EVENT-BODIES
EVENT-BODIES
“EVENT-BODIES” is the 3rd edition of Live Exhibition Performance Series organized and curated by the collective SENSORIUM SPACE Happenings. The 3rd edition is a three-day event consisting of live performances, video and film screenings. The mornings will start with lectures and discussions, materialising through a reflective-mirror exhibition design, a ten-day art-residency at the library of PUBLICS’ event space, and an online publication.
The Live Exhibition Performance Art Series “Event-bodies” will be held in September 2021 at both Vapaan Taiteen Tila, PUBLICS event space and online. This year’s edition focuses on the cultural exchange between Finland-based, Greece-based, and Cyprus-based art professionals with the potential to discuss the need of re-contextualisation in contemporary art, and especially in the art of living exhibits (live and performance art) who engage the body and the public.
“EVENT-BODIES” studies and negotiates the body, its materiality, and its existence during the pandemic. The event is a hybrid between the virtual, the actual and the spatial where the body occurs in two (or more) spatio-temporal environments. The bodily perception of EVENT-BODIES aims to find means to represent and present the altered body through screen-projections and physical means. Particularly, what is altered is the sense of being within public space. The body alters by becoming fragmented within physical and virtual environments (i.e., through virtual channels, dream-images, the net, online/offline, camera, video projections), provoking multiple spatio-temporal re-presentations. The body becomes both a medium and an event that co-exist in the physical and the virtual inhabitations, and consequently enable a sense of multiple-representations. The hyper-connected body in the pandemic age is simultaneously over-anxious, isolated, and constantly monitored by a surveillance regime. pandemic. Through the 3rd iteration of our collective’s activities, we explore, curate and make public the current shifts towards the virtual environments that currently require one to re-question and re-contextualise the contemporary event-body.
The above issues do not only affect the body, its materiality and its existence, but it also affects the archivable and the public space. Particularly, with the now expanded need for remote access and digital archives, the library’s status as a publicly accessible repository of knowledge is questioned. Through the ten-day art-residency we ask the artist to question, reflect and rethink how the archivable collections may become institutionalised event-bodies, repositioning the artist’s actual and virtual spatio-temporal co-ordinates. How do new forms of in-habiting the library entail yet-to-determined modes of behaviour and by extension new subjects.
Through our creative initiatives we seek to apply a subversive approach to the above issues by creatively exposing the consequences and the current shifts of the pandemic. Our individual experiences in live art, performance, visual arts, architecture, installation and design, film and production formulate synthesised and multi-dimensional perspectives that not only allow us to design an exclusive angle through it, but also juncture our network and cultural heritage (i.e., Greece, Cyprus, Finland, and Germany) with the potential of conceiving a creative and diverse cultural discussion concerning the pandemic-body (event-body, dissociated-body, spatial-body).