The Restock, Rethink, Reflect Two - Commissions
Live Art and disability
The Live Art Development Agency has commissioned Martin O’Brien and Noëmi Lakmaier to create new performance based works for the Restock, Rethink, Reflect Two programme to take place in March 2011. Dates and times for the programme will be announced in early 2011.
Martin O'Brien
Mucus Factory
"Death is always with me. It’s in my lungs. I’m a factory of mucus as thick as pudding… a human foster’s freeze machine making sundaes of sickness." - Bob Flanagan.
Everyone knows what it is like to cough, everyone one knows what it is like to struggle to breathe, everyone knows what mucus tastes like… But not to this extent! Mucus Factory questions and subverts the common representations of people with severe illness as icons of bravery or eliciting sympathy by presenting a transgressive but more realistic image of what it means to have a severe chronic illness. Presenting his body as a medical specimen, O’Brien literally performs medicine, taking physiotherapy, a common treatment for Cystic Fibrosis, from the hospital to the gallery space, a medical gaze to an art gaze. Mucus Factory invites audience members to assist or watch O’Brien as he performs a durational physiotherapy session. Physiotherapy consists of loosening mucus in the lungs by beating the chest and exercises designed to clear the airways. The result is excessive amounts of mucus being coughed up during treatment -- a confounding of the binary of health/illness and its place within the human condition and a comment on the discipline and brutality of the treatments enforced to keep O’Brien ‘healthy’ and alive.
Martin O'Brien's practice focuses on physical endurance and excess in relation to the fact he suffers from Cystic Fibrosis, a severe chronic disease in which the body produces excess mucus that, amongst other things, works to restrict and prevent breathing through clogging up of the airways and lungs. O’Brien’s practice includes a daily regime designed from imposed medical treatments and preparatory exercises for his work, investigating the convergence between the condition of his body and his body based performance practice.
Martin O'Brien has performed in venues in Britain, Poland, Germany, Spain and Norway and his work has been described in Real Time Australia as ‘Utterly compelling… a real tour de force’. He has recently run a Live Art Development Agency DIY 7 project entitled ‘Altered States’ at Colchester Arts Centre. He was a contributor to ‘Victim Art: Plague, Performance and Metaphor’ as part of Ron Athey’s residency at the Centre for the History of Emotions (2010), Queen Mary University London and artist in residence at Gallery Art Claims Impulse, Berlin in 2008. In October 2010 he will begin a practice based AHRC funded PhD at the University of Reading on endurance based performance.
http://martinobrienperformance.weebly.com/
Noëmi Lakmaier
Undress/Redress
“Undress/Redress is a live and durational piece that aims to evoke, address and explore the ambiguities of intimate inter-human interaction between the female, disabled body and the able bodied male.
For this piece a man very slowly undresses me in front of an audience; starting with my jewellery and continuing to slowly and carefully take off my clothes item by item, until I am naked. As he does this he folds the items carefully and places them in a pile on the table. As soon as he has removed all my clothes he starts to redress me from a pile of identical clothes. He does this equally slowly and carefully. Once I am fully dressed again – almost exactly the way I started out, with the subtle difference that I did not dress myself – he leaves and I stay waiting for him to return at a time of his choosing to start undressing and redressing me again. I will remain entirely passive throughout the process of being undressed and redressed, not assisting or resisting the man’s actions in any way. Not a single word will be exchanged for the duration of the piece.
The actions in this piece are essentially familiar and at the same time fundamentally absurd. The manner in which the man handles and undresses/redresses me remains ambiguous throughout, giving rise to questions as to the intentions behind the activity: Are the man’s intentions sexual or those of a caregiver? Am I fully consenting to what is being done to me or am I merely tolerating it?” - Noëmi Lakmaeir
Noëmi Lakmaier's work explores notions of the ‘Other’ ranging from the physical to the philosophical, the personal to the political. The individual's relationship to its surroundings, identity, and perception of self and other in contemporary society are core interests in her predominantly site-responsive, live and installation-based practice.
Lakmaier's work aims to emphasize and exaggerate the relationship between object, individual and space. Through the use of everyday materials as well as her own body and the bodies of others, she constructs temporary living installations - alternative physical realities - exploring the psychological implications of power, control and insecurity, the drive to belong and succeed as well as feelings of self-doubt and otherness.
She is interested in the presence of the viewer as voyeur and how this presence can act as the catalyst that galvanizes an event and creates a tension and a divide between ‘Them’ – the passive observer - and the ‘Other’ – the objects of their gaze.
www.noemilakmaier.co.uk
Information about the Call for Proposals for these commissions can be found here.
