PERFORMANCE:LISTE Art Fair 2018
The 14th Performance Project of LISTE Art Fair 2018 featured a series of seven solo and group performances by artists interested in dissolving the boundaries of performance art, sound, and music, of art, pop, and politics as well as of matter and life in general, also several galleries presented Performances in their booths.
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: LISTE Art Fair Archive
As part of the Jenny’s booth presentation at LISTE, Dan Mitchell has invited the musician Ben Wallers to perform as “The Rebel”. Wallers is the frontman of the band Country Teasers, known for their satirical, scathing lyrics and unorthodox live performances. The Rebel is a solo project which has co-existed alongside the Country Teasers since the late 80s, releasing several albums and performing in the context of both music and art. Narrated from the perspective of various invented and self-aware personas, often blurring the lines of gender and race, The Rebel’s lyrics expound upon a wide range of current cultural issues and political turmoil. In the Official program Vaginal Davis presented “Blick und Begehren” (2017-18), a self-defined “cultural antagonist” and “erotic provocateur” Vaginal Davis’ practice has spanned a multitude of genres from zine making to filmmaking, to DJing and being the lead singer of the punk band Afro Sisters. Davis’s work deploys radical politics, makeshift aesthetics, and wicked humor, the theorist José Esteban Muñoz dubbed Davis’s mode of performance “drag terrorism” alluding specifically to her unique style of performance and her decidedly unconservative politics. Basel Vorisek continued this endeavour with a new iteration of his ongoing work “Whip Drone” (2018). He swings a whip to accelerate metal spinners which consequently create layers of gnarly, nearly hallucinatory, vaguely technoid sighing sound spheres exceeding the limits of perceptibility. Nora Turato presented her performance at LambdaLambdaLambda booth. In her spoken word performances the artist incorporates fragments of advertising slogans, daily conversations, literature, social media posts, platitudes, cliches and politics that culminate in a powerful soundscape that can be situated between performance art and contemporary music. Turato edits her script-based live performances in videos addressing the problematic question of how to document or archive a performance work. For the last two years, Daniel Jacoby has been developing a body of sculptural work that deals with the relationship between clothing as a product, and the body as a produced image. Daniel has transformed his laser-cut MDF and aluminum static structures into bulky and roughly cut foam pieces, and has brought them back onto the body. These soft volumes, filled with stretched socks, underwear, and other garments, are not exactly worn but rather carried by performers as some sort of portable storefronts. In an act that flirts with a fashion runway show, but defies some of its codes, His performance aims at making the bodies disappear behind the voluminous pastel shapes. Adopting odd ways of moving (e.g. slowly walking backwards) and positioning themselves (e.g. yoga poses) the foam blobs seem to fluctuate between inanimate racks and phantasmagoric bodies.
