Born to be a Still Life
Symposium:
Title:
- Born to be a Still Life
Organiser/Presenter(s):
Statement:
Workshop Statement
ART IN PROCESS is an Australian/Austrian artist team that has worked interdisciplinarily across installation, new media, performance and live art for over ten years, creating experimental work, that involves interactions with public participants and functions within non-traditional spaces. We develop projects internationally, recently, in Vienna and Sydney. In our artistic work we explore relationships between humanity, technology and the natural environment in a socio-cultural context, addressing issues related to identity and belonging that arise from globalization. Projects address the elimination of existing distances arising from the borders and barriers that exist between countries, cultures and individual people. We ask questions about how we fit into certain places, what impact we have on our surroundings and what particular impact these surroundings have on us. The workshop Born to be a Still Life is open for participants from any discipline, who are interested in themes and issues related to identity, belonging, and cultural difference/likeness, and in experimentation with different artistic media that involve new media as a transmitting and fusing element. Born to be a Stil Life asks questions about positioning us in this world, about differences of Western and Eastern Culture and how we individually try to accommodate to certain issues (in this case based on surveying public spaces in Istanbul). During the introduction, session participants will be selected to take active part in the artistic project that will develop from the workshop. Participants will work with us on performances in public space, experimenting with the human body through mime, gesture, movement and voice and utilising improvisation; they will explore how it feels to occupy a particular space and what internal and external reactions are caused by it. We will investigate and discuss the limits of control and release and the layers in between. Performative and temporal actions will ask questions about the original needs of a human being within its surrounding environment/society and within different cultural contexts. The process will be strongly driven by each participant’s commitment. Single performances will be filmed and accessible for an audience in public and privates space throughout the process. Questions will address our existence, reality and illusion in relation to the co-existence of mind and body and different cultural backgrounds. From the process resulting, a video and sound installation will round off the whole creative process. A public presentation involving a final live performance in front of an invited audience during ISEA is planned. The workshop will conclude in an end-presentation of what has been developed with participants throughout the two days of the workshop. This experimental piece, bringing together a live act and video/sound installation will form one of the components of the Born to be a still life – project series that ART IN PROCESS creates through multiple international collaborations in 2011.
