Image Credit: Richard Ibghy & Marilou Lemmens, When the Guests Are Not Looking, 2016-18 (workshop documentation at Audain Gallery 2018, performed by SFU students). Photo: Richard Ibghy.
CANCELLED
Panel: Performing Intertextuality
Thursday February 22, 2018, 7pm
SFU, Audain Gallery, Vancouver
Performing Intertextuality draws together the praxis of two projects in SFU Galleries' new series entitled Of Bodies, On Land, In Time. These projects are Richard Ibghy and Marilou Lemmens' When the Guests Are Not Looking (Jan 20-Feb 17), and Naufus Ramírez-Figueroa's Corazón del espantapájaros (Heart of the Scarecrow) (forthcoming 2019).
When the Guests Are Not Looking is both an artist book and an installation that considers productivity in relation to art and performance. Structured around the vagabond nephew in Denis Diderot's late 18th century satirical text Rameau's Nephew that presents a dialogue on work and idlenessbetween the nephew and a philosopher, When the Guests Are Not Looking offers an alternate view to the demands of post-Fordist labour regimes and neoliberal social processes on individual performance. The artists explore how these expectations operate in the gallery through installation and live performance.
Corazón del espantapájaros (Heart of the Scarecrow) explores the historical reverberations of Guatemalan playwright Hugo Carillo's 1962 play of the same name, and its oblique interpretation by students at El teatro de la Universidad Popular de Guatemala in 1975, which provoked one of the most severe censorships of the arts during the Guatemalan Civil War (1960-1996). Ramírez-Figueroa considers the endurance of artistic production in tumultuous times, the political efficacy of education, and the long-term effects of censorship.
Panelists Sabeth Buchmann and Alma Ruiz will discuss how Ibghy, Lemmens and Ramírez-Figueroa read history through literature, literature through performance, performance through history. The cultural and socio-geographic contexts within which Diderot and Carillo wrote will be discussed, alongside the current cultural and social climate within which the artists revisit their texts. The discussion will be moderated by Peter Dickinson.
Of Bodies, On Land, In Time is a SFU Galleries series that foregrounds performative, process-based and embodied practices that attend to the social, political and economic pressures that impact people, land-relations, and material and immaterial culture.
Sabeth Buchmann is an art historian and critic based in Berlin and Vienna, where she is Professor of the History of Modern and Postmodern Art at the Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna. She co-edits PoLyPen, a series on art criticism and political theory and her publications include Putting Rehearsals to the Test: Practices of Rehearsal in Fine Arts, Film, Theater, Theory, and Politics, co-edited with Ilse Lafer and Constanze Ruhm (2016) which includes a text by Richard Ibghy and Marilou Lemmens; Hélio Oiticica, Neville D'Almeida and others: Block-Experiments in Cosmococa, written with Max Jorge Hinderer Cruz (2013); Art After Conceptual Art, edited with Alexander Alberro (2006).
Alma Ruiz is a Guatemalan-American curator based in Los Angeles who has primarily focused on contemporary art from the post-war period in Italy and Latin America. She was the Senior Curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles from 1984 to 2015, where she curated exhibitions featuring Lygia Clark, Magdalena Fernández, Hélio Oiticica, and Gabriel Orozco, among others. In 2016 she curated the 20 Bienal de Arte Paiz in Guatemala City, and she is currently Senior Fellow at Sotheby’s Institute of Art Los Angeles/Claremont Graduate University.
Peter Dickinson is Professor in the English Department and the School for the Contemporary Arts at SFU. He is also an Associate Member of the Department of Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies at SFU and is Director of SFU’s Institute for Performance Studies. Trained as a literary critic, he has also written for the stage. His publications include World Stages, Local Audiences: Essays on Performance, Place, and Politics (2010); the co-edited volume Women and Comedy: History, Theory, Practice (2014); and a co-edited issue of the journal PUBLIC on Mega-Event Cities: Art/Audiences/Aftermaths (2016).
Supported by the Canada Council for the Arts and The Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery.
Click the exhibition title for more information.
Richard Ibghy and Marilou Lemmens: When the Guests Are Not Looking
Naufus Ramírez-Figueroa: Corazón del espantapájaros (Heart of the Scarecrow)
