Living in Time from Live Art Mexico on Vimeo.
Performance Program: Living in Time
Museo Ex Teresa Arte Actual & organized by Casa Viva Gallery.
Friday, February 11th, 2022, 7:00 - 9:00pm
In a period in which our relationship with time has irrevocably changed, Living in Time makes visible the power of transforming small actions and repetitions into rituals. Responding to the architecture of the former church, Arantxa Araujo, in collaboration with LUM Arte y Medios y Vicios Ocultos, Alejandro Chellet, Miao Jiaxin, and Verónica Peña, consider how place grounds experience and how our environments mediate our connection with ourselves and others. The title refers to the text We are opposite like that (Subcontinentment books: 2020) by the writer and artist Himali Singh Soin. The poem begins, “we live in time, even as we experience the world in duration,” and continues to trouble the “invisible tension between objective reality and the subjectivity of perception.” While this extended moment of crisis brings new anxieties, it also presents an opportunity to unbound ourselves from a linear relationship with time and imagine new forms of communication.
In Timelessness (2022), a new performance created for this occasion, Arantxa Araujo, in collaboration with LUM Arte y Medios y Vicios Ocultos, explores the nature of time by embarking on and breaking cycles of fluidity. Following a set of prescribed actions centered around ritual involving melting wax and icy water, she constructs a mask only to remove it and leave a piece of herself behind. Set against the light interplay of the projection she has choreographed and sound Mariana Uribe has scored, the motions repeat and upend at different intervals and speeds, ultimately dissecting our perception of presence and existence.
Alejandro Chellet’s Navigating human traces (2022) investigates human development through the history of our relationship to water. After spending extended periods within this major territorial force on this planet and attuning himself to a different pace, his research looks to shift a perspective of framing time on land. He also considers the historically violent interactions that water facilitated (of colonialism and conquest) and now experiences when humans extract oil from the sea. Inspired by recent sailing experiences on México’s Pacific Coast, Chellet will perform a series of intuitive movements atop a collection of maps.
In the premiere of Bubble Breathing (2022), Miao Jiaxin stands inside a glass box, blowing soap bubbles dyed with red pigment. As a microphone amplifies each of his breaths via the speakers set up in the space, the bubbles explode onto the walls. The red pigment slowly covers the glass layer by layer as the performance progresses, marking the artist’s respiratory cycle. Through the accumulation of time, the presence of breath intensifies, and the existence and the potential threat of breath are made manifest.
Verónica Peña's The Body in the Substance (2018-2022) is an ongoing project in which she considers notions of ritual, time, the counteraction of violence, and the promotion of human harmony. Through this durational work, Peña will submerge herself underwater while a metamorphosis transforms her body's appearance. In the confined space of the water tank, time presents as both suspended as if she is in a primordial or embryonic world and acutely dire with her breathing at threat.
Text by Samantha Ozer.
Photos: Rodrigo Jardón.
Arantxa Araujo is a Mexican transdisciplinary artist with a background in neuroscience. Her work is essentially multidisciplinary, feminist, and rooted in bio-behavioral research. Explorations of gender constructions, performativity and identity, and the politics of migration are seen and experienced in her installations, which often include video, sound, photography, mapping, light, and performance. Her work has been shown in the Brooklyn Museum, at the Radical Women Latin American Art Exhibit, Chashama Space to Present, Grace Exhibition Space, Glasshouse Gallery, The Queens Museum, Panoply Lab, Art in Odd Places, New York; RAW during Miami Art Week; the Semel and Huret & Spector Gallery, Boston; SPACE Gallery and Bunker Projects, Pittsburgh; El Monumento a la Revolución and La Explanada del MUAC, during the Hemispheric Institute’s Encuentro and El Vicio, México. She has participated in the Nuit Blanche Festival in Saskatoon, Canada. Araujo is a Franklin Furnace Fund for performance art award recipient (2019-2020), BAC grantee (2020), an LMCC (2019) grantee and has received support through numerous residencies and fellowships including Leslie-Lohman Museum Artist Fellowship (2019-2020), Creative Capital taller (2018), ITP Camp (2018, 2019) and EMERGENYC (2017). Araujo was awarded a full scholarship from Mexican Government Institution CONACYT (2012).
Alejandro Chellet is a Mexican multidisciplinary artist. His work addresses the misplaced core principles of coexistence, the loss of connection with Nature and the political and environmental context of urban societies. His artwork ranges from social practice, painting, sculpture, site specific installations, urban interventions and performances using permaculture, artivism, improvisation, somatic movement, politics, altruism and shamanism practices. His work has been shown at festivals, museums and galleries in Europe, Asia, North, Central and South America, including Museo de Arte de Tlaxcala. Tlaxcala, UNAM, Int. Festival EXTRA, Universidad de la Comunicación, Museo Universitario de Arte Contemporáneo, UNAM, México; Linda Montano Art/Life Institute Gallery, Pulsar Performance Space, Grace Exhibition Space, New York; Palais des Nations, Genève, Switzerland; Open Art Realization, Beijing, China.
Miao Jiaxin is a Chinese artist who works across photography and performance. His early photoworks explored the theme of urban angst. Among his performative practices across different media, Miao has blended his naked body into the streets of New York City at midnight, traveled inside a suitcase hauled by his mother through urban crowds, made live-feed erotic performances on an interactive pornographic broadcasting website, and dressed as a Chinese businessman for an entire year when working towards his MFA at School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He is more widely known for converting his New York studio into a jail and charging $1 per night as accommodation on Airbnb. The same studio later was converted again to be a blind dating (meeting) spot, as well as a massage therapy clinic. Miao’s works often express the ambivalent and sometimes antagonistic tension that always exists between the individual and governing or cultural authorities, questioning assumptions about power in relation to identity politics. He posits the artist’s nature as one who transgresses boundaries and challenges consensus.
Verónica Peña is an interdisciplinary artist, curator, and international-community advocate from Spain living in the US. Her work explores absence, separation, and the search for harmony through Performance Art. Her performance installations combine underwater submersion, visual metamorphosis, and audience participation to address global issues of migration, cross-cultural dialogue, peaceful resistance, empathy, liberation, and women’s empowerment. Recent works include participatory performances that generate shared moments amongst strangers. She exhibits primarily in Europe, and America. In the US: Times Square Alliance, Armory Show, Queens Museum, NARS Foundation, Franklin Furnace, Satellite Art Fair (Miami Art Week), Hemispheric Institute at NYU, Grace Exhibition Space, Triskelion Arts, School of the Art Institute of Chicago (Visiting Artist), Defibrillator Performance Art Gallery, Momenta Art Gallery, Gabarron Foundation, Dumbo Arts Festival, and Consulate General of Spain in New York, amongst others. In Europe: Museo La Neomudéjar (Madrid), Fundación BilbaoArte, Friche La Belle De Mai (Marseille), Festival Intramurs (Valencia), La Tabacalera (Madrid), amongst others. She was selected for Creative Capital NYC Taller 19-20, received a Franklin Furnace Fund 17-18, and a Universidad Complutense de Madrid Fellowship (Juan Genovés Taller). She published “The Presence Of The Absent”, was reviewed by Donald Kuspit, and published on Hyperallergic. She leads Performance_Art_Open_Call, a 20,000 members FB Community. She is at work on her new participatory performance experience about submersion, freedom, fear, and resistance, “SUB.STANCE”.
Samantha Ozer is an American curator, producer, and writer. She has organized projects independently in Athens, México City, Milan, and Los Angeles and at the David Kordansky Gallery as a curatorial member of The Racial Imaginary Institute. As a writer and researcher she organized the guest lecture series for Ekene Ijeoma’s course “Black Mobility and Safety in the US” and organized the course “Art and Climate Change” as part of the Poetic Justice group at the MIT Media Lab. As a Curatorial Assistant at MoMA PS1, New York, USA, she worked on the exhibitions Theater of Operations: The Gulf Wars 1991-2011, Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration, and Niki de Saint Phalle: Structures for Life. As a consultant and research fellow for the Museum of Modern Art, New York, USA’s Research & Development department, she organized the salon series with Paola Antonelli, Director, MoMA R&D and Senior Curator, Architecture & Design. Her writing has appeared in Artforum, Materia, PIN–UP magazine, Shifter journal, and Texte zur Kunst. She has a forthcoming essay in Relative Intimacies, Volume III of Sternberg Press’ Intersubjectivity series, edited by Lou Cantor and Emily Watlington.
Alejandro Chellet is a Mexican multidisciplinary artist. His work addresses the misplaced core principles of coexistence, the loss of connection with Nature and the political and environmental context of urban societies. His artwork ranges from social practice, painting, sculpture, site specific installations, urban interventions and performances using permaculture, artivism, improvisation, somatic movement, politics, altruism and shamanism practices. His work has been shown at festivals, museums and galleries in Europe, Asia, North, Central and South America, including Museo de Arte de Tlaxcala. Tlaxcala, UNAM, Int. Festival EXTRA, Universidad de la Comunicación, Museo Universitario de Arte Contemporáneo, UNAM, México; Linda Montano Art/Life Institute Gallery, Pulsar Performance Space, Grace Exhibition Space, New York; Palais des Nations, Genève, Switzerland; Open Art Realization, Beijing, China.
Miao Jiaxin is a Chinese artist who works across photography and performance. His early photoworks explored the theme of urban angst. Among his performative practices across different media, Miao has blended his naked body into the streets of New York City at midnight, traveled inside a suitcase hauled by his mother through urban crowds, made live-feed erotic performances on an interactive pornographic broadcasting website, and dressed as a Chinese businessman for an entire year when working towards his MFA at School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He is more widely known for converting his New York studio into a jail and charging $1 per night as accommodation on Airbnb. The same studio later was converted again to be a blind dating (meeting) spot, as well as a massage therapy clinic. Miao’s works often express the ambivalent and sometimes antagonistic tension that always exists between the individual and governing or cultural authorities, questioning assumptions about power in relation to identity politics. He posits the artist’s nature as one who transgresses boundaries and challenges consensus.
Verónica Peña is an interdisciplinary artist, curator, and international-community advocate from Spain living in the US. Her work explores absence, separation, and the search for harmony through Performance Art. Her performance installations combine underwater submersion, visual metamorphosis, and audience participation to address global issues of migration, cross-cultural dialogue, peaceful resistance, empathy, liberation, and women’s empowerment. Recent works include participatory performances that generate shared moments amongst strangers. She exhibits primarily in Europe, and America. In the US: Times Square Alliance, Armory Show, Queens Museum, NARS Foundation, Franklin Furnace, Satellite Art Fair (Miami Art Week), Hemispheric Institute at NYU, Grace Exhibition Space, Triskelion Arts, School of the Art Institute of Chicago (Visiting Artist), Defibrillator Performance Art Gallery, Momenta Art Gallery, Gabarron Foundation, Dumbo Arts Festival, and Consulate General of Spain in New York, amongst others. In Europe: Museo La Neomudéjar (Madrid), Fundación BilbaoArte, Friche La Belle De Mai (Marseille), Festival Intramurs (Valencia), La Tabacalera (Madrid), amongst others. She was selected for Creative Capital NYC Taller 19-20, received a Franklin Furnace Fund 17-18, and a Universidad Complutense de Madrid Fellowship (Juan Genovés Taller). She published “The Presence Of The Absent”, was reviewed by Donald Kuspit, and published on Hyperallergic. She leads Performance_Art_Open_Call, a 20,000 members FB Community. She is at work on her new participatory performance experience about submersion, freedom, fear, and resistance, “SUB.STANCE”.
Samantha Ozer is an American curator, producer, and writer. She has organized projects independently in Athens, México City, Milan, and Los Angeles and at the David Kordansky Gallery as a curatorial member of The Racial Imaginary Institute. As a writer and researcher she organized the guest lecture series for Ekene Ijeoma’s course “Black Mobility and Safety in the US” and organized the course “Art and Climate Change” as part of the Poetic Justice group at the MIT Media Lab. As a Curatorial Assistant at MoMA PS1, New York, USA, she worked on the exhibitions Theater of Operations: The Gulf Wars 1991-2011, Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration, and Niki de Saint Phalle: Structures for Life. As a consultant and research fellow for the Museum of Modern Art, New York, USA’s Research & Development department, she organized the salon series with Paola Antonelli, Director, MoMA R&D and Senior Curator, Architecture & Design. Her writing has appeared in Artforum, Materia, PIN–UP magazine, Shifter journal, and Texte zur Kunst. She has a forthcoming essay in Relative Intimacies, Volume III of Sternberg Press’ Intersubjectivity series, edited by Lou Cantor and Emily Watlington.
