Event and Ticketing Details
Dates & Times
Tuesday 18 March
6:15 PM - 7:15 PM
What is body-based art? Surgically grafting an ear onto an arm? Exploring human rights or gender identity through performance? Contemporary dance interwoven with light and sound? Challenging preconceived notions about sexuality? In all of these cases, the body is a powerful site – and instrument – for art. In this discussion, performance artists take to the stage to talk about how their bodies have influenced their art, and about the body as a site for extreme performance.
In association with Arts House as part of FOLA – Melbourne’s inaugural Festival of Live Art – burlesque star Moira Finucane, physical movement artist Natalie Abbott, famed bodywork performer Stelarc and Casey Jenkins, the artist behind 2013 vaginal knitting art project Casting Off My Womb, come together to explore the human body as an expression of and location for art to take place. Here, the boundaries of how the body can be a means of artistic expression are challenged.
Hosted by curator/producer Julianne Pierce.
Art & us.
The nature and meaning of art has been hotly debated for centuries, but in this new series for 2014, the Wheeler Centre explores the impact of art in a variety of contexts. We look at how artistic practice fits in to the many diverse aspects of everyday life, as well as how its context has a direct effect on the realms of inspiration and creation.
Featuring
Casey Jenkins
Casey Jenkins is a queer solo parent by choice to two children and a performance/installation/community artist exploring intimacy, identity and the interplay between modes of power (individual and institutional, perceived ...
Moira Finucane
Moira Finucane is a writer, director, performer and creator of volcanic and magic realist worlds … legendary salons, literary variety and intimate theatrical spectacles, internationally renowned for her arresting mix of provocation and entertainment.
Finucane has defined and redefined cabaret around the world - from Budapest to Tokyo, Hong Kong to Stockholm, Ljubljana to Sydney Opera House. She is the black matter of burlesque; a bower bird across artforms, pecking the eyes from culture to create indelible visions of humanity, joy, power and desire.
One half of the legendary House of Finucane & Smith, she has won 15 theatre awards including six Green Room Awards, the Australia Council’s coveted Theatre Fellowship and the once-in-a-lifetime Contribution to Cabaret Award.
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Natalie Abbott
Natalie Abbott is a Victorian based artist. She graduated form dance at the VCA in 2007 as the recipient of the Orloff Family Trust Scholarship for most outstanding talent, and has since channeled her energies into creating visceral dance work; performing nationally and internationally with in Asia, Europe and America; and working with various independent choreographers and visual artists in Melbourne, the UK and NY.
Her works include Ultimate Pressure (video and sensory immersion) at Next Wave Festival (2010), Circles For Squares, Lucy Guerin’s Pieces for Small Spaces (2011), LEVITY – a video work at Blindside Gallery (2012), PHYSICAL FRACTALS at Next Wave Festival 2012, Dance Massive, Melbourne and PACT presents, Sydney (2013); SWEAT, live art for Tiny Stadiums Festival (2013) and MAXIMUM (2014).
Natalie’s new work MAXIMUM has been developed through residencies at PACT in Sydney, Arts House (Culture Lab) in Melbourne and Lucy Guerin INC. The work will premiere May 2014 at Arts House for Next Wave Festival, tour to Avingon festival in France, and to Sydney. Natalie is an avid performer and choreographer constantly seeking to extend her craft through practice and experience.
Stelarc
Stelarc is a performance artist who has visually probed and acoustically amplified his body.
He has made 3 films of the inside of his body. Between 1976-1988 he completed 25 body suspension performances with hooks into the skin. He has used medical instruments, prosthetics, robotics, virtual reality systems, the internet and biotechnology to explore alternate, intimate and involuntary interfaces with the body.
He has performed with a third hand, a virtual arm, a stomach sculpture and exoskeleton, a 6-legged walking robot.
His FRACTAL FLESH, PING BODY and PARASITE performances explored involuntary, remote and internet choreography of the body with electrical stimulation of the muscles. His PROSTHETIC HEAD is an embodied conversational agent that speaks to the person who interrogates it. He is surgically constructing an extra ear on his arm that will be internet enabled, making it publicly accessible acoustical organ for people in other places. He is presently performing as his avatar from his Second Life site.
In 1995, Stelarc received a three year Fellowship from the Australia Council’s Visual Arts/Craft Board, and in 2004 was awarded a two year New Media Arts Fellowship. In 1997 he was appointed Honorary Professor of Art and Robotics at Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh. He was Artist-In-Residence for Hamburg City in 1997. In 2000 he was awarded an Honorary Degree of Laws by Monash University.
He has completed Visiting Artist positions in Art and Technology, at the Faculty of Art and Design at Ohio State University in Columbus in 2002, 2003 and 2004. He has been Principal Research Fellow in the Performance Arts Digital Research Unit and a Visiting Professor at The Nottingham Trent University, UK.
He is currently Chair in Performance Art, School of Arts, Brunel University, Uxbridge, UK. He is also Senior Research Fellow and Visiting Artist at the MARCS Lab at the University of Western Sydney, Australia. Stelarc’s artwork is represented by the Scott Livesey Galleries in Melbourne.