PRAXIS, INC: Gallery 2021

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The video-collage consists of the images from the live rehearsals for a group dance-theater piece; solo studies created in private spaces which explore the themes of « fragmented body » and « infinite subjectivity »; and photos and  footage from the streets of NYC taken during the pandemic and social protests in the spring 2020. The text in the video-collage is from Alain Badiou’s ‘In Praise of Love’, Mallarmé’s poem ‘The Fool Chastised’ and Sean Lewis’ writing in response to the events in the city. The sound score includes the music by the composition by the avant-garde composer Luigi Nono - ‘The Forest is Young and Full of Life’; Jason Ciaccio playing the guitar, and an excerpt from a live recording from the protests. The images and scenes are linked to each other through visual and visceral associations in a non-linear, surreal fashion. The creation of the video-collage involved email discussion as well as exchange between the collaborators of the newly made kinetic materials.

The performers in the video excerpts and photos are Julie Fotheringham, Michael Mangieri, Sean Lewis, Julian Donahue and Marija Krtolica. The video collage was shown at the Borders: “Fragmented Identities” and “New Landscapes”, Itsliquid Festival in Venice (Italy) in Fall 2020.

Marija Krtolica is a choreographer and dance scholar. She holds MA in  Performance Studies (Tisch School of the Arts), MFA in choreography (UC Davis), and PhD. in dance (Temple University). Her doctoral dissertation “The Embodiment of the Unconscious: Hysteria Surrealism and Tanzheater” (2018) addressed the relationship between the nineteenth century hysteria, and 20th century dance-theater. As an art maker Marija aims to join vigurous movement practice, poetry of human embodiment, and theoretical inquiry. Her article “Expression and  Symptom”was published in Documenta (Ghent University), September 2019.

“heritage under (de)construction” is a selection of performance documentations and video-performances by three female visual artists from Greece; Anna Papathanasiou, Maria Louizou and Eleni Tsamadia. This selection of performances aims to investigate the cultural particularities enabled by the artists’ practices and work through notions of the “traditional”, by utilizing a contemporary vision and aesthetic. The featured artists engaging with performance practices are re-thinking narratives of Greek heritage through a subversive mode of performing the ancient, the historical and the sacred, in order to blur it’s “structural seams”and comment on its construction. All three of them are exploring Greek cultural elements in order for them to be deconstructed and rethought in a contemporary critical context.

Odette Kouzou (b. 1994) lives and works in Athens as a curator and a researcher. She holds a Masters’s degree in Performance Studies / Tisch School of the Arts / NYU (2019) and a Bachelors’s in Art History from Athens School of Fine Arts (2017). With a background in art history, she operates through the lens of various feminisms to curate, research, write and meditate on contemporary art and performance matters. She has been involved in various creative environments, such as Snehta Residency, Hyle (founded by Georgia Sagri) and ArtAthina2019. Currently, she works as a research and curatorial assistant alongside Aphrodite Gounou (Contemporary Art Advisor of the Museum of Cycladic Art (Athens) and Chisenhale Gallery (London). She also works as a production associate of Greece in USA (founded by Curator Dr. Sozita Goudouna). Finally, she has been nominated as an emerging curator for Whitechapel and NEON Curatorial Exchange Program 2020.

Kouzou made this selection of performance documentations and video-performances gives the opportunity for international audiences to discover works of Greek artists and engage with an art scene, they weren't familiar with before.

EAT by Anna Papathanasiou, presented live in New York (2018), during the “The Time Bomb Gala at the Watermill Center under the direction of Robert Wilson.

“Eat” is a two hour long performative piece in which the artist consumes her bust and head sculpture made out of white chocolate. It was selected and performed as part of the Time Bomb Gala at the Watermill center and reprised at the Discover Watermill day, under the direction of Robert Wilson in New York. “When one attempts to interpret any kind of structure, say a language or a universe, it is a common approach to begin by locating the archetypal forms within it. When the structure one attempts to ‘read’ is one’s ‘self’, I suggest he/she creates archetypal versions of the ‘self’ itself, in this case the cannibal. The Cannibal aesthetically resembles statues that derive from the ancient Greek sculpture. The work depicts the moment one discovers the process of self-consumption. The Cannibal begins to devour him/herself as a manifestation of a self-destructive practice. Time is a significant factor in order for a person to identify the reason why the self-consuming cannibal appears as an obsolete statue that we can only passively study like archaeologists. Adrian Trikas-Pandis

 Works by Maria Louizou: “The Passage” presented at the EMST (2018), “The Monument” presented in an empty industrial area resembling a monologue or lament, while the image derives from the Kores of Erechtheion.

The “Passage”, 2017, wool and metal, 750 x 235 x 305 cm. National Museum of  Contemporary Art, EMST, 2018. “The Passage” is created from ninety kilos of wool woven on an upright loom. It stands on a semi-circular frame exceeding human height and there is a row of the same material. They serve as cases to receive specific parts of the human body and are inhabited  by seven singers per hour.  While the performers put on the elements of the piece, the whole composition looks like a revival of a monument’s frieze. This  piece focuses on how civilization deals with personal loss and renders it collective. An archetypal, warm embrace opens before the spectators as a kind of rebirth and collective caring. 

“The Monument”, 2016,  handcraft and metal, 700 x 750 x 500 cm. Library of Athens School of Fine Arts. “The Monument” is an ensemble comprising three parts: a suspended piano, an upright body with its head in it, and a performer in this position who sings a tune from Lesbos. The piece is presented in an empty industrial area which allows the echo to turn the melodies and the lyrics into extended sounds. What you hear resembles a monologue or lament, while the image derives from the Kores of the Erehtheion. The piano with a concealed metal frame  is draped in a white handcrafted cloth, while the female figure is dressed in the same cloth, so that it functions as a  complete body, with the piano for head. This piece speaks of the impossible marriage of a female figure with her local history, and at the same time of the insistence of the body and the spirit to be part of a whole with an identity and a history to narrate.

Works by Eleni Tsamadia: “Venus De Milo” video is an attempt of an exact reproduction of Aphrodite of Milos.  “Divine particles” a physical performance on a digital environment.

Eleni Tsamadia is a visual artist based in Athens/Greece. She received her bachelors and master's degree from the ASFA. Her practice is concept driven and spread through different mediums. She has so far created two solo projects and taken part in various group shows in Greece and abroad. Her latest work focuses on painting and raises the question on how the body is being represented through that medium nowadays. 

“Venus De Milo” video is an attempt of an exact reproduction of Aphrodite of Milos. No official permission was granted for this reproduction to be conducted but the artist's urge to study the classics overpowered the law.

“Divine particles” is a physical performance on a digital environment. This short video action is based upon the idea of experiencing infinity. How does infinity Looks or feels? How the stories about it and the actual concept differs? How do our selves become infinite by their digital appearance and their random distribution?

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This 3-part piece, drawing on an archive of fetish/kink related content that are customs I’ve created for clients over the past few years. The videos themselves are all different, each one an enactment of a certain fantasy the client brings to me, granted they are within my limits. 

So I’m using one of these videos, that I’ve distorted with threshold and other effects to an outline, that focuses on me getting myself off - a masturbatory loop. I made the audio drawing on a collection of internet artifacts and remixing/sampling them. I recommend using headphones for the best listening experience, but keeping an eye on the volume to not hurt your ears. It will be more affectively powerful with the volume up though. Link to project slides.

In terms of continuing this project, I’m intending this video to be one part of a series. This one focuses on submission, and the next one will focus on domination, while the third will break from that binary and express a a more fluid space of queer sexual sensibility, Endorsing a politics that enables a multiplicity of desires and identifications. But this is not to say that submission/domination aren't queer positionalities, bc they most definitely are.

Chaski No: Maneuvering blur & rupture through expanded audiovisual performance and engineering, Chaski's work happens amidst cybernetics of desire and memory, visceral transgression, dysrhythmia, discontinuity, queerness and sonic material tonality

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A cesura is a metrical pause or break in a verse where one phrase ends and another phrase begins. What does it mean to stop, to break, to be in the fracture? ‘cesura’ delves into this space amidst theoretical formulations of the break. A study in putting our attachments into play/pleasure/knowledge/worlds, ‘cesura’ focuses on viscerally transgressive movement, broken transmission, material degradation of moving image, and scoring affect. Engaging Foucault’s preface to his seminal text "Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason", we hack up the text and stage its live reenactment in a screen-recorded transcription.

'cesura' draws on our familial archives, audio visualization, Super 8 Footage, the video work of trans peruanx artist and philosopher Giuseppe Campuzano, the 1950 short film Un Chant d'Amour by Jean Genet which features the uncredited dancing of Coco Le Martiniquais, and field recordings from collaborators. We start with sound engineering - editing, automating and overlaying sonic textures to inform new combinations of frequencies. Working separately and together first in the digital audio workspace and then in video editing software, we improvise and play off each other. Details become portals in a disobedient multitude. ‘cesura’ celebrates its disorder lending itself to the power-potential of glitches and errors.

(@solychaski) is a duo comprised of Chaski No (they/them) and Sol Cabrini de la Ciudad (she/her). Operating in a tradition of loss and disappearance, they are interested in the affirmation of fragments through a collaborative practice communing with the incommensurable geographies of an alterity that resists interpretation. Maneuvering blur & rupture through expanded audiovisual performance/engineering, Chaski's work deals with the cybernetics of desire and memory, visceral transgression, dysrhythmia, and discontinuity.
Sol Cabrini (Trans)mits research between moving image, trans dysfunctional bodily conformity, and sound editing as a way of productive fragmentation.

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Two percussive dance artists from different continents, each carrying the tradition of a unique art form, came together online in an expression of cross-cultural exploration during this global pandemic. This collaborative project was created and performed by B.A .students Tanya Bagnato and Chandsi Kataria. They hope viewers will find joy in  experiencing the intrinsic similarities between their beloved Tap Dance and Bharatanatyam.

Tanya Bagnato and Chandsi Kataria are both performing artists who are in their first year at Performance Studies. To view more of their work, please visit their respective websites.

breath&blood // a delirium on haptics & refusal is a project on the desire to remain obscure flesh, shrouded in tremulous mysticism with other things. It is a queer practice of poetics that has emerged as an overall recast of body, subject, human, thing. Sadé's exploration of interobjectivity with the typewriter is only made possible by her willingness and openness to embracing her own illegibility and proximity to no-thing-ness. b&b is what else after the exhale, rhizoming lines of resistance, the desirability of bodylessness, and its potentialities. In an effort to transmute the biopolitical toxins and molecular processes of neoliberalist capture out of/through the Body, out of/through Man, she adopts the neologism, breath&blood, to express the texture and materiality of her practice of refusal through visual and concrete poetry. 

Sadé Powell was born in Baltimore and raised in every borough of New York City. She’s spent the last 7 years in Oakland as an organizer, leading and implementing community-based programs for BIPOC and queer youth in the Bay Area. She is a visual and concrete poet influenced by typewriter art and has self-published poems grappling with mysticism, fugitivity, love, thingliness, queerness, and grief. Her recent typewriter collection, breath&blood // a delirium on haptics & refusal, is an imaginative experimentation on interobjectivity as proximity and relation to otherwise potentialities.