Off Art Brussels 2012 I satellite meeting
ExperienZ, a new annual event conceived as an experimental platform, a mixture of discussions, new works and artistic practices, all Live, will be held on 20 April from 4pm to midnight at the Beursschouwburg, in parallel to the Art Brussels fair.
For this first edition, entitled Bodies That Matter, the two curators, Nathalie Guiot-Saucier and Agnès Violeauont, set out to raise the question of gender in art, through the different forms of performance. The body and identity are at the centre of the debate here.
Line-up performances
4 pm Gilles Collard and Vincent Dieutre
5 pm Valérie Mrejen
6 pm Julien Bismuth and Gregg Goldston
6:30 pm Marcelline Delbecq and Elina Löwensohn
7 pm Cocktail
8 pm Hsia-Fei Chang, Karaoké burlesque
9 pm Lydia Lunch and Elise Passavant
10 pm Carole Douillard
22h30 pm Emmanuel Lagarrigue
23h pm Christophe Fiat
From iconic figures such as Martha Rosler, Eva Hesse, Rosemarie Trockel and Marina Abramovic, and in political positioning, in work echoing the gender theories of the early 1970s (Lucy Lippard) and late 1980s (Judith Butler), and through the development of the queer movement, feminist artists have constantly challenged the frontiers between the private and the political, between social critique and artistic experiment. Is there such a thing as women’s art, and is it possible to speak of female and male genius, or is that merely sexist? What has become of the original attribution of roles and their representation in art? While it is possible to speak of different aesthetic or societal languages, for Butler gender or socially assigned sexuality is “a social performance that is learned, repeated and executed.” Finally, how do male artists view women and women artists? For Simone de Beauvoir, women constitute a lack in opposition to which men constitute their identity.
Art history has often airbrushed women from discourse. And even if there may not be a distinctively female form of art, the performances selected for ExperienZ #1: Bodies That Matter begin to adumbrate answers, to tell another (hi)story.
