Lost AstronautAlicia Framis
| Nov ’09 |
| 3 |
| 12:00 pm |
Opening on November 3, 9-11 pm
DJ set by Silvia Prada
Premiering in New York for Performa 09, Alicia Framis presents Lost Astronaut – an ongoing performance-installation at APF LAB, exploring the potentialities of living on the moon through the ironical and fictional character and activities of a woman astronaut. Left on Earth like all women who were never part of the moon race, she settles in to BaseCamp, in which she will live for the 2 weeks of the biennial in a customized astronaut suit, among drawings and prototypes that aim to both parody and demand women’s presence on the moon.
Her activities will be pre-determined by scores written by invited authors and artists, and the audience will be able to interact with her in BaseCamp or as she wanders the streets of New York City. Participating writers and artists include: Marina Abramovic, Mark Beasley, Virginia Bobin, Kim Ann Foxman, Brian Keith-Jackson, Shelley Jackson, Angie Keefer, Matthew Licht, Rita McBride, John Menick, Katie Paterson, Silvia Prada, Frances Richard, Michael Schulman, and Katrina Sieveirding.
In conjunction, a collection of architectural models designed for the moon in collaboration with architects will be on view, exploring various possible forms of architecture in the future, while presenting a realistic scheme that seeks to fit the context and conditions offered by a lunar habitat.
Lost Astronaut provides a plausible fiction that humorously responds to the Futurists’ preoccupation with the evolution of architecture, design, and lifestyle in the future through crossing disciplines and artistic and intellectual collaborations, at a time when humans’ settlement in space is becoming scientifically possible.
Alicia Framis (b. Barcelona, Spain, 1967) studied Fine Arts at the Barcelona University and at Ecole de Beaux Arts in Paris. She also completed her masters at the Institut d’Hautes Etudes, Paris and at the Rijksakademie Van Beelde Kunstende, Amsterdam. Her work investigates notions of national and group identities, the social mechanics of cities, and personal safety. She has exhibited internationally at institutions such as Museum Reina Sofia, Madrid, Spain; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; Mass MOCA, North Adams, MA; Triennale Yokohama, and the Venice Biennale.
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On Twitter: http://twitter.com/lostastro
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A Performa Premiere presented by Performa and Art Production Fund. Curated by Defne Ayas, with support from Virginie Bobin and Madeleine Kate McGowan. Supported by the State Corporation for Spanish Cultural Action Abroad. Special thanks to Pera Mediterranean Brasserie, TBD Wines, and Voss Water.
FREE
BaseCamp at APF Lab open daily noon-6 pm.
DAILY SCHEDULE:
Tuesday, Nov 3, 8:00PM
Author: Silvia Prada
Location: Art Production Fund, 15 Wooster Street
Wednesday, Nov 4, 10:00AM
Author: Rita McBride
Location: 43 Mercer Street
Thursday, Nov 5, 6:00AM
Author:Marina Abramovic
Location: Art Production Fund, 15 Wooster Street
Friday, Nov 6, 5:45PM,
Author: Mattew Licht
Location: Art Production Fund, 15 Wooster Street
Saturday, Nov 7, 12:00PM
Author: Brian Keith Jackson
Location: The NY Public Library, 5th Avenue at 42nd street
Sunday, Nov 8, 5:00PM
Author: Kim Ann Fox
Location: Art Production Fund, 15 Wooster Street
Monday, Nov 9, 10:00AM
Author: John Menick
Location: Art Production Fund, 15 Wooster Street
Tuesday, Nov 10, 4:00PM
Author: Shelley Jacksons
Location: Art Production Fund, 15 Wooster Street
Wednesday, Nov 11, 12:00PM
Author: Frances Richard
Location: Art Production Fund, 15 Wooster Street
Thursday, Nov 12, 4:00PM
Author: Virginie Bobin
Location: Art Production Fund, 15 Wooster Street
Friday, Nov 13, (Time TBA)
Author: Mark Beasley
Location: Art Production Fund, 15 Wooster Street
Saturday, Nov 14, 7:00PM
Author: Michael Schulman
Location: Art Production Fund, 15 Wooster Street
Sunday, Nov 15, 11:00AM
Author: Angie Keefer
Location: Lincoln Center (Entrance), 70 Lincoln Center Plaza
Monday, Nov 16, 5:00AM
Author: Katie Paterson
Location: Unknown
Tuesday, Nov 17, (Time TBA)
Author: TBA. Join the challenge on Facebook, and be the one instructing the Lost Astronaut.
Location: TBA
WRITERS BIOS:
Born in 1946 in Belgrade, Yugoslavia, Marina Abramovic studied in Belgrade and Zagreb and is currently based in New York. Abramovic pioneered the use of performance as a visual art form in the early 1970s, exploring her physical and mental limits by withstanding pain, exhaustion, and danger in the quest for emotional and spiritual transformation. She collaborated with Ulay from 1976-89, created some of the most iconic early performance pieces, and is one of few artists of her generation who continues to make important durational works.
Mark Beasley is a Curator at Performa. Prior to Performa, he worked at the public art organization Creative Time; his recent projects include the first New York public art quadrennial, “Plot09: This World & Nearer Ones”; “Hey Hey Glossolalia: Exhibiting the Voice,” and the Russian and South American touring show “Electric Earth: Film & Video from Britain for the British Council.”
Virginie Bobin is a Curatorial Assistant at Performa. She is also working on various independent projects, including a forthcoming sound installation in Coney Island with artist Hong-Kai Wang and an Internet database on performance and documentation with bo-ring, a curatorial collective she co-created in 2008 with Austrian artist Julia Klaering.
Kim Ann Foxman is a vocalist for the internationally known band Hercules and Love Affair, a designer of her own line of jewels, Foxman, and a very well respected DJ of classic aesthetic dance music. Kim Ann Foxman was first known in NYC for her party Mad Clams @ the Hole and as a resident DJ at Susanne Bartsch’s party at Happy Valley. She has been a guest DJ in many famous international clubs and in New York in places such as Avalon, 205 Club, Studio B, Santo’s Playhouse, EastVillageRadio.net , Tim Sweeny’s Beatsinspace.net. and more.
Brian Keith Jackson is the author of the critically acclaimed novel, The View From Here, which received the First Fiction Literary Award from the Black Caucus of the American Library Association. He has received fellowships from Art Matters, the Jereome Foundation and the Millay Colony of the Arts. He lives in New York City. People compared Brian Keith Jackson’s remarkable first novel, The View from Here, to the works of Alice Walker and Toni Morrison, and Publishers Weekly called it “an extraordinary debut…[by] a formidable craftsman and exceptionally gifted storyteller.”
Shelley Jackson is the author of The Melancholy of Anatomy, Half Life, Patchwork Girl, and several children’s books. Her writing has appeared in many journals, including Conjunctions, McSweeney’s, The Paris Review and Cabinet Magazine. The recipient of a Howard Foundation grant, a Pushcart Prize, and the James Tiptree Jr Award, she is the cofounder (with artist Christine Hill) of the Interstitial Library, and the author of SKIN, a story published in tattoos on 2095 volunteers.
Angie Keefer is a partner in ExCorporation, a design practice based in Gowanus, Brooklyn; co-creator of tomorrownowforever.com; a sometimes contributor to Paper Monument and Dot Dot Dot; and editor of The 8-Train, forthcoming from Art in General. Her mother, a rocket scientist, went to work for the space program in 1962.
Matthew Licht is a writer, artist, and filmmaker. He got an education in New York City. He learned escape is impossible. He’s done many jobs, from driving the delivery truck for a VIP liquor store in Beverly Hills to being The World’s Oldest Copy Boy (Save One) at the Newspaper of Record. He is the author of the novels The Crazy-House Gag and the detective trilogy World Without Cops, among others. The Moose Show (Salt Pubs.), a short story collection, was nominated for the Frank O’Connor Prize. His writing explores genre and subculture in witty, delightfully provocative ways.
Rita McBride is a prominent American artist based in Dusseldorf, whose sculptures and installation deal with fiction and public space and often provide a set for performances and lectures. She has edited a series of books for which she invited other artists and writers to write short stories involving constraints and a relationship to the art world. Each of the books corresponds to a sub literary genre (crime novels, SF, soft-eroticism…). She is currently working on a new novel, Westways, in collaboration with writer Mathew Licht.
New York and Mexico City based artist John Menick makes digital films, visual art, and the occasional essay on art and culture. His work has been exhibited at the P.S.1 Center for Contemporary Art, New York; La Maison Rouge, Paris; Palais de Tokyo, Paris; CCA Wattis, San Francisco; Midway Contemporary Art, Minneapolis; Artists Space, New York; The Centre for Contemporary Arts, Glasgow, among other venues. He is currently a visiting artist at the Cooper Union and lectures regularly about art and film. In 2008 he was awarded a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Video and a New York City Film and Video Grant from the Jerome Foundation.
Katie Paterson’s artistic practice is multi-disciplinary, cross-media, and conceptually driven, often exploring landscape by means of technology, and connectivity by way of moonlight, melting glaciers, and dead stars. Recent works include Earth–Moon–Earth (Moonlight Sonata Reflected from the Surface of the Moon), the transmission of Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata to the moon and back; Vatnajökull (the sound of), a live phone line to an Icelandic glacier; and All the Dead Stars, a large map documenting the locations of 27,000 dead stars. She has recently exhibited at Modern Art Oxford, Altermodern: Tate Triennial 2009, Tate Britain, Universal Code, Powerplant, Toronto, (2009), and will present new work at Performa 09.
Silvia Prada’s work incorporates a strong ideology of movement within a broad range of contemporary pop culture. She contributed to different magazines like The Face, Dazed and Confused, Blackbook, Vman or Fanzine 137 and she showcased her work in several museums and galleries including Deitch Projects, Colette, Centro de Arte Santa Monica, Museo de Arte Contemporaneo Carrillo Gil, Musac or Moca Shangai. She recently published her latest work in a book called the Silvia Prada Art Book. Prada’s work is deeply connected with specific events and parties in order to diffuse her discourse in different contexts like design, music, fashion and art.
Frances Richard’s book of poems, See Through, was published by Four Way Books in 2003; in 2005, with Jeffrey Kastner and Sina Najafi, she organized an exhibition and accompanying monograph titled Odd Lots: Revisiting Gordon Matta-Clark’s “Fake Estates.” She writes frequently about contemporary art, teaches at Barnard College and the Rhode Island School of Design, and lives in Brooklyn.
Michael Schulman is on the editorial staff of The New Yorker, where he writes about theatre and other subjects for The Talk of the Town and Goings On About Town. In 2007, he covered Christian Jankowski’s Performa commission “Rooftop Routine” for the magazine, and he wrote about Francesco Vezzoli’s contribution to Performa 07 for the Charta book “Right You Are (If You Think You Are).” His work has appeared in The Believer and the New York Sun.
Uriel Fogué is a Bilbao based architect and teacher of the Architectonical, City and Territory Department at ESAYA (UEM). He is co-editor of the publication UHF. Most recent projects and works of his Agencia de Arquitectura (Agencia de Arquitectura (Architecture Agency) look at the “infra-structuring” of public space as an aesthetic policy practice concerning energy. He was one of the coordinators of the 1st International Meeting of Philosophy and Architecture at the Universidad Europea de Madrid and took part in Madrid Abierto 2009
