea.co.uk

Instagram: @birgittahosea

 

 

Carali McCall is a London based artist whose practice is engaged in drawing and performance; awarded her MFA at Slade School of Art, UCL and PhD at Central Saint Martins UAL, McCall is co-author of the Bloomsbury publication ‘Performance Drawing: New Practices since 1945’ (2020) and author of the upcoming publication ‘The Body in Landscape’ (2022); she is currently participating in the inaugural Turps Banana MASS Correspondence course 20/21, and undergoing a residency at The Centre for Recent Drawing (London UK) with fellow co-authors of Performance Drawing.

McCall’s work is in private and public collections and recently had a solo exhibition with Gryder Gallery (New Orleans USA), where she performed a live endurance-based performance drawing. McCall has been awarded Arts Council England funding for the artwork, Run Vertical (Running up the side of a Building) and is involved in rigorous academic research, affiliated with research groups such as Land2, Sensingsite and The Landscape Research Group.

Website: www.caralimccall.com

Instagram: @caralimccall

 

 

Photo: Mark Edward Smith

Claire Zakiewicz is an interdisciplinary artist living in London and NYC. She has a background in improvised and experimental music, which she incorporates into her performance drawing and painting practice. 

She was named in the New York’s top ten artists list in Art511 magazine in 2019. Zakiewicz has written a number of articles and essays on performing drawing. She contributed a chapter for The Aesthetics of Imperfection: Spontaneity, Flaws and the Unfinished (Bloomsbury), 2020. Her works have been shown at galleries, performance venues and institutions including Tate Tanks and Tate Britain, for the exhibitions Tweet Me Up (2011) and Label (2012), at Landmark, Bergen for the performance Engastromyths Quakers and Shamans (commissioned by Ny Musikk, 2009) and most recently she produced a collaborative performance painting titled Writing the Future for Future Visions, Hounslow (2021), funded by the Arts Council, England. Past residencies have included Bill Young’s Dance Studio (New York), USF Bergen, (Norway), The Mothership (New York), Point B Worklodge (New York) and Cill Rialaig (Ireland). Zakiewicz studied at Chelsea College of Art, Anglia Ruskin University and London Metropolitan University.

Website: www.clairezakiewicz.com

Instagram: @clairezakiewicz

 

*TICKETS AVAILABLE HERE*

 

 

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Assembly #3: September 8, 2021

 

 

Hundred Years Gallery is delighted to present a collaboration between the live, interdisciplinary art organisations, Mellifera and Some Loose Assemblies.

Curators Emily Suzanne Shapiro and Claire Zakiewicz will convene prominent figures in the British art and new music worlds to perform collaborative new works focusing on communication between modes of perception through improvisation and experimentation.

This event will feature new works by Aurelie Freoua, Gerald Curtis and Claire Zakiewicz who will be performing live drawing and painting in collaboration with dancer Jess Lea and legendary experimental musicians Steve Beresford, Emily Suzanne Shapiro, Douglas Benford, Megan Steinberg and Peter Nagle.

The cycle of three 20 minute performances will be presented twice for two different audiences, at 7:00pm and 8:30pm. The venue ask audiences to respect social distancing and mask wearing. There will be a capacity of 10 tickets per time slot.

Audiences are invited to sign up for one of these two slots.

 

ARTISTS

 

Claire Zakiewicz is an interdisciplinary artist living in London and NYC. Her practice explores the (meta)physical relationships between sound and drawing and the processes that underlie our emotional relationship with art. She has a background in improvised and experimental music, which she incorporates into her contemporary art practice. Often working collaboratively, she explores performance, dance and acting methods as part of her drawing and painting process.

She was named in the New York’s top ten artists list in Art511 magazine in 2019. Zakiewicz has written a number of articles and essays on performing drawing. She contributed a chapter for The Aesthetics of Imperfection: Spontaneity, Flaws and the Unfinished (Bloomsbury), 2020.

Her works have been shown at galleries, performance venues and institutions including Tate Tanks and Tate Britain, for the exhibitions Tweet Me Up (2011) and Label (2012), at Landmark, Bergen for the performance Engastromyths Quakers and Shamans (commissioned by Ny Musikk, 2009) and most recently she produced a collaborative performance painting titled Writing the Future for Future Visions, Hounslow (2021), funded by the Arts Council, England. Past residencies have included Bill Young’s Dance Studio (New York), USF Bergen, (Norway), The Mothership (New York), Point B Worklodge (New York) and Cill Rialaig (Ireland). Zakiewicz studied at Chelsea College of Art, Anglia Ruskin University and London Metropolitan University.

website: www.clairezakiewicz.com
instagram: @clairezakiewicz


 

Photo: Fabio Lugaro

Steve Beresford has been a central figure in the British and international spontaneous music scenes for over forty years, freely improvising on the piano, electronics and other things with people like Derek Bailey, Evan Parker, Han Bennink, John Zorn and Alterations (with David Toop, Terry Day and Peter Cusack).

He has written songs, written for large and small ensembles, and scored short films, feature films, TV shows and commercials. He was part of the editorial teams of Musics and Collusion magazines, writes about music in various contexts and was a senior lecturer in music at the University of Westminster. With Blanca Regina, he is part of Unpredictable Series, which produces events and sound and video recordings of experimental music and art.

Steve has worked with Christian Marclay on numerous Marclay mixed media pieces. He has also worked with The Slits, Najma Akhtar, Stewart Lee, Ivor Cutler, Prince Far-I, Alan Hacker, Tania Chen, Ray Davies, Mandhira de Saram, The Flying Lizards, Zeena Parkins, Helen Petts, Satoko Fukuda, The Portsmouth Sinfonia, Hyelim Kim, Ilan Volkov, Rachel Musson, Vic Reeves, Sarah Gail Brand, Lore Lixenberg and many others.

Beresford has an extensive discography as performer, arranger, free-improviser, composer and producer, and was awarded a Paul Hamlyn award for composers in 2012.

In 2021, Bloomsbury published a book by Andy Hamilton: ‘Pianos, Toys, Music and Noise: Conversations with Steve Beresford’.

website: www.unpredictable.info

 

 

Aurelie Freoua is a French artist and performer living and working in London. She originally studied Mathematics and Economics in Paris but went on to study art and completed an MA in Fine Art at Camberwell College of Arts, London 2016. She also participated in the Slade Summer School.

Since then, her paintings have been exhibited in several group shows in London, New York, Miami, Paris and the South of France. Aurelie had several solo shows in London, including ‘Symphony of Colours’ in Mayfair (2017). Her artworks have featured in poetry collections including ‘Echoing’ published by Ampersand. She created a work specially for the Bonhams’ auction in support of the Grenfell Tower victims (2018). She has taken part in workshops organised by the Digital Maker Collective at Tate Exchange, Tate Modern. 

Over the past four years, Aurelie collaborated more and more with the Vortex Jazz Club and improvising musicians, creating music and art simultaneously with the musicians and artists using similar sonic and visual approach. She has improvised live painting in response to music during The London Jazz Festival in 2017 and 2019; she curates and performs in multidisciplinary, experimental and immersive live performances called ‘Resonances’, merging visual art, musical performances, poetry and dance. Aurelie has designed covers for albums by Raphael Clarkson, Paulo Duarte and Henrik Jensen, released on Babel Label in 2019 and 2020. 

She has recently worked on set designs and costumes for several theatre plays at Theatro Technis alongside her acting performances. She created a mural painting ‘Misterioso’ (7m20 x 5m50) in Shoreditch, which was the backdrop for ‘The Dancing Wall’ performance. Aurelie is currently developing projects with musicians, poets and dancers for upcoming events.

Through her work, Aurelie aims to explore and transcend such notions as the invisible, movement, ephemerality and the intangibility of emotion through vivid colours and harmonious compositions of form, line and light. Throughout her practice she values authentic representation and intensity in a process of ‘making visible’.

website: www./aureliefreoua.com
instagram: @aurelie_art


 

Emily Suzanne Shapiro is a Canadian bass clarinetist and clarinetist dedicated to exploring and creating new music. Emily has a special love for the sound and scope of bass instruments and constantly pushes the limits of what she can do on bass clarinet.

Alongside performing contemporary music on bass clarinet, Emily is involved in many other musical endeavours. Composing and improvising are central to her career, and she has been an active performer of Balinese gamelan for 10 years and has also explored jazz, klezmer, rock and electroacoustics. She is always seeking out new artistic experiences to enrich and motivate her work.

She is a proud member of Les Feuillus, the London Improviser’s Orchestra, the Corner Quartet and Lila Cita and has performed all over London, including iklectik, Cafe Oto, Hundred Years Gallery, LSO St Luke’s, the Vaults festival, the Barbican and many more. She founded and manages the Mellifera arts platform, a monthly interdisciplinary arts performance event, and the Lonely Impulse Collective, a daily solo improvisation project.

Outside of music, Emily loves gardening, running, whisky and making friends with animals.

website: www.emilysuzanneshapiro.com
instagram: @lonely_impulse_collective

 

Douglas Benford has been involved in various audio genres since the late 1980s, performing at many institutions and venues in the UK (Bristol’s Arnolfini, London’s Science Museum, Cafe Oto, Tate Modern, The Roundhouse, ICA and Glasgow’s CCA), as a composer and sound artist. He has performed at festivals worldwide and has installation work in numerous UK art spaces.

website: https://dbenford.bandcamp.com/
instagram: @the_d_benford


 

Photo: Sam Walton

 

Megan Steinberg is an experimental composer and abstract turntablist based in London. She works with found sound, chance procedures, graphic scores, quietness and microtonality.

Originally a jazz guitarist, Megan studied Composition at Brunel University where she fell into experimental music. After discovering free improv using objects, violin and cello, in 2016 she began performing free improv and experimental music for single-deck, analogue turntable.

Megan is studying a PhD at Royal Northern College of Music, where she has been appointed the Lucy Hale Doctoral Composer in Association with Drake Music. Her project is focused on the creation of works for Disabled musicians, new instruments and AI.

She has composed for incredible performers including Heather Roche, Juice Vocal Ensemble, Distractfold, Apartment House and Lore Lixenberg. In 2016, she was awarded the FI Williams Prize for Composition for her piece The Dying Sakura Tree. Her music has been performed at Kings Place and IKLECTIK in London, Grachtenfestival in Amsterdam, and Arts by the Sea Festival in Bournemouth, as well as on BBC Radio 3, Resonance FM and Threads Radio.

Megan is a dedicated advocate for accessibility and representation in new music.

website: www.megansteinberg.com
instagram: @megan_steinberg


 

Peter Nagle is a composer, cellist and sound artist working with drones, loops, electronica and field recordings. As well as extensive solo work he has collaborated with a wide variety of musicians, artists and choreographers including Douglas Benford, Laura Cioffi, Dave Clarkson, Angharad Davies, Peter Falcolner, Irene Fiordilino, Steve Gisby,  Rahel Kraft, Anthony Osborne, Misha Penton, Alwynne Pritchard, Carla Rees, Richard Sanderson, Emily Suzanne Shapiro, Tansy Spinks and Rahel Vanmoos. 


Recent work includes The Convalescent, (performance/installation at APT Gallery Deptford, 2018),  Congregation (ensemble performance/installation, premiered October 2019), An Equal and Opposite Reaction, (album, Linear Obsessional, 2019), the Nexus remote collaboration project (five EPs, 2021) and On Mute, a short horror film about video conferencing (2021). Invisible Cities will be released on Linear Obsessional in December.

Peter is a PhD candidate at Trinity Laban, researching drone as an agent of sonic identity and transformation.

website: www.peternagle.co.uk
instagram: @petemaskreplica


 

Gerald Curtis has exhibited and performed nationally and internationally including Revolve Festival, Sweden and Lublin Performance Festival, Poland. His first solo show, Regeneration on Hounslow Heath (2019), was selected by Hounslow Creative People and Places to become part of their touring library programme. The exhibition incorporated a collection of photography, painting, video and performances. Most recently, he has collaborated with artist Claire Zakiewicz and Habib William Kherbek of the band Dirtagnan to produce a video performance, Writing the Future (2021) (forthcoming). Gerald Curtis is a recipient of the Time Space Money bursary from A-N and the Farnham Maltings No Strings Attached fund. Gerald graduated from the UCA, Canterbury with a BA (hons) Fine Art, 2009 and Royal College of Art, MA Painting (Performance Pathway), 2017.

website: www.geraldcurtisstudio.com
instagram: @gerald.curtis87


 

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Assembly #2: 14th July, 2021

 

Hundred Years Gallery is hosting a series of Performance Art and Digital/Video Art screenings titled Some Loose Assemblies. For the second event an assembly of visual artists, dancers and musicians will perform three new live-art works by Gerald Curtis, Gwendolyn Kassenaar and Claire Zakiewicz.

This event hopes to develop our collective understanding of the term Performance Drawing and address new directions of this applied interdisciplinary process. The artists will explore the relationship between bodily gesture and visual traces. While embedded in both ephemerality and abstraction, the theme encompasses immediacy, energy, time, motion, light, space. The works will be performed alongside and in conversation with Mary Lemley's archival project My Life in Hackney, which will be exhibited throughout the gallery during the whole of July.

Visual artist Gwendolyn Kassenaar will be creating live-art performed with contemporary dancer Petra Haller and musical trio Loz Speyer, Andrew Lisle and Thodoris Ziarkas. Their performance will be inspired by the poem ‘Steps’ by Herman Hesse (‘Stufen’ in German). Merging visual art and dance they will embody its main message: to always be ready for change and embrace life! While central to Gwendolyn’s work, this is highly relevant to our current times as everyone in society faces profound uncertainties due to the Covid-19 pandemic.

Gerald Curtis will be presenting a short performance titled Tracing the Fragmented. This piece continues his exploration into using movement to create a series of drawn traces to a fragmented choreography. Maintaining a tension between improvisation and intention, Gerald is pursuing an intuitive language of mark making focusing on the present that is unique to the situation. Identifying as an artist with Dyspraxia, the performance is an attempt to create a form of expression of making with the disability. By pushing the body, the artist hopes to reveal spaces between the dyspraxic and non-dyspraxic.

Claire Zakiewicz will perform a live painting alongside musical trio Keisuke Matsui, Alan Wilkinson and Douglas Benford. For this performance the painter and musicians will explore the aesthetics of imperfection in performance drawing - particularly the tension between failure and resolution and the balance between control and surrender within a cross-disciplinary collaboration.

Following government guidelines, the venue asks audiences to follow social distancing and mask wearing. There will be reduced capacity with 10 people per time slot. Each 20 min. performance will be presented twice for two different audiences, at 7pm and 8:30pm.

Audiences are invited to sign up for one of these two slots.

 

ARTISTS

 

Claire Zakiewicz is an interdisciplinary artist working in both London and NYC. She is interested in the (meta)physical relationships between sound, drawing, movement, how we read drawings and the processes that underlie our emotional relationship with art. Mostly working with performance painting, Zakiewicz often works collaboratively and uses dance and acting methods as part of her drawing and painting practice. She has a background in improvised music and drawing as well as composition and inter-disciplinary scores. She contributed a chapter describing her drawing practice for the volume Aesthetics of Imperfection: Spontaneity, Flaws and the Unfinished (Bloomsbury), 2020.
Past residencies have included Bill Young’s Dance Studio (New York), USF Bergen, (Norway), Cill Rialaig, Ireland and PointB Worklodge, (New York). Her works have been presented at galleries, performance venues and institutions including Tate Tanks and Tate Britain, for the exhibitions Tweet Me Up (2011) and Label (2012), at Landmark, Bergen for the performance piece Engastromyths Quakers and Shamans (commissioned by Ny Musikk, 2009) and most recently she produced a collaborative performance painting for Future Visions, Hounslow (2021), funded by the Arts Council, England
Zakiewicz studied at Chelsea College of Art, Anglia Ruskin University and Sir John Cass School of Art where she completed a research-based MA in the physical and metaphorical relationships between sound and drawing, which had both practical and theoretical components.

website: www.clairezakiewicz.com
insta: @clairezakiewicz


 

Gwendolyn Kassenaar is a Dutch visual artist based in London. A graduate from Chelsea College of Art, she carried out further studies at the Royal Drawing School. She engages in both painting and drawing, which lies at the heart of her practice.
Her art is based on rhythm, music and dance, which also form an integral part of her creative process. She creates live-art at live music and dance performances, in her studio and through close collaborations. Her work combines figurative and abstract and is characterised by expressive gestural mark-making, bold lines and a vivid use of colour. She is interested in distilling that indefinable energy of the ephemeral moment. In her practice she embraces the aleatory aspect of experimentation and improvisation.
Recurring themes in her work are: self-discovery, empowerment, personal liberation and spiritual awakening, conveying her energetic zest for life.
Being an active participant in the improvised and experimental music scene in London, she is resident artist at Freedom (Vortex Jazz Club), Melifera (Hundred Years Gallery), Skronk and part of the recent Spherical Improv series. She currently collaborates with percussionist Beibei Wang, fusing their art forms into a simultaneous performance.
In dance, her background in ballroom, Latin dance and FiveRhythms further informs her work, as does her ongoing collaboration with contemporary and tap dancer, Petra Haller.
Her artwork features on album covers (Apocalypse Jazz Unit, Loz Speyer); has been presented in group shows in London (Nexus Art, Kindred Upper Gallery), and forms part of a corporate collection in Germany. Her live mural in Shoreditch was her first public art commission. Most recently, her London artist residency included public live-art performances alongside a solo exhibit of her works.

website: www.gwendolynkassenaar.com
insta: @gwendolynkassenaar


 


Gerald Curtis has exhibited and performed nationally and internationally including Revolve Festival, Sweden and Lublin Performance Festival, Poland. His first solo show, Regeneration on Hounslow Heath (2019), was selected by Hounslow Creative People and Places to become part of their touring library programme. The exhibition incorporated a collection of photography, painting, video and performances. Most recently, he has collaborated with artist Claire Zakiewicz and Habib William Kherbek of the band Dirtagnan to produce a video performance, Writing the Future (2021) (forthcoming). Gerald Curtis is a recipient of the Time Space Money bursary from A-N and the Farnham Maltings No Strings Attached fund. Gerald graduated from the UCA, Canterbury with a BA (hons) Fine Art, 2009 and Royal College of Art, MA Painting (Performance Pathway), 2017.

website: www.geraldcurtisstudio.com
insta: @gerald.curtis87


Petra Haller is an independent dance artist and tap dancer based in London. She started her career as a freelance dancer working on BBC1, The One Show: SKY1, Luie Spence's Show Business; Ellen Kent Production, Aida, as well as various music videos and live events. After several years of solely working for other people she started creating, producing and performing her own work as well. Her first outings as a creator, dancer, producer include: "Charlie: My Message to Humanity", Lake Studios, Berlin and the Solo Theatre Showcase "Solo Roulette" at the Blue Elephant Theatre in November 2018 Performing "Deliver Me" a theatre and dance piece which combines spoken word and contemporary dance. She is currently the resident dancer ad Resonances Performances, an interdisciplinary collaboration of improvised music, poetry, digital art and live painting led by Aurelie Freoua and supported by the Vortex Jazz Club. Petra has been the first tap dancer named in Jazzwise Magazine's rising jazz artists section in: Who to look out for in 2020. She has mainly studied tap under Jason Samuels Smith and Derick Grant, who not only taught her the dance style but also inspired her to study the roots fo this African-American art form in jazz music and African American history. She was introduced to free improvisation by Cleveland Watkiss at the Freedom of Art Loft Jam and immediately found herself at home. Petra is committed to honor the lineage and history of tap dance while finding her place in improvised music and jazz, constantly hungry to learn and collaborate with other art forms and instrumentalists. Recent performances include 1/Resilience/Memories: Vortex Jazz Club 2020 Jazz Connective; Vortex Jazz Club 2020 Tap Dance and Piano Duo with Richard Adam Lewis: Vortex Jazz Club 2020 Resonances 3 Reves: Vortex Jazz Club, London Jazz Festival 2019 Exctasies; Artwalk Wakefield 2019

website: www.petrahaller.net/home
insta: @petrahallerdancer


 

 

Loz Speyer is a trumpeter, composer, improviser and teacher - who for some years now has been coordinating groups ranging from the 11-piece composers’ collective Rare Mix to freely improvising trios. His own bands, Cuban-Jazz six-piece Time Zone, and Free Jazz quintet Inner Space, have toured to Jazz festivals and clubs all around the UK, and released several critically acclaimed albums of original music. His recent lockdown project Spherical Improv brought together musicians and artists to improvise together online, producing a series of videos that seek to express the interaction.

website: www.lozspeyer.com
insta: @lozspeyer


 

Andrew Lisle is a drummer working in the field of jazz and improvised music. He strives to create music within the avant-garde, pushing the limits of what is possible on the drums (technically and musically) while drawing influence from the jazz tradition.

website:www.andrewlisle.com/biography.html


 

 

Thodoris Ziarkas is an improviser, double bassist and composer from Greece.
Growing up with the sounds of Greek folk music primarily playing regional instruments such as the Lyra and tsambouna, Thodoris evolved through different trajectories to discover the double bass.
Based in London since 2009 he is the co-founder of the group Valia Calda, also presenting solo work [Reconstruction] as well as leading Thodoris Ziarkas's USCITA. Other projects include the London Improvisers Orchestra, AMAN and the collaboration with dance artist Georgia Paizi on the ongoing project the SEED.
Other collaborations include: Alan Wilkinson, Anna Homler, James Allsopp, Steve Beresford, Savina Yannatou, Chris Batchelor, Maggy Nichols, Beibei Wang, Adam Bohman,Terry Day, Sharon Gal, Michalis Kouloumis.

website: http://www.thodorisziarkas.co.uk


 

 

Keisuke Matsui was born in Kyoto, Japan and now lives and works in London, he has performed electric guitar, electronics, objects on albums with The London Experimental Ensemble, who share a fascination with old and new forms of experimental and improvised music. Matusi has also performed with and released numerous albums with other prominent artists.

website: https://hundredyearsgallery.bandcamp.com/album/tommy-rot-trio


 

 

Douglas Benford has been involved in various audio genres since the late 1980s, performing at many institutions and venues in the UK (Bristol’s Arnolfini, London’s Science Museum, Cafe Oto, Tate Modern, The Roundhouse, ICA and Glasgow’s CCA), as a composer and sound artist. He has performed at festivals worldwide and has installation work in numerous UK art spaces.

website: https://dbenford.bandcamp.com/
insta: @the_d_benford


 

 

Alan Wilkinson (alto, baritone saxophones, bass clarinet) has for many years been a leading figure in the British Improvised Music Community. His reputation of a full blast, take no prisoners approach was cast in the Leeds based trio Hession/Wilkinson/Fell. Based in London since 1990, his current groups include a long standing trio with John Edwards and Steve Noble, the quartet The Founder Effect with John Coxon, Pat Thomas and Noble, and many collaborations past and present with among others Derek Bailey, Peter Brotzmann, Thurston Moore, J.Spaceman, Chris Corsano, Konstrukt and Talibam!

website: www.cafeoto.co.uk/artists/alan-wilkinson/


 

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Assembly #1: 9th June, 2021

 

 

Hundred Years Gallery will be hosting a series of three Performance Art and Digital/Video Art screenings titled Some Loose Assemblies, organised by Claire Zakiewicz and Sophie Seita. For the first event, five artists will present new works.

Pearl and Theory are two artistic personas created by Kate Clayton and Sophie Seita during a lockdown project of remote composting. Compost is their metaphor for intergenerational dialogue, for transformation. The compost-bed is tended by Pearl and fed digitally by Theory who contributes worm-arias from afar. In this video, Pearl and Theory share their pearls of wisdom, moving liberally through ideas likewormsthroughsoil. What’s the worm’s symbolic power? To quote Rebecca Solnit, marble lasts, but compost feeds.

Libby Heaney will screen Figures in Limbo (2020), an audio-visual animation exploring representations of the body in computer vision and parallels in (mostly western) art history. The work investigates how cultural and historical biases are now being translated into code and what this means. As the piece progresses, Heaney proposes an alternative (quantum) conceptualisation of the body, as boundary-less and form-less, and able to evade the machine gaze.

Claire Zakiewicz and Gerald Curtis will be performing a live collaborative drawing with music written for the duo by Ditagnan.

Following government guidelines, the venue asks audiences to follow social distancing and mask wearing. There will be reduced capacity with 10 people per time slot. Each 15 min. performance / screening will be presented twice for two different audiences, at 7pm and 8pm.

Audiences are invited to sign up for one of these two slots.

 

ARTISTS

 

 

Sophie Seita is a London-based European writer, artist, and educator who often thinks about how text and the act of reading can be visualised and translated into movement, sound, space, costume, and performative objects. She’s shown her work at La MaMa Galleria, Printed Matter (both NYC), JNU (Delhi), [ SPACE ], Bold Tendencies, the Royal Academy, Queer Art Projects, Raven Row, Parasol Unit, Art Night (all London), Kunsthalle Darmstadt (Germany), the Arnolfini (Bristol), and elsewhere. She’s the author of a number of books, most recently, My Little Enlightenment Plays (Pamenar, 2020), The Gracious Ones (Earthbound Press, 2020), and Provisional Avant-Gardes (Stanford University Press, 2019). She is an Assistant Professor at Boston University, co-organises the Sound/Text seminar at Harvard, and is a tutor on both the Alternative Education Programme at Rupert in Vilnius, Lithuania, and the MSt in Writing for Performance at Cambridge University. At the moment, she’s working on:The Gracious Ones, a philosophical ballet for women on imaginary running machines supported by the Dover Prize Fund at Darlington; and a public art and speculative research project with Naomi Woo in the form of The Minutes of the Hildegard von Bingen Society for Gardening Companions, funded by the British Council, Canada Council for the Arts, and Farnham Maltings.

website: www.sophieseita.com/
insta: @sophieseita


 

 

Claire Zakiewicz is an inter-disciplinary artist working in both London and NYC. She is interested in the (meta)physical relationships between sound, drawing, movement, how we read drawings and the processes that underlie our emotional relationship with art. Mostly working with performance painting, Zakiewicz often works collaboratively and uses dance and acting methods as part of her drawing and painting practice. She has a background in improvised music and drawing as well as composition and inter-disciplinary scores. She contributed a chapter describing her drawing practice for the volume Aesthetics of Imperfection: Spontaneity, Flaws and the Unfinished (Bloomsbury), 2020.
Her past residencies have included Bill Young’s Dance Studio (New York), USF Bergen, (Norway), Cill Rialaig, Ireland and PointB Worklodge, (New York). Her works have been presented at galleries, performance venues and institutions including Tate Tanks and Tate Britain, for the exhibitions Tweet Me Up (2011) and Label (2012), at Landmark, Bergen for the performance piece Engastromyths Quakers and Shamans (commissioned by Ny Musikk, 2009) and most recently she produced a collaborative performance painting for Future Visions, Hounslow (2021), funded by the Arts Council, England
Zakiewicz studied at Chelsea College of Art, Anglia Ruskin University and Sir John Cass School of Art where she completed a research-based MA in the physical and metaphorical relationships between sound and drawing, which had both practical and theoretical components.

website: www.clairezakiewicz.com
insta: @clairezakiewicz


 

 

Libby Heaney's post-disciplinary art practice includes moving image works, performances and participatory & interactive experiences that span quantum computing, virtual reality, AI and installation.Heaney's practice uses humour, surrealism and nonsense to subvert the capitalist appropriation of technology. Heaney uses tools like machine learning and quantum computing against their 'proper' use, to undo biases and to forge new expressions of collective identity and belonging with each other and the world.
Heaney has exhibited her artwork widely in galleries and institutions in the UK and internationally including solo exhibitions as part of the official program 2017 EU capital of culture in Aarhus and at the Goethe Institute (London 2019) and at RMIT Gallery (Melbourne 2021), Art AI Festival (Leicester 2021), Mutek ES+AR (online 2021), Etopia Centre of Art and Technology (Zaragoza, Spain 2021), Holden Gallery (online 2021), Somerset House Studios (online 2020), Arebyte Gallery (online 2020), LUX/Hervisions (online 2020), Tate Modern (London 2016, 2019), ICA (London 2019), Barbican (London 2019), Somerset House (London 2019), V&A (London 2018),. Heaney is currently a resident of the iconic London institution Somerset House.

website: www.libbyheaney.co.uk
insta: @/libby_heaney_


 

 

Gerald Curtis works across performance, painting and photography to produce multi-faceted bodies of work rooted in explorations of urban and rural environments. Gerald is interested in cross disciplinary research-based practices and the potentially new dynamic social spaces that these processes can inhabit. Primarily taking ideas of flux and flow as starting points, his practice can be described as being grounded in tactile material-based media while looking into connections between the landscape and memory.
Recently graduating from the Royal College of Art, Gerald Curtis has exhibited and performed nationally and internationally including Revolve Festival, Sweden and Lublin Performance Festival, Poland. His first solo show, Regeneration on Hounslow Heath (2019), was selected by Hounslow Creative People and Places to become part of their touring library programme. The exhibition incorporated a collection of photography, painting, video and performances. Most recently, he has collaborated with artist Claire Zakiewicz and Habib William Kherbek of the band Dirtagnan to produce a video performance, Writing the Future (2021) (forthcoming). Gerald Curtis is a recipient of the Time Space Money bursary from A-N and the Farnham Maltings No Strings Attached fund.

website: www.geraldcurtisstudio.com
insta: @gerald.curtis87


 

 

Kate Clayton is a performance artist based in Glasgow. Within her practice Clayton works collaboratively, collectively and individually. Her main focus is on the visibility of older women, in what is, in part, an attempt to claim agency for the over-60s (and now over-70s). Other themes include intergenerational friendship, and the collaborative process. Creative Scotland funded ‘Timefield’, a collaboration with four other ‘older’ artists who met while on a residency together at Cove Park. For Glasgow International, 2018, Creative Scotland also funded performances and workshops by XSEXCENTENARY, a collective of women artists, of which Kate and Katherine Araniello were two of the founding members.
Kate’s work often involves artistic personas (Silver Swimmer, Art Scrubber, Bus Pass and Pearl Compost) performed in different contexts and environments. Silver Swimmer has performed in cabaret (Traverse, Edinburgh, and Tron, Glasgow). A portrait of Silver Swimmer by photographer Frank MacElhinney was shortlisted for the Scottish Portrait Award in 2017. Art Scrubber has performed tributes to artists and labourers she admires at the Reid Gallery, Glasgow School of Art, and Platform, Easterhouse. Pearl Compost made her first public appearance at 201 Telephone Gallery this May, 2021, where she performed with the worms. Clayton’s art practice exists under the overall banner of 'NOT DEAD YET'.

website: www.kateclayton.co.uk
insta:
@kat3clayton


 

 

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Future Visions

A reimagined future for Hounslow's community

29 May - 13 June 2021
Hounslow High Street

Writing the Future
29 May - 13 June 2021
Gerald Curtis, Claire Zakiewicz and Dirtagnan

This work has been commissioned by Creative People and Places Hounslow for Future Visions, an exhibition of works that signal a positive future for Hounslow High Street and its communities.
Hounslow-based artist Gerald Curtis collaborated with Claire Zakiewicz and the band Dirtagnan to create a performance and painting. Taking the exhibition brief as a starting point to reimagine the purpose of the High Street after the impact of Covid-19, Writing the Future is a 45-minute performance which incorporates themes of creative participation and attunement.

Claire and Gerald move through a ritual of phases and actions with paint and automatic writing methods, layering marks made in response to each other and the music. The composition of the movements form the image and the performance, creating tension, momentum, flow and resolution. The marks and movements can be read in many possible ways throughout the performance and within the traces on the surface of the canvas. 

Although the title of the work seems to attempt to divine or influence what is to come, the focus was to generate a piece that explores possibilities of interpretation, cooperation and collaborative practice methods to create an open outcome. 

The band Dirtagnan created the soundtrack for the performance.

This piece will be exhibited as photographic and video documentation (by videographer Cristina Schek) as part of Future Visions.

Future Visions is a new and ambitious project led by CPP Hounslow brings together Hounslow’s local artists to send a message that imagination, hope, and kindness are not cancelled, even in difficult times.  
Future Visions will adorn Hounslow High Street from Saturday 29 May for two weeks, followed by a touring exhibition appearing in libraries and cafes throughout 2021. The exhibition will also be shown online from 14 June 2021 at hounslowvisualarts.org.uk/future-visions and accompanied by a series of Meet the Artists events that will run throughout the year.
The exhibition will fill the town centre with bright, bold, uplifting work representing the artist’s hope for the future of our community. The exhibition sets up a new type of social interaction, highlighting the positive impact art can have on health and wellbeing, and reinvigorating the high street with art!
Curated by members of the local community with support from CPP Hounslow, we want to give everyone the opportunity to experience the incredible wealth of artistic talent in our local area.
The exhibition is part of CPP Hounslow’s Visual Arts Programme, supported by Creative Enterprise West.

Future Visions will be on display on Hounslow High Street, starting at Bell Square from 29 May - 13 June 2021.

It will also tour London Borough of Hounslow Libraries and Hounslow’s other High Streets later in the year, and throughout 2022. The exhibition will also be online from 14 June 2021.

Creative People & Places Hounslow is part of the Arts Council England’s major investment in increasing arts capacity in underserved areas, working in Feltham, Heston and Cranford, Brentford and central Hounslow. CPP Hounslow is a consortium led by Watermans.

Watermans is West London’s leading arts centre. It attracts over 250,000 visits a year to its thriving and inclusive programme of independent cinema, theatre, exhibitions and courses. Watermans runs a year-round programme of cutting-edge digital arts for which it receives National Portfolio Organisation funding from Arts Council England.

Twitter: @CPPHounslow
Facebook: @CreativeHounslow
Instagram: @hounslow_cpp

www.watermans.org.uk

 

 

 

 

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*rsvp required due to social distancing

 

 

ARTISTS

 

 

Claire Zakiewicz is an inter-disciplinary artist working in both London and NYC. Zakiewicz’s main area of research has been the physical and metaphorical relationships between drawing and sound. Painting is the central part of her practice, but she also works with film, performance and sound. Zakiewicz examines the differences between internal and outward observation in painting. Her projects explore patterns with the starting point of the body, perception, intuition and attention. In her improvisational work, Zakiewicz uses the tensions between failure and resolution, using mistakes as material. Her work has been presented at international institutions such as Tate Tanks and Tate Britain (London), NOoSPHERE (NYC) and in offsite projects during the 57th and 58th Venice Biennale of Contemporary Art (respectively in 2017 and 2019) and the 16th Venice Architecture Biennale, in 2018. She currently writes for Creatrix Magazine, Hypocrite Readerand Art511 Magazine, and her essay The Aesthetics of Failure is due to be published by Bloomsbury in Andy Hamilton's book The Aesthetics of Imperfection, in September, 2020. Zakiewicz was named one of New York's "Top Ten Artists Working Today" in an article by Art511 Magazine in January 2019.

 


 

 

Gerald Curtis is a London based artist working with performance, painting and photography. His projects are based on themes of failure, control and endurance. Graduating from the Performance Pathway at the Royal College of Art in 2017, Gerald has created a practice centred around public spaces, their use and importance. Recently, Gerald has been working with London Creative Network and Photofusion to develop projects using photography as a means to document works that have extended durations beyond conventional exhibition time frames. In particular, he is interested in looking at the process of walking and its uses in public space.


 

 

Habib William Kherbek is a writer, poet, journalist and artist. His novels include ‘Ecology of secrets’ (2013), ‘Ultralife’ (2016), ‘New Adventures’ (2020), and the forthcoming ‘Best Practices’ (2021). Kherbek’s journalism has been included in several publications including Flash Art, Berlin Artlink, Aqnb and Map Magazine. In his project ‘Retrodiction’ (released in 2016 by left gallery, Berlin), Kherbek created video poems based on images of ‘second-hand’ language that he encountered in Berlin, over the course of three months. Other poetry collections include Everyday Luxuries (2018) and 26 Ideologies for Aspiring Ideologists (2018). His essay “Technofeudalism and the Tragedy of the Commons” (2016) appeared in the first issue of Doggerland’s journal, and he has contributed essays to the “Intersubjectivity” series from Sternberg Press. His journalism has appeared in the award-winning Block Magazine, Rhizome.org, Berlin Art Link, MAP, Flash Art, Spike Magazine, Sleek, Samizdat, AQNB and other publications. Kherbek is presently completing a research fellowship at the Critical Studies Department of the Sandberg Institute in Amsterdam.

 


 

 

Libby Heaneyis a British artist, based in London, who’s practice seeks to subvert the capitalist appropriation of technology, through image works, performances and virtual reality experiences. She uses tools like machine learning and quantum computing against their 'proper' use, to undo biases and to forge new expressions of collective identity. In her projects Heaney uses diverse media and modes like blurring, combining, remixing and weaving (derived from quantum physics) to unsettle or 'diffract' standard conceptions of 'truth'. From these modes emerge new forms that question the distinction between fake / real, visible / invisible, private / public, the individual / the collective, especially where those categories are mediated by technology. The works draw on a wide range of source material, spanning pop culture, politics, literature and beyond. Her projects speak to the entanglement of personal and machine agency. Heaney has exhibited her artwork in galleries and institutions in the UK (Tate Modern, ICA, V&A, Barbican, Somerset in London) and internationally in Aarhus (Denmark), Dublin, Barcelona and Lima. Heaney is currently a resident of Somerset House Studios.

 


 

 

Sophie Seita is an interdisciplinary artist, writer, and educator who works with text, sound and translation. Her practice is imbedded in queer-feminist politics and spans different media such as performance, poetry, installation and video. Seita is the author of Provisional Avant-Gardes(Stanford University Press, 2019) and most recently, My Little Enlightenment Plays (Pamenar Press, 2020), which she will present at the open studio event. My Little Enlightenment Plays(2020) is a mix of historical material with contemporary queer affect theory, the psychology of colour-symbolism and experimental dance, challenging the Enlightenment’s opposition of sentiment and rationality. Seita works internationally on various projects and has performed and presented her work in several places including New York, London, New Delhi, Chile and Amsterdam. She currently is an Assistant Professor at Boston University, co-organises the Sound/Text seminar at Harvard, and is on the faculty for a new MSt in Writing for Performance at Cambridge. Seita is also among the cohort of this year’s Constellations artist development programme organised by UP Projects and Flat Time House.


 

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Lockdown Classroom

 

 

 

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Cill Rialaig Artist's Residency

 

March 5 - 12, 2020

Dun Geagan, Ballinskelligs
County Kerry, Ireland

 

 

 

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PERSPECTIVES IN MOTION

Written and Directed by Claire Zakiewicz

Performers in Alphabetical order:
Mariana Alviarez
Laura Colomban
Claire Zakiewicz

Filmed in Venice, 2018
Produced for Time and Timelessness Festival, Aldeburgh, 2020

 

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Open Studio

January 1, 2020
7:30 - 8:30pm

Concert with cellist and vocalist Lenna Pierce

January 2 - 7
Open by appointment

The Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts
323 West 39th Street, New York, 10018
Studio 314

 

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Panel Discussion

December 28, 2019
4:30 - 8:30pm

Park Church Co-Op, Brooklyn, New York

 

 

 

 


Art as Spiritual Practice, Art as Activism

 

 

Conference as part of NOUMENA: deLIGHT
Magic & shamanism series
With an art show “Altars, Portals and Grottos”

60 minute panel discussion + Q&A

PANELISTS:

Jill McDermid - director of Grace Exhibition Space, Brooklyn
Nilton Maltz - psychoanalyst and visual artist
Jaguar Mary X - ritual performance artist and filmmaker
Hector Canonge - interdisciplinary artist and curator
Moderated by Claire Zakiewicz - interdisciplinary artist

 

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He Said, I Thought

by Carol Szymanski

Signs and Symbols Gallery, New York
October/November 2019

 

 

 

 

 

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Noumena: Music of the Spheres

Autumn Equinox


September 21, 2019
6:30 - 10:00pm

The Park Church Co-Op
129 Russell Street
Greenpoint, New York, USA

 

 

 

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Art Eat Festival



2-Day Series of Film Projections and Exhibitions

September 21 - 22, 2019

Regatta Quay
12 Key St, Ipswich IP4 1FH
England

 

 

We are excited to announce that Claire Zakiewicz’s series of animated drawings will be featured in the two-day visual art and street food ART EAT Festival, located at the Ipswich Waterfront, England, from September 21-22, 2019. The festival will include a multi-disciplinary vocabulary of artists, working across all creative mediums, with a focus on primary sensations such as sight, sound and taste.
 
Zakiewicz’s symmetrical motions, which incorporate the techniques and styles of both stop-motion film and documentation, titled Resonance Image (2011), Spherical Symmetry (2019) and Collaborative Control (2016), examine the relationship between the “unresolved and perfected form,” and between the tangible and intangible interactions. Zakiewicz is interested in the way we learn to perceive form and composition when our comprehension is limited within a set of prescribed visual semiotics. She asks whether “performing drawing,” as a type of improvisation, can dissolve the boundaries of our “learned disposition,” and bring us back to an origin of sorts. Each animation re-considers the role of the “body” and the role of “form” as intertwining modalities that shape and navigate our perception of a tangible reality. In this series, the artist continues her examination with the pictorialization of space and the intimacy of exchange. Her interest is predominantly also turned towards the observer, where she examines the process of reading shapes, using physiognomic perception, a process often governed by things that have the most significance to us, such as, faces, gravity (vertical and horizontal lines), circles and perspective lines.
 
“I've been exploring, deconstructing and reducing both the physical and conceptual elements of my earlier drawing, performance and sonic based practice into a vocabulary of signs, forms, actions, objects and symmetries,” says Zakiewicz. “We read shapes, lines and colours according to our physiognomic perception. This relates to our relationship with human faces and bodies alongside the objects and shapes in our physical world. For example vertical lines are translated as energetic and relating to cities or tall trees, horizontal lines are seen as calm and reference land or seascapes. We conceptualize circles as representing the cyclical patterns of life, and to the primordial forces that navigate the order and symmetry of the universe.” 



For additional information contact info@clairezakiewicz.com and the view this series of works visit www.clairezakiewicz.com

 

 

 

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SPHERICAL SYMMETRY

 

Resimage, stop-motion, 2017

 

3-Day Series of Performances, Film Projections & Drawings
Off-Site project, 76th Venice International Film Festival

August 27- 29, 2019

Performances: 7:30pm - 9:30pm
Projections: 9:30pm - 5am


ARTI3160
Salizzada Malipiero, San Marco
3209/A - 3160
Venice, Italy

 

 

ARTI3160 is excited to present SPHERICAL SYMMETRY, a three-day series of performances, video projections and an exhibition of drawings during the opening of the 76th Venice International Film Festival. Curated by Claire Zakiewicz and Laura Vattovaz, each performance will feature an inter-disciplinary dialogue and exchange between an international collective of artists; Jana Astanov (Poland), Katie Cercone (USA), Anita Cerpelloni (Italy), David Jason Williams (USA) and Claire Zakiewicz (UK).

SPHERICAL SYMMETRY examines traditional ideologies of cosmology, shamanic techniques, occult symbolism and traces early tribal archetypes alongside sacred geometry. Continuing Zakiewicz's investigations with conceptions of improvisation, each performance will indirectly ask: "how can we draw interesting parallels between the macro-languages of music and art over the centuries and the evolution of our understanding of the universe," & "can today’s artists be perceived as shamans possessing the power of accelerating humanity’s evolution in consciousness?” Zakiewicz says. "Our physicality is our cosmic home. Each line is drawn with attention to the body and to the drawing itself and our interactions outside of ourselves whether verbal or experiential, moment-to-moment.

 

 

ARTISTS

 

 

Jana Astanov is a multidisciplinary artist, living in New York. Born in Poland she studied anthropology, philosophy and linguistics in France, and arts in the UK. Her work includes photography, poetry, performance, new media and installation. She describes her performance art practice as “mythology vs ideology” referring to her two main interests the political & economic foundations of our civilisation and mythological/ religious values. In her work she utilizes shamanic techniques, spiritual beliefs, dance movement derived from the Grotowski technique, she also merges poetry with performance practice and sound art. She published four collections of poetry: Antidivine (Undergroundbooks.org), Grimoire, Sublunar, and Birds of Equinox (Red Temple Press). She is a founder of Creatrix Magazine.

 

 

 

Katie Cercone “High Prieztezz Or Nah”is a visionary artist, scribe, prieztezz and spiritual gangsta hailing from the blessed coast. Cercone has performed or shown work in exhibitions at the Brooklyn Museum, Bronx Museum, Whitney Museum, Dallas Contemporary, Momenta Art, C24 Gallery, Changjiang Museum China, Dodge Gallery and Aljira Center for Contemporary Art. She has published critical writing in ART PAPERS, White Hot, Posture, Brooklyn Rail, Hysteria, Bitch Magazine, Utne Reader and N.Paradoxa. With her collective Go! Push Pops she was awarded the Culture Push Fellowship for Utopian Practice in 2014. Her work has been featured in Dazed, MILK, Interview, Japan Times, Huffington Post, ART 21, Hyperallergic, PAPER, Art Fag City, Washington Post, and Art Net TV among others.  Cercone has curated shows for Momenta Art, KARST (UK), Cue Art Foundation and NurtureArt. She is co-leader of the queer, transnational feminist collective Go! Push Pops and creative director of ULTRACULTURAL OTHERS Urban Mystery Skool. Cercone was a 2015 National Endowment for the Arts Fellow for the U.S.-Japan Exchange Program in Tokyo (JUSFC).

 

 

Incroci di leggerezze, ink on Japanese paper, 70cm x 80cm, 2019

 

Anita Cerpelloni is an architect-artist-designer and the founder of ART3160, Venice. Cerpelloni studied traditional and experimental techniques including, printmaking, calligraphy, drawing techniques, engraving and painting. She further developed her skills while travelling in Japan where she absorbed ancient Japanese techniques giving new life to her artworks as well as sharing her knowledge through workshops in Venice. As a designer she was selected to exhibit her geometric paper lamps during the Venetian design week in 2018 and collaborated with glass artisans for the glass museum in Murano in 2016. Anita has been running Paper Project Venice since 2012, which puts 'nature' as a total reference to her professional and artistic activities.

 

 

 

For over twenty years, David Jason Williams a.k.a. U.N.D.A.K.O.V.A. (Universe. Naturally. Delivers. All. Knowledge. Of. Vitality. Automatically) has been awakening audiences with his special brand of insightful & knowledge infused hip hop. Urban monk and teaching artist, his seasoned background in yoga and meditation has allowed him to develop a yoga hip hop curriculum for urban youth through the non-profit BEAT GLOBAL. UNDAKOVA believes self-love and artistic expression are the ultimate tools for empowering communities.

 

 

Photo: Mark Edward Smith

 

Claire Zakiewicz is a British inter-disciplinary artist working across drawing, film, sound and performance. Zakiewicz’s practice explores the physical and metaphorical relationships between sound and drawing. It is a scientific and philosophical practice-based enquiry - thinking through making. Zakiewicz re-examines the pictorialization of space and the intimacy of exchange. Her animated films have been shown at Alive In the Universe for the 58th Venice Biennale, 2019 and at Tate Tanks and Tate Modern (London) in the exhibitions Tweet Me Up, and Label, 2012. Zakiewicz has exhibited regularly throughout the UK, USA, Italy and Norway and has produced and performed in numerous productions and international institutions including Resonance FM (UK); ARTI3160 (Venice, Italy); USF (Norway); Bill Young's Dance Studio (NYC); Mothership NYC; Last Frontier NYC and Itinerant Performance Arts Festival (NYC). Zakiewicz lives and works in London, UK and New York, United States. Zakiewicz writes for the publications Creatrix Magazine, Art511 Magazine and Hypocrite Reader.

 

 

 

 

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Aldeburgh Beach Lookout

 

 

 

 

Open House
Saturday 27 & Sunday 28, July, 2019
11:00am – 5:00pm

Claire Zakiewicz has been invited to undertake a one-week intensive residency at the Aldeburgh Beach “Lookout,” from July 22 - 28, 2019. Located in the English seaside town in Suffolk, the isolated tower provides a unique opportunity to engage with the iconic cultural landscape and surrounding waters.

Continuing her examination with “Imprecision: The Aesthetics of Failure,” Zakiewicz will develop a new body of work that combines elements from her breath drawings and observation series. Focusing on revealing the differences between internal and external observation, the artist will draw the same scene repeatedly, alternating from direct observation during daylight and blindfolded at night.

Zakiewicz says: “What is the difference between “internal” and “external” vision? I want to reduce drawing, at least for a while, to a minimal practice and explore modes of perception. My aim is to be present in search of a "timeless moment" (to paraphrase Caroline Wiseman, Director of the residency) and to examine my intuition and instincts with and without sight.”

Zakiewicz will also produce a video installation, to be projected on the “Lookout” tower as an extension of the site itself, and a series of interactive performances as live drawing experiments throughout the residency. For exhibition and performance details contact info@clairezakiewicz.com

Film Projections:

The Primacy of Movement 

Evenings from July 22 - 28, 2019
8:30pm-11:00pm 

"One, two, three, four’ the beats of Philip Glass’s opera Einstein on the Beach measure out time. Time is the heart beat of the universe, towards death, the nemesis of creativity."  

Caroline Wiseman



What does it mean to be "alive"? Simple gestures such as intimacy, touch, movement and interaction are being navigated by a third hand today, an external interface, so, how do we understand this inherent complexity and the changing nature of "interactivity" and being “alive”?
 
Initiated from her participation in the exhibition Alive in the Universe, curated by Caroline Wisemen and David Baldry at the Palazzo Pesaro Parafava, Venice, for the 58th Venice Biennale, Zakiewicz will produce a series of film animations, performances and new paintings during her residency at the Aldeburgh Beach “Lookout,” from July 22 - 28, 2019. These works will examine the “Primacy of Movement” in relation to what the term “alive” means today and continue Zakiewicz's ongoing research with Imprecision: The Aesthetics of Failure.
 
Founded by curator Wiseman, the Aldeburgh Beach “Lookout” residency program will also become a nexus for the exchange of ideas for her project Alive in Universe. Wiseman says “Alive in the Universe was initiated to invite artists from around the world to produce a new body of work-whether through installation, performance or film- to express how it feels to be alive in the universe.”
 
Zakiewicz’s video’s will be projected on the beach look-out exterior from 8:30pm - 11:00pm throughout the evenings and an exhibition of new works will be on view Saturday July 27 & Sunday July 28, 2019 from 11:00am – 5:00pm.
 
The Lookout tower will also be open via appointment during the residency and for additional information on screenings and exhibition details please visit www.aldeburghbeachlookout.com and contact the artist directly at info@clairezakiewicz.com

 


Aldeburgh Beach Lookout
31 Crag Path
Aldeburgh
Suffolk IP15 5BS
United Kingdom

 

Articles:

Creatrix Magazine

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Off-Site project, 58th Venice Biennale 

May 10 - 30, 2019
Open by appointment or during the following events
Video projection (window) 8:00pm - 8:00am

Schedule of Events:

Preview and Performance
Friday May 10
1:30 - 2:30pm
Dannie-Lu Carr and Claire Zakiewicz

Opening Reception and Performance
Saturday May 11
6:30 - 9:00pm
Claire Zakiewicz

Japanese Calligraphy Workshop
Sunday May 12
9am - 4pm
Anita Cerpelloni and Claire Zakiewicz
RSVP info@clairezakiewicz.com

Performance
Wednesday May 15
7:00 - 8:00pm
Paul Morgan and Claire Zakiewicz

Closing Reception and Performance
Thursday May 30
7:00 - 9:00pm
Hector Canonge and Claire Zakiewicz

ARTI3160
Salizzada Malipiero
San Marco, 
3209/A - 3160


Venice, Italy

 

 

ARTI3160 Gallery presents IMPRECISION: The Aesthetics of Failure featuring new works by Claire Zakiewicz. Please join the artist for the closing reception and a series of performances with accompanying artists including, Hector Canonge, on Thursday May 30, 2019. 

IMPRECISION: The Aesthetics of Failure examines the tensions between failure and perfection: the techniques, limitations and the implications. "In my drawings, I've noticed that aiming for something ugly can produce beauty. Failure creates new pathways; it disrupts prescribed patterns," says Zakiewicz. "Drawing blindfolded with one’s attention on something other than the drawing, almost, always produces a quality of line, unity and balance of shapes - even - or more prominently, as control moves further away." 
 
Zakiewicz asks: What is failure? How does failure relate to imperfection? We often think of failure as the opposite of success, however, in many ways, failure can be associated with eliminating expectation or a state of not "consciously" aiming for pure perfection. Embracing "failure" per se can often lead to a more balanced symmetry. So, is failure the resolution? 

Alongside Zakiewicz's solo exhibition, a selection of her video works are featured in Alive In the Universe curated by Caroline Wiseman and David Baldry at the Palazzo Pesaro Parafava, Venice. The exhibition includes artists from varying disciplines such as Sarah Lucas, Julian Simmons, Maggi Hambling and Eileen Haring Woods. For more information click here.

A detailed narration on Zakiewicz's experience in Venice has been published in the form of diary entries in Creatrix and ART511 magazine. To follow the artist visit here.

Download exhibition catalogue here

 


 

 



 

 

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Struggle and Surrender: Process and Material in Painting

by Elisabet Dijkstra

 

It comes as a surprise at first that visual artist, Claire Zakiewicz, does not make art. She prefers to label her creative work as a practice in listening, learning and observing.

Claire and her art reside in a world called spatialised time - a wonderful place where shapes of sound, dance and drawing are related back to the material world we live in. This world exists in the crossroad between two chief species of time. Intellectual time is a purposeful sequencing of parts or events and is, therefore, affiliated with ideas composition and product. Real time, familial to ideas of improvisation and process, is the experience of these sequenced parts.

Screen Shot 2018-10-06 at 21.06.54.png

So in the land of spatialised time, Claire’s artistic house is located in a town called ‘perspectives in motion’ where the artistic system adopts a temporal focus attributable to Claire’s interest in the philosophy of the two species of time mentioned above.

In the course of one prickly affair, Claire found that the paintbrushes she was using were far to bristly and produced scanty lines - this effect was far from what she had envisaged. What does a relationship with failure look like? There are different shades of failure. Technical failure, like the brushes malfunctioning, and feeling of failure - a sense of dissatisfaction. Nonetheless, like all relationships, this one is creative. One create’s a space wherein to exist with the failure which, according to Murphy’s law, will inevitably happen.

What is worth mentioning is that failure has an important role in the element of duration. Claire resolved to refer to the whiskery brushstrokes - the technical failure - as a symbol of her emotions to the corporate shells of skyscrapers that characterised her first few weeks in New York.

Overthinking is dangerous. Claire’s approach to colour is spontaneous and usually involves picking quickly, or even asking friends to pick. Improvisation is a means of surrender, and energy is reserved for the act of becoming a character - becoming a paintbrush, for example.

Screen Shot 2018-10-06 at 21.42.58.png

Performing brush strokes is a humanistic act - it is rooted in the body.

“Follow a set of patterns, rather than have expectations”, says Claire. She finds pleasure in the surprise outcome and this is reinforced by experiments such as painting in the dark with a cellist playing in the room, or painting blindfolded among dancers and improvising poets, or painting her bear feet and dancing on paper.

Screen Shot 2018-10-06 at 21.38.22.png

Perhaps the wall between life and art crumbles when you don’t think too much. This involves a level of trust in the idea that the body knows more than the brain.

Maybe this is the big question of process : where is the end?

Then follows, when is it? What is it? Is there an end? Or must we accept the perpetual motion in life and art? Surely, we must all take note from Leonardo Di Vinci’s view that a work of art is never finished, it is abandoned.

Claire values the creative process rather than product; however, product - which connotes "finished” – is an essential part of the process. I think it is about realising the symbiosis between process and product - that the product is not the be all and end all, the process is not a smooth ride altogether.

Failure must become a friend if the artist wishes to make beauty alive and tangible in the moment.

 

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Perspectives In Motion

 

Preview Reception & Performance
Friday September 14, 2018
6:00 - 9:00 pm

Performance by Assembly

Off-site Project, 16th International Architecture Biennale

September 15 - 27, 2018

ARTism3160
San Marco
3209/A - 3160
Venice, Italy


an exhibition of drawing and painting by Claire Zakiewicz
and perormances by Assembly

Performances every day at 7pm

 

 

 

ARTism 3160 is pleased to present Perspectives in Motion by Claire Zakiewicz to be opened on September 15, 2018. The exhibition will re-address ideas of “failure” and the conceptions of “the imperfect” within the discipline of drawing.

“What is the balance between the unresolved and the perfected form? How do we know when a work is finished? In many ways, it’s a mediumistic act that must then be completed by the viewer. The finished paintings have space to somehow “finish themselves,” Zakiewicz says.

Often drawing with her eyes closed, Zakiewicz’s practice becomes a series of meditations in space. Employing gestural drawing in response to phenomena in the surrounding world such as atmosphere, color and sound, the drawings question the boundaries between abstraction and figuration, disruption and unity, and the ideology of “freedom” alongside self-imposed constraints.

Zakiewicz’s examines the phenomenology and architecture of drawing. In this particular series Perspectives in Motion, the works reveal a personal language of spontaneous mark making and simple structural motifs that examine historical referents from Surrealism’s automatic drawings and writings, action painting from the Abstract Expressionists and Japanese Calligraphy.

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Assembly

Mothership August Salon
Tuesday, August 14, 7:30 pm

Mothership NYC
252 Green Street
Greenpoint, Brooklyn, NYC


a collaborative live act organized by Claire Zakiewicz featuring the following artists:

 

 

Mariana Alviarez - Dance
Marcus Cummins - Saxophone
Aaron Moore - Percussion
Lenna M Pierce - Cello and Voice
Claire Zakiewicz - Live Drawing

 

Venezuelan artist, Mariana Alviarez is based between New York and Buenos Aires. She is a dancer, actress, performer, dance educator, choreographer and researcher. She has been working with several dance and drama companies, in both multimedia projects and films. With a BA in International Studies, she aims to create spaces for the development of the performing arts, facilitating exchanges between anthropology, folklore, international culture and social studies. She has performed her own projects in Venezuela, USA, Argentina, Chile, Perú, Ecuador, and Spain.

British saxophonist Marcus Cummins has been associated with the UK free and improvised music scene since the early 90's. He has worked extensively as a solo artist, in duo's and larger bands but is perhaps best known internationally for his involvement in Trevor Watts' 'Celebration Band'. Marcus then studied music at Leeds City College of Music and Dartington College of Arts. During this time studying primarily jazz and Indian music (with the council of many masters such as Bobby Wellins; Evan Parker; Paul Dunmall and Dharambir Singh) he developed a personal style unlike that of any of his contemporaries.

Aaron Moore is an Englishman residing in Brooklyn, New York and is a founding member of the English experimental group Volcano The Bear, formed in 1995. Primarily a drummer he generally considers any instrument or object playable in one way or another. Moore's current projects include Brooklyn-based group Gospel of Mars and a duo project with Norwegian Erik K Skodvin.

Lenna M Pierce (AKA Meaner Pencil) is a cellist, vocalist, memoirist, and music reviewer who has performed in the filthiest subway stations of New York City as well as at medieval French churches and turn of the century Swiss theaters, house shows in Paris, Barcelona and Berlin, and artist co-ops in Lincoln Nebraska. 

Claire Zakiewicz is a British born multi-media artist. Her ongoing research is focused towards examining the physical and metaphorical relationships between sound and drawing. This research has been a scientific and philosophical practice-based enquiry - thinking through making. Her animated films have been shown at Tate Tanks and Tate Modern (London) for the exhibitions Tweet Me Up and Label curated by Tracey Moberly. She has exhibited regularly throughout the UK, USA, Italy and Norway and has produced and performed in numerous productions and international institutions including, Resonance FM (UK), ARTIsm3160 (Venice, Italy), USF (Norway), Bill Young's Dance Studio (NYC), Mothership NYC, Last Frontier NYC, Itinerant Performance Arts Festival (NYC). Zakiewicz studied Fine Art at Chelsea College of Art, London and Anglia Polytechnic University, Cambridge, before completing a research-based MFA at Sir John Cass School of Art, London. This research examined how the body experiences the world through the study of our perceptions, and how we conceptualize objects, frames, repetition and embodied patterns.

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Lenna Pierce

Dispatch: Art Out of the World


ISSUE 88 | MAGIC | JUL 2018

Let’s take a moment to remember that the symbols our brains use to communicate with us in our dreamstate are largely present to prevent us from receiving too much truth at once, and to keep us pleasantly restful. If you apply this understanding to the world of art it would make sense that the most beautiful performances might not be the most direct.

Attending the Itinerant Performance Art Festival at Last Frontier in Greenpoint, ancient meat hooks hang from the high ceilings, decorated with bells and flowers. Sungjae Lee is slathering himself with thin layers of green clay, gaining mass and wrinkles over several hours, a statement on aging I think. Cristina Silvio, dressed in unpleasant flesh colored spanks, is nailing her long brown hair to a board, a few locks at a time, until she is quite bound to it, evoking simultaneously Mary Magdalene and Jesus Christ. The trend in performance art seems to be a return to the body, the opposite of modern life, a reaction to New York.

I have come to see Claire Zakiewicz who I know to be a great world traveler, as well as an accomplished painter. These two facts together explain how she has been moving farther and farther away from her own canvas through experiments in remote painting. First, blindfolded painting took her away from conscious control. Then she made a magical pair of sunglasses taped over with white medical tape to allow her to see back into herself. During one notable performance she laid a canvas on the floor and daubed paint on blindfolded dancers who danced to my live accompaniment. Her most recent collaboration with Siw Laurent takes her even farther from the canvas.

In a room where other artists are focused on the body, Claire stands behind her DJ table, creativing music for the purpose of moving her proxy painter, Siw, whose operatic voice echoes through the building. Siw holds small black charcoal bars that match her blindfold. She makes black skyscraper marks on the white paper and screeches in tongues. She holds charcoal between her toes, as if to free herself as much as possible from conscious control. Claire then alters the music, speeding it up to a scream. When this chaos clears there are voices in the noise, reading poetry by Danni Lucar “Salty salty salty/ salting wounds to heal/ crashing waves/ salty air cleansing the demons from my mind/ salting the soul.” Siw’s mouth has become black from charcoal. Some of her wild gestures mark the paper–others do not. Now she is on all fours making animal noises. Now she is pointing at nothing and speaking in tongues. Siw is singing over a Steve Reich sample. Siw is manipulating invisible marionettes. Siw is Claire’s marionette. She removes her blindfold and reenters the world. They bow. The crowd applauds.

 

 

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Exhibition in Venice, Italy
Off-site project, 57th Venice Biennale

Out of the Mothership
Don’t invent, don’t create, don’t make Art...

July 8 - 25, 2017

Opening Reception: Saturday July 8, 6:00 - 9:00pm


Closing reception & performance: Saturday July 22, 6 - 8pm

Meaner Pencil - cello & voice

Claire Zakiewicz - live painting

"Find in yourself those human things which are universal." 

Sanford Meisner

Out of the Mothership is an exhibition that presents British born artist Claire Zakiewicz’s ongoing research into the physical and metaphorical relationships between sound and drawing. This research has been a scientific and philosophical practice based enquiry - thinking through making.

Zakiewicz is interested in the way we begin to perceive form and shapes when our comprehension is limited by a set of prescribed visual semiotics. She asks how “performing drawing,” affects the body and the intimacy of exchange. 

For this series, the artist collaborated with musician and Astrophysicist Gavin Starks who composed a hand written letter for the artist at the beginning of 2017. The letter, intimate yet philosophical in nature, discussed Starks ongoing research into combining sound and cosmology, as a new cultural language. 
 
Starks' interest in modes of perception and networked thinking alongside Zakiewicz‘s enquiry into the phenomenology of perception, dance, gesture and observation is the focus. Starks says: “For me, music, like mathematics, is a non-verbal language. It is experiential". He asks whether our current concerns in astrophysics - for dimensionality, curvature, gravitation, symmetry, spin and manifold mirror those in the arts - leading him to questions such as: "is there a musical equivalent to the CURVATURE of space-time?"

“We can draw interesting parallels between the macro-languages of music and painting over the centuries,” Zakiewicz writes.  “And the evolution of our understanding of the universe. Our physicality is our cosmic, home. Each line drawn with attention to the body and to the drawing itself and our interactions outside of ourselves whether verbal or experiential, moment to moment.”
 

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Upcoming Exhibition in Italy

Out of the Mothership
Don’t invent, don’t create, don’t make Art...

 

July 8 - 25, 2017
Opening Reception: Saturday, July 8, 6 - 9pm

Off-site project, 57th Venice Biennale

ARTIsm3160
San Marco
3209/A - 3160
Venice, Italy
 

Claire Zakiewicz, Resonance, stop-motion clip, 2016

"Find in yourself those human things which are universal." 
- Sanford Meisner

Out of the Mothership is an exhibition that presents British born artist Claire Zakiewicz’s ongoing research into the phenomenology of drawing. Over the past five years Zakiewicz has undertaken numerous residencies in New York, Norway and London, where she has been collaborating with composers, physicists and other thinkers and makers to produce a series of performances and drawings.

This particular series will re-examine the pictorialization of space and the intimacy of exchange - whether through gesture, sound or drawing. Zakiewicz asks how “performing drawing,” affects the body and our experience of the tangible and intangible objects in time and space.
 
This is Zakiewicz’s first solo show in Italy, which will take place during La Biennale di Venzia. Her previous exhibitions and performances include Tate Tanks (UK), Tate Modern (UK), Resonance FM (UK), USF (Norway), Bill Young’s Dance Studio (NYC).
 

 

 

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Studio view, 100 Grand Street, Soho, New York, 2016
Photo: Isaac Rosenthall

 

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Collaborative Control with Dance and Drawing
Created during Bill Young Dance residency, 2016

The performative aspect of my work, where I explore intuition, improvisation, spontaneous gesture, chance and many other things is possibly more physiological than conceptual.

As part of Zakiewicz's residency at Bill Young Dance studios in New York, she collaborated with well-known dancers and musicians including Anna Chirescu, who was trained in classical dance at the Conservatory of Paris before joining the Conservatoire National superieur de Musique et de Danse de Paris (CNSMDP), Pierre Guilbault, who has a background in ballet and contemporary dance and New York based singer and cellist Lenna Pierce.

Lenna Pierce - Cello and Voice
Anna Chirescu - dance
Pierre Guilbault - dance
Claire Zakiewicz - drawing 

 

This particular series titled Collaborative Control examines the spatialization of time, body memory and colour theory. The temporal aspect of these works, performed in real time, as one continuous motion, exposed the various distinctions between conceptual time and real time. 

 

 

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Claire Zakiewicz - live drawing
Meaner Pencil - cello & voice
Michael Hart - curation

PointB Worklodge, New York, USA, 2016

This particular series was performed in complete darkness/blackness. Each movement was made in response to particular sounds, a cello and voice, played by Meaner Pencil.

 

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Residency at Bill Young's Dance Studio

 

 

Sept 2016 - Jan 2017
Bill Young Dance
100 Grand St, SoHo, New York, USA

 

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Tourette Syndrome is a series of drawings inspired by Zakiewicz's interest in exploring the brain's response to stimuli and exploring the various filters or lack of filters and control we have over our actions

 

 

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Tourette Syndrome, 2014
Pastel on paper
Dimensions TBC

 

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Residency at PointB Worklodge

 

 

Luna Studio at PointB Worklodge, Brooklyn, USA
Nov 2013 - Dec 2014

 

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Things to Remember

 

Things to Remember is a film of subtly threaded scenes, using moments and perspectives from the writer’s life. The film acts as a reminder that one tiny moment in time can represent truth and lies, tenderness and abuse, connection and genuine misunderstandings, determining who we ultimately become in order to make sense and survive.

Dannie- Lu Carr - director and producer
2016

 

 

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LECTURE AND PANEL DISCUSSION

 

October 20 - 22, 2011

One More Time: An Exhibition and Symposium on marking time in art
Curated by Anne Robinson
London Metropolitan University

Claire Zakiewicz presents her research into relationships between sound and drawing
Performances by Claire Zakiewicz on each day of exhibition

 

 

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In 2011 I worked with poet Jason Shelley and created a visual piece for his poem

'Writing with your eyes closed'

The wind is so strong outside.
The sun is shining. The wind is blowing.
Three sheets of writing paper on the bench, held down by a phone, are blown away.

The phone hits the ground.
I make chase for the paper stapled together at the corners.

 

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Ear to Eye, June 2009
Sara Lane Studios

Claire Zakiewicz works with the Norwegian-based British composer and vocalist Alwynne Pritchard

In these performances, Zakiewicz worked with the Norwegian-based British composer and vocalist Alwynne Pritchard to explore possible relationships between extended vocalised sounds and drawing in live performance.

Over extended periods Zakiewicz works into the drawing using various methods relating to the spacialization of time.

 

 

 

 

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Chaos Caberet IV, April 2010


The Foundry, Great Eastern Street (downstairs)
Ron Briefel; keyboard and home made instruments, Claire Zakiewicz; live drawing and animated film

 

 

 

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Chaos Caberet III

March 2010
The Foundry, Great Eastern Street
Ron Briefel; keyboard and home made instruments, Claire Zakiewicz; live drawing

 

 

 

 

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Residency at USF, Norway

 


Fat Battery Summer School,
USF, Bergen, Norway,
August, 2008

 

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2024