The Unifiedfield Videoperformance series at The Cinematheque of Davao.

junio 7th, 2015 |  Published in News

Friday 12th and Saturday 13th June, 18.30 – 20.00 pm at The Cinematheque of Davao.
Palma Gil Street, Davao City. Tickets are sold at the box office for 100 php*. Rating: +18.

The Unifiedfield presents: Videoperformance 01, Videoperformance 02, and Guggenheim, a series of recent video-performances featuring international artists who investigate, in very personal ways, the complex interchanges between performance art and the cinematic language. Not merely documentations of performances, these videos have been created specifically for the video medium with no live audience during the performance itself.

*This is a fundraising event with two purposes: to grant a local artist to participate in our residency program, and to fundraise money for the Bajau community in Seaside II, Matina Aplaya:

– The Unifiedfield Nomadic Artist-In-Residence Program is glad to announce the first local artist granted to participate in our residency program: Soi Kalinaw (aka Soika) is a Filipino street artist, performance artist and a painter. Originally from Leyte, he studied Fine Arts at University of San Carlos and has been producing street art inspired by discomforting cartoon images commonly in the streets of Cebu City, also doing discomforting performance art and social realist paintings with a touch of black humour and sarcasm. The artist will travel to Davao to create new works of street art, engage with local artists and to produce a site-specific video-performance in collaboration with Marta Moreno Muñoz and some filmmakers from Davao. We are aiming to raise enough funds to cover the residency expenses (travels, accommodation, per diem for the artist, materials).

– The Unifiedfield engaged with the Bajau community at Matina Aplaya for Terue Yamauchi´s residency project. Among the Bajau freedivers’ tools are homemade fins, which aid them in swimming in the seas. The fins are crafted from PVC pipes, nylon strings, and rubbers from tires and slippers. We are aiming to raise PhP5,000.00 to produce 20 pairs for the Bajau freedivers.

Videoperformance 01, Videoperformance 02 and Guggenheim have been previously exhibited by The Unifiedfield at Nikolaj Kunsthallen in Copenhagen; MOCA, Museum of Contemporary Art Taipei; and Singapore Art Museum, amongst others.

‘Habagat’, by Martha Atienza. Performer: Donna Miranda.


‘Untitled’ by Nerea Martínez de Lecea (UK, 2009). 00:01:10
‘In Girum Imus Nocte’ by Marta Moreno Muñoz (Spain, 1998- 2008) 00:08:00
‘Sometimes I Feel Like A Pitbull Terrier’ by Bean (UK, 2009) 00:02:55
‘Habagat’ by Martha Atienza (Philippines, 2009) 00:10:00
‘Point No Point’ by Jennifer Campbell (Canada, 2010) 00:03:58

The Unifiedfield presents VIDEOPERFORMANCE 01, a series of recent video-performances featuring five international female artists who investigate, in very personal ways, the complex interchanges between performance art and the cinematic language. The artists explore their own subjectivity fluctuating from the highest peaks of psychological dissatisfaction to a reconciliation with existence. Some of the works presented here can be seen as an expression to exorcise personal demons within, responding to a patriarchal and undesirable reality.

The video selection begins with Nerea Matinez de Lecea´s piece ‘Untitled’, a work which mediates the subjective realms of perception and experience representing a dislocated, displaced identity. Her video presents a single seemingly psychotic female subject, with her face completely wrapped in bandage floating through a room in a stress induced state of physical and psychological disarray.

This is followed by Marta Moreno Muñoz‘s video-performance ‘In Girum Imus Nocte’, where hysteria is manifested through repetitive rotations within the confines of a bathtub. The performer, driven by pre-oedipal nostalgia, attempts to experience the dissolution of the ego; through these tireless contortions of her body, she reaches a trance and attains a kind of mystical regression.

Bean puts together a work that embodies her internal battle, one of a ritualistic and animalistic venting, boiling her temper in an abandoned wasteland. ‘Sometime I Feel Like A Pit Bull Terrier’ uses selective cuts, repeats and speed variations of the original video footage showing the artist on her hands and legs facing the camera carrying out the action of biting a bag of salt , to expose her underlying frustrations and failures. Sometime I Feel Like A Pit Bull Terrier marks the inflection point of the overall emotional tonality of VIDEOPERFORMANCE 01 as we begin to appreciate the feelings of reconciliation towards the end of the video.

‘Habagat’ by Martha Atienza is the only work of this first series where the artist herself is not the performer in the video. Filmed on the island of Bantayan in the Philippines , Habagat alternately cuts between two young female performers, one dressed in red and the other in white, trying desperately to move towards the depths of the Visayan sea resisting the overwhelming currents of the oncoming waves. The tension depicted in the imagery intended by the artist is a reaction towards the judgment and discrimination felt as a woman, bearing witness of the struggle for women who want change. Performers:Donna miranda and Criselda Alolor.

Jennifer Campbell‘s ‘Point No Point’ documents a performance staged specifically for the camera that offers novel contexts for the mind and body. Set against the iconic landscape of the Pacific Northwest, the artist is seen trudging through the ocean to become a human lighthouse. In this work, a sense of awe for the Sublime can come as both homage and parody, by re-imagining beacons, signals and forces of nature.

‘Volutes’ by Laura Brinkmann.



‘Precipitate’ by Jennifer Campbell (Canada, 2010) 00:03:43
‘Volutes / The Charm Of A Dancer’ by Laura Brinkmann (Spain, 2007) 00:05:10
‘In // Out’ by Kai Lam & Yuzuru Maeda (Singapore, 2010) 00:04:42
‘Dirty’ by Sarah Dahnke (USA, 2013) 00:01:55

The VIDEOPERFORMANCE 02 series opens with ‘Precipitate’ by Jennifer Campbell, where the body of the artist becomes a medium for experimentation employing a tragic humor by becoming a sort of human fountain. This video-performance continues to explore Jennifer Campbell’s subversion of her body through absurd and explicitly physical actions. Similar to the intrigue and frustration of watching a cat chase its tail, this performance points, or does not point, to the absurd dualities that exist in our actions and reactions.

‘The Charm Of A Dancer’ by Laura Brinkmann, a video piece composed of stop-motion photography and forms part of a larger series by the artist called ‘Volutes’. Taking place in a very regular domestic set with an unassumingly older lady sitting on her regular sofa, this work uses smoke as its principal element. The smoke slowly fills the frame of the video engulfing the older lady and everything else in the set, transmitting the undercurrents of loneliness, isolation and betrayal by life’s expectations.

‘In // Out. (After Robert Watts “Trace No.22”)’ is a collaboration between Kai Lam & Yuzuru Maeda which explores the human body in the politics of representation. The body here becomes the subject for a symbolic ‘ownership’; a medium for reclaiming one’s living conditions as a means to liberate oneself from one’s surrogated desires.

The last piece in this series is the dance film on Super-8 ‘Dirty’, a duet between woman and dirt by Sarah Dahnke, starring Elisabeth Asher and trombone by Alex Asher.

Guggenheim [video-performance, 2011] from residua on Vimeo.

This event will conclude with the screening of Guggenheim, a video-performance by Marta Moreno Muñoz.

In this video, the performer destroys a wardrobe full of VHS tapes labeled ‘Guggenheim´, first with an axe, followed by a ritualistic burning of the wardrobe and tapes. This work deals with the idea of the artist’s dissolution of her own narcissism, her contradicting sentiments towards her own practice and its conflicting relation with the ‘art institutions’.

The video-performance “Guggenheim”, first of the Destroying 2000 Years of Culture series”, was created for an alternative art festival that took place at the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao but was unfortunately censored by the direction of the museum a day before the scheduled screening on the 12th of May 2011.

ABOUT THE ARTISTS

Nerea Martinez de Lecea is an award-winning interdisciplinary artist. Her work has been exhibited/screened internationally in galleries and cinemas including: the Saatchi Gallery; Museum of Contemporary Art, Taipei; Arnolfini; Chapter; Copenhagen Contemporary Art Centre; Singapore Art Museum; and Somerset House, and at festivals including: Edinburgh; Toronto; Varna; Monaco; and Beirut.

In 2012 she created the video installation ‘We Are Still Here’, commissioned by artist Marc Rees as part of Adain Avion, Wales’ major contribution to the UK-wide project Artists Taking the Lead, part of the London 2012 Cultural Olympiad and London 2012 Festival.

In 2010 she won the Award for Fine Art at the National Eisteddfod of Wales. Members of the selection panel praised the “power” and “universality” of her work. Nerea’s work has also been featured on UK television channels BBC2 and S4C, where critics said about her work “It was very striking and honest…it had fantastic aesthetics.”

Nerea’s work has been featured in publications in the UK and USA. In 2014 she was commissioned to produce artwork for ‘Raw Material: Llareggub Revisited’ (National Theatre Wales). In 2011 she made the Professional Shortlist in the Sony World Photography Awards. In 2010, she was named as one of ‘Fifty Exceptional Photographers’ by Artists Wanted, New York. She is a winner of The Commission, a (UK) national dance film competition and, with artist Julia Winckler, produced the photographic book, ‘A Country I Always Carry With Me’.

Alongside her own practice she collaborates with artist Michele Woodey as Found&Lost:

Found&Lost @ Art Basel Miami, 2014.
‘The Ballad of Ivor Jones, part two’, Toronto, 2014.
‘The Ballad of Ivor Jones, part one’, National Theatre Wales, 2013/2014.
‘Welcome To The Dreamtime’, Stephen Romano Gallery, New York, 2014.

http://foundandlost.info

Bean is an artist of nomadic nature. Currently based in London she is founder of ]performance s p a c e [ a studio and event space in Hackney Wick.

Bean’s artistic practice stems from obsessive, paranoid, scientific and anthropological research. Her work has been described as deliberately “accidental, scattered, scuffed, blurry and incomplete”. Oscillating the poles of violence/meditation, power/control, movement/home; it revels in the feral actions, inscriptions and fringe existence of the nomadic body.

Currently focused on the inscription of her flesh, as an act of both reclaiming and disowning her body as material. The marking of the tattoo acts as the work and its documentation; questioning notions of performance as a bracketed event, the lines between art and life, the durational and the temporary.

She has presented work in Europe, Australia, Asia & USA.

www.beaninthearchive.com


Born in Manila, The Philippines to a Dutch mother and Filipino father, Martha Atienza has moved between both countries and cultures throughout her life. Currently she resides both in the Netherlands and the Philippines, dependent on where her projects bring her.

In 2006, Martha received her Bachelor in Fine Arts from the Academy of Visual Arts and Design in the Netherlands. She also participated at the art programme at the Kuvataideakatemia in Helsinki, Finland, in 2005. Previously she exhibited video art, often described as snapshots of reality, as part of installations at galleries. Her works have been exhibited internationally at various art spaces, galleries and video festivals. In 2009, she joined a residency in Green Papaya Project space in the Philippines. She recently was awarded the Ateneo Arts Award with studio Residency Grants in Liverpool, Melbourne, New York and Singapore.

Atienza’s video installations are visions culled from her Filipino and Dutch side. The precept of ‘stranger’ emanates as crevice between the operations of understanding and imagining. Her work is a series mostly constructed in video, of almost sociological nature that studies her direct environment.

Atienza concocts her observations into fictions framed by gallery devices. She does not spare herself from this presentation of anomalies. Tempting as it is to construe identity within the operation of the gaze. Atienza hardly gives us this power. She is still the employer of this gaze, even when the view is centered on her own image. It remains a curious sensation: to stand as voyeur to another person’s voyeurism.

Currently, she is investigating the usage of contemporary art as a tool for effecting social change and development.

www.marthaatienza.com

Born in Vancouver, Jennifer Campbell now lives and works in Seattle. She completed her BFA-honours in 1998 at the University of Victoria and completed her MFA in photography at Concordia University (Montreal) in 2004.

Jennifer’s image-based practice explores the process and results of transformation through the use of her own body as a performative object. She draws upon a catalog of props – familiar and obscure, ready-made and invented, static and locomotive – constructing images by positioning these props together with her body in unaccustomed ways. By subverting her body through absurd and explicitly physical actions, she aims to convey certain subjective experiences that are beyond the scope of everyday life. Her investigations are meant to stimulate ideas and create situations that challenge the viewer to interpret, explore and re-imagine their own actions, emotions and thoughts in relation to the given physical and psychological environments.

Her work has been shown in solo exhibitions at Dazibao and Galerie B-312 (Montreal), Westspace (Melbourne), Axeneo7 (Gatineau) and 4Culture (Seattle), as well as group shows in Vancouver, Toronto, Montreal, Seattle, San Francisco, Philadelphia and New York. She has also taken part in the LIVE Biennale in Vancouver where she created a live performance and video piece produced by the Grunt Gallery. Recently, she has received awards such as Landscape Instants from Centro de Arte y Naturaleza (Huesca) and the Juror’s Award at the Northwest Film Festival.

www.jennifercampbellphoto.com



Laura Brinkmann
(Spain, 1977) is a photographer and artist. She completed her Bacherlor´s Degree in Psychology in 2000 at the University of Malaga and in 2005 completed a BA in Communication Studies and Photography at the Faculty of Fine Arts in Hamburg. In 2004 she was invited to participate at Arco by the Council of Málaga and in 2007 she won the first prize of Malaga Crea , a contest for young artists. Since then she has shown her work at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Taipei, the Modern Art Centre (CAC) in Malaga, the Gallery Evelyn Botella in Madrid and PHE09, amongst others.

www.laurabrinkmann.blogspot.com

Kai Lam (Singapore, 1974) has proved an active innovator since his artistic involvements in 1995 during which he was majoring in Sculpture at Lasalle-SIA College of the Arts. In 2001, he was awarded a study grant from Lee Foundation and an education bursary from National Arts Council, and graduated from the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology’s Bachelor of Arts where he majored in Sculpture. Versatile and prolific skills in drawing, painting, sculpture, mixed-media installation and performance, Lam also collaborated in theater productions and co-organize art events. As President of alternative art group, Artists Village, he helped initiate “Artists Investigating Monuments” in 2000, presenting installations and performances in various public sites. This was later presented again in Singapore Art Museum, 2004 and Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney and at HKW, Berlin, 2005. In 2003, he started to co-organize “Future Of Imagination”, an annual international performance art festival that showcases and focuses on performance practice and in 2009 he co-initiated, “Rooted In The Ephemeral Speak” (R.I.T.E.S). Since 1999, he has travelled to different countries in Asia and Europe to present his art projects.

www.theunifiedfield.org/archives/1783

Born in Japan in 1978, Yuzuru Maeda received a Music BA from the LaSalle Collage of Arts, Singapore in 2009 and currently lives in Singapore. In her daily musical practice, she produces soundtracks, jingles and music compositions for independent films, commercials and her own video works. She performs mainly with the Sanshin (Japanese), Sarod (Indian) and Violin (Classical) with electronic sound compositions. Her musical lineage is La Monte Young and Ustad Ali Akbar Khan. She explores music and sound in cross cultural contexts and her musical works are described as ‘Beyond time and space’ which experess about divine energy and spirituality.

Besides her musical practices, Yuzuru Maeda has been making video-based works under the title of Zentai Art Project. These video works are visual explorations that are extended from her practice as a contemporary musician. In Zentai Art Project, the artist uses the ‘Zentai’ sub-culture to investigate into the human conditions of identity, spiritual connections with cosmic energy in the universe and as a means to come to terms with one’s living environment.

www.yuzuru.weebly.com

Sarah Dahnke is a Brooklyn-based choreographer, multimedia artist, and arts educator. She has earned a bachelors in dance performance from Oklahoma City University and a masters in new media and performance from New York University. As a dancer she has toured the U.S. and Europe, performing everywhere from the south of France to Lollapalooza with dance companies and bands such as Chicago Tap Theater, Undertoe Dance Project, Suite 132 Dance Company, Jigsaw Soul and The Polyphonic Spree. Under the name Round Tuit Dance Project, Dahnke’s choreography for stage and video has been showcased nationwide at venues such as Dance Theater Workshop, The Kitchen, CPR-Center for Performance Research, 319 Scholes, DUO Multicultural Arts Center, Milkbar, Hyde Park Arts Center, Ruth Page Center for the Arts, Gowanus Ballroom, and Grace Exhibition Space. Sarah teaches dance and video throughout New York City through Spoke the Hub and The Tribeca Film Institute. She is a 2013 awardee of a grant from The Puffin Foundation.

www.sarahdahnke.com



Marta Moreno Muñoz (Spain, 1978) is a performance and video artist with a background in experimental theatre and other time-based arts. Graduating in 2002 with a M.A in Fine Arts, her work has focused predominantly on “feminine” subjectivity, dissolution of the ego and the notion of pre-oedipal nostalgia in response to a patriarchal and undesirable reality. She is at present in a transitional stage, shifting towards the conceptualization of larger-scale projects exploring the complex interchange between performance art and cinematic language.

Currently based in The Philippines, she is working on personal artistic projects, researching for her PhD thesis “Art as an Experience of Dissolution of the Self” and directing The Unifiedfield; Marta Moreno has lived, produced and engaged in artistic works in Spain, UK, Turkey, India, The Netherlands, Indonesia, Singapore, and exhibited internationally.

www.theunifiedfield.net