Playlist:

Performance

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In this week's Playlist we present a selection of videos by contemporary artists that feature performances.


Amelia Beavis-Harrison, The War Room, 2018

 

The War Room is a fictitious play space for the capitalist profit driven Thorn Group whose main pre-occupation is to dominate the Grønland area of Oslo though aggressive gentrification. The installation shows hints of planned strategies to change the local area through development of leisure business, replacing the current local independent character of Grønland. Working in partnership with leading international coffee shop chains the Thorn Groups War Room is built around a strategy table in the heart of the room, where a high stakes casino game takes place.

The casino game hints towards current gentrification strategies in the area with initiatives such as Olav Thons militarisation of security and Starbucks new presence causing a ripple effect of closing down smaller businesses. The Thorn Group gambles casually on property occupation, slowly changing the face of the area.

Check out Amelia's profile on Axisweb >


Candice Jacobs, CONVERSATIONS AS A REFLECTION OF MY COLLECTIVE SELF, 2017

 

Celeste Art Prize Finalist, OXO Tower, London
(Performance, white quartz sand zen garden, 9c gold plated 3d printed bronze Fortuna cigarettes, 5min audio, wireless headphones, imac, HD video, digitally printed floor cushions, bathroom mirror)
Dimensions variable

Three 5 min one-on-one performances with an audience. For each time slot, Jacobs pulled a card from her Tarot deck the previous day to determine the reading. The Tarot card was translated into a new
collection of symbols which aligned signs towards the relationship between productivity, technology and labour, such as the “refresh” button and the “next” button.

This new symbolic language combined with an astrological reading fo the time of day and location of the site, produced a reading that reveals intuitive insight into the character of the participant and the affect this might have on their own forms of production; resulting in the construction of a collective form of self, initiated by participation in the event.

Check out Candice's profile on Axisweb >


Jo Ray, Pictorial House Modelling (After Miss Joyce Inall), 2015

 

In the 1920s and 30s, an engineer called Edward Walter Hobbs published a miscellany of instructional books, with subjects ranging from 'How to Make Model Clipper Ships' to 'Concrete for Amateurs'. The connecting principle appears to have been the development of skill in changing one’s environment, via practice at a domestic and even miniature scale.

Hobb’s ‘Pictorial House Modelling’ (1928) features carefully choreographed illustrations demonstrating each stage of the process, through a depiction of the hand, posed mid-action.

A model for the making of models.

‘It is difficult to describe in words how to acquire the touch necessary to produce a really keen edge, but the knife should be worked to and fro over the stone, turning the wrist and thereby the blade of the knife at each end of the stroke...’.

Miss Joyce Inall is cited by Hobbs as having prepared the models for the illustrations, and, imagining the hands in the photographs to be hers, I made a performance to camera, my own hands reflected in the glass of the computer monitor, trying to accumulate knowledge by emulating the gestures of a skilled maker.

In 1918 an engineer also named E. W. Hobbs patented a prosthetic hand.

Check out Jo's profile on Axisweb >


Rebecca Glover, SLABS, 2017

 

Slabs is a band of sculptures and humans. Through mimicry harmony and distortion their music defies genres and articulates a new way of listening to objects and their incredible voices.

Sculptures are activated through feedback loops and the voices of performers who engage in a form of dialogue with the sound.

'The sound bears similar surprises to the early days of free jazz. There is a continuous breakdown and discovery of melody that resembles a chain of disrupted conversations.
The confluence of rhythms coming from the continuously varying group of activators, makes the music equal parts primary and protest. Interested in ideas such as Pauline Olivero’s deep listening, Glover champions dissonance as the sound of alternative thinking. Her work belongs to the quieter forms of political action, that ask how we determine music from noise or the expected from the relevant. Where classical protest pushes away, this conversely invites-in the multitudes. If globalism had a sound, this might be it. '
Ashlee Conery
Rebecca Glover and SLABS release their first EP July 1, 2017 some of which can be heard online @ https://soundcloud.com/rebecca-glover-5/ndndahssssst

Check out Rebecca's profile on Axisweb >


More film and video works >