Music byLenna Pierce (2020)
Actor: Siw Laurent at the Itinerant Performance Art Festival in 2018
Performance conceived and directed by Claire Zakiewicz
Video shot and edited by Claire Zakiewicz
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, whom 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, creating 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 Dannie-Lu Carr “Salty salty salty/ salty wounds to heal/ crashing waves/ salty air cleansing the demons from my mind/ salt in 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.
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 ReaderandArt511 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 26Ideologies 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.
