Studio visit with:

Six Artists from LIVE Biennale 2009

Sunday, October 18, 2009

LIVE 2009 features over 40 performances by the best and brightest of the world’s contemporary artists from across Canada and 11 other countries to explore new, experimental and experiential ways to challenge how we see, think and act. This roundtable discussion will provide an opportunity to hear the artists speak about their LIVE projects and performance art practice.

LIVE 2009 showcases two weeks of dynamic, eclectic and provocative performances, events, happenings, cabarets and festivities at venues and locations throughout Vancouver. Expect art that is always engaging but never boring, activities that defy tradition and events that run the gamut from serious and gently humorous to outrageous and beyond! www.livebiennale.ca

Featured artists for Roundtable discussion:

Esther Ferrer\’s work spans four decades of international avant-garde activity. Her work can be thought of as a particular type of minimalism that integrates rigour, humor, diversion and absurdity. She has exhibited her work globally and represented Spain at the Venice Biennale in 1999. In 2008 she was awarded the Premio Nacional de Artes Plásticas, the National Prize of Visual Arts, by the Spanish ministry of Cultural Affairs. This is Ms. Ferrer\’s first appearance in Vancouver.

Lee Wen lives between Singapore and Tokyo. He has been exploring different strategies of time-based and Performance art since 1989. His work has been strongly motivated by social investigations as well as inner psychological directions using art to interrogate stereotypical perceptions of culture and society. He seeks possibilities of collaborations, networks and dialogical discourses. He is a contributing factor in The Artists Village alternative in Singapore and had been participating in Black Market International Performance Collective. He initiated and organized “The Future of Imagination”, an international Performance art event in Singapore. He has never been to Mongolia.

The Rite of Spring (Le Sacre du Printemps)
Stricken with early stages of Parkinson\’s disease, Lee continues to explore ways of expanding Performance art strategies. Attempting a new direction Lee re-interprets Igor Stravinsky\’s once controversial ballet “Rite of Spring” first conceived a century ago. “Spring begets expectations of changes. It is in the air, the oceans, terra firma and life organisms; in creatures like us. I languidly brazen out that I have a sick body. And so do the earth, the society, and the world. The discoveries of remedies for incurable diseases are confronted with unheard ailments, bugs and viruses, endless conflicts that seem to escalate just when resolution is close at hand, the backlash of rigid bigoted fundamentals recall and stunt the growth of our liberated spirits, relieves us not the Sisyphean task this human existence. I accept it and reject it. I ignore it and deal with it. For changes will not come without challenge and resistance. So I will to dance, to activate, to perform the body in sickness, in its primitive urgings, in perennial refutation of tyrannical status quos and repressive fates, seeking resolution of conflicts to mollify the inconsistencies for the reconciliation of contradictions that is yet to be.”

Paul Couillard has created at least 200 solo and collaborative Performance works in 20 countries, often working with his partner Ed Johnson. His work explores our bodies as vessels of sensation, experience, knowledge and spirit. His solo practice is particularly concerned with duration and the effects of time.
Couillard was the Performance Art Curator for Fado until 2007, and is a founding co-curator of the 7a*11d International Performance Art Festival. He is the editor of Fado\’s Canadian Performance Art Legends, a series of books on senior Canadian Performance artists, including La Dragu: the Living Art of Margaret Dragu (2002) and Ironic to Iconic: the Performance Works of Tanya Mars (2008). A third book, featuring the work of Alain-Martin Richard, is scheduled for publication in 2011.

Shannon Cochrane has a new Performance, called Performance Festival Performance. Running 30 minutes long it offers from one festival to another, a survey of the artists, gestures and materials from the last 7a*11d festival. It is a meta Performance, a riff on a riff. Shannon Cochrane is the Artistic Director of Fado Performance Art Centre in Toronto and has performed in a variety of venues internationally.

International milti-disciplinary artist Valentín Torrens uses Visual poetry in unconventional languages and is interested in perception as a source and a limit of our desires. Torrens investigates the politics of perception, its liberation, the social shaping of the meaning and communication as suggestion. Torrens changes tactics and decodes the accommodations of art and culture, its connivance with the horror by using a double code, real vs. illusion, of the performer as a shadow, his own and the context shadow, which transforms performer and context. Humour and liminal play, short-circuiting the language\’s logic and the audience\’s mind. Action under dim light, stressing the live human perception.