Contributors Biographies
Daniel Aschwanden was born in Switzerland and currently works in Vienna as a performer and choreographer, especially in transmedia projects, and as a curator and professor. His special interest is the representation of the body in the arts (dance and theatre) context as well as in social contexts. In his performances he explores the relationship between the body and low and high-tech (digital) media (video / computer installations). In the late 80s he founded an international dance and performance festival, Tanzssprache, at the WUK in Vienna. In the early 90s he founded the performance label Bilderwerfer. From 2000-2005 he collaborated, amongst others, with Yosi Wanunu, Toxic Dreams, Anne Juren and Jack Hauser. In 2005 he initiated a performance project in urban space, framefreezeframe (Vienna, Bratislava) and a media lab called absent interfaces together with Scott de la Hunta. He created the video Chinese Whispers, a summary of his fist visit to Beijing together with Peter Stamer. In 2006 he was artist in residence at Tanzquartier Wien, where he organized TanzRadioStudio2, a series of events and discourses. Back in Beijing, he participates with Peter Stamer in the DIAF 06 Festival with Headroom, a series of interventions, installations and discourses throughout the city. In September 2006, together with Soundt(h)inker Oliver Stotz Headroom is translated into a radio play and presented as a live performance at Tanzquartier under the title Chinese Whispers. www.bilderwerfer.com
Oreet Ashery is a London based artist, working in Live Art and digital media. Ashery's practice is conceptual and process based, consisting of visual and performative investigations into personal politics and its complex relationship to social realities, identity and cultural politics, and the nature of an art practice. Oreet has an ongoing interest in the intersections between Jewishness, race, gender and the Arab and Muslim world. Her work is shown extensively in the UK and internationally in a variety of contexts including museums, cinemas, festivals, galleries, the streets, the internet, and site specific locations. Since 2004, Ashery has created a number of events as part of a project entitled Welcome Home, in which she investigates the subject of Returning. She has been working as an art educationalist since 1992 with a strong commitment to work with specific communities including; young people excluded from schools, offenders and ex-offenders, children refugees, people over 80, homeless women, Bengali women's group, adults with learning difficulties. www.oreetashery.net
Franko B was born in Milan and has lived in London since 1979. He has been creating work across video, photography, performance, painting, installation, sculpture and mixed media since 1990. He has performed at the Tate Modern, ICA, South London Gallery and Beaconsfield. He has presented work internationally in Zagreb, Mexico City, Milan, Amsterdam, Antwerp, Copenhagen, Madrid and Vienna, Tate Liverpool and most recently at the Palais des Beaux-Arts, Brussels, Belgium and the Crawford municipal gallery in Cork, Ireland. Franko B lectures widely, including at St. Martins School of Art, DasArt, New York University and the Courtauld Institute of Art. He has been the subject of two monographs, 'Franko B' (Black Dog Publishing 1998) and 'Oh Lover Boy' (2001) and has published a photographic project entitled 'Still Life' (2003). His new monograph, Blinded By Love, is published in 2007 . www.franko-b.com
cabula 6
(Jeremy Xido, Claudia Heu)
Jeremy Xido, originally from Detroit, graduated cum laude in Painting and Comparative Literature from Columbia University in New York and trained at the Actor's Studio with Barbara Poitier, Arthur Penn and Andre Gregory. He has worked extensively in Europe and the United States as an actor and dancer for stage and film and since 2003 has been the co-director of the performance company Cabula6, which has toured around the world with a number of original pieces. As a director he has shot several short films, most recently Crime : Europa, a project funded by the European Union investigating criminal cases in 6 towns across Europe.
Claudia Heu lives in Vienna, is a director, performer and teacher in the field of dance, experimental theatre and performance. She is the founder of ONNO theater, and since 2003 together with Jeremy Xido artist director of cabula6 presenting productions all over Europe. In addition to the work in the theater, she has spent years of her life involved in community work - from a year and a half working in a Favela on the outskirts of São Paulo, Brazil, to work in refugee camps and prisons in Austria.
Cabula6 focuses on the border between reality and fiction and the uneasy dialogue between a person's private sense of identity and its dynamic reception in a broader social context. We search out non-traditional performance spaces that make it possible to walk this line, between what is real and what is constructed and which can bring audience members face to face with their assumptions and expectations about who they are. We create films, installations and performance pieces for the stage and on location. We are dedicated to principles of delight, humour, investigation and adrenalin. We love to play. www.cabula6.com
Curious are Helen Paris and Leslie Hill, internationally acclaimed for their edgy, humorous interrogations of contemporary culture and politics. Their work embraces live performance, digital media, installation, publication, film, and video. Over the last ten years they have created and toured over 30 performance, film and video projects in Europe, North America, Australia, Brazil, China and India as well as collaborating with national and international artists and companies. Hill and Paris's publications include Performance and Place (Palgrave Macmillan), 2006 and Guerrilla Performance: How to Make a Living as An Artist, (Continuum), 2004. www.placelessness.com
Robin Deacon is a London based performer, writer and filmmaker. Since the early 1990's, his work has toured internationally to festivals and conferences. Most recently, his work has explored journalistic and documentary styles, using the lecture format to re-enact autobiographical incidents. His work is characterised by a humorous and often satirical approach to the subject matter. www.robindeacon.com/
Richard Dedomenici is a one-man subversive think-tank. By approaching the limits of conventionally acceptable behaviour, his poetic acts of low-grade civil disobedience forcibly ask pertinent questions of society, while his subtle anarcho-surrealist interventions create the kind of uncertainty that leads to possibility. www.dedomenici.co.uk
Ines Doujak is a visual artist and works on questions of representations of
gender, sexuality and racism within and outside of insitutions. Thomas
Talasch is Free Fighter and cook. This is their second collaboration. The
first Project called "Follow the Leader" was presented at the following
exhibitions: Be what you want, but stay where you are, Witte de With,
Rotterdam; How do we want to be Governed? MACBA (Museu d'Art Contemporani Barcelona); Being in the World, Art Central, Miami and Die Regierung. Paradiesische Handlungsräume, Secession, Vienna.
Adrian Heathfield writes on, curates and creates contemporary performance. He co-curated Live Culture at Tate Modern with the Live Art Development Agency in 2003, Small Acts at the Millennium with Tim Etchells and Lois Keidan in 1999, and Forced Entertainment's twelve hour durational performance-lecture Marathon Lexicon. He is the editor of Live: Art and Performance (Tate Publishing, 2004), Small Acts: Performance, The Millennium and the Marking of Time (Black Dog Publications, 2000), and co-editor of On Memory, an issue of Performance Research, and of the box publication Shattered Anatomies: Traces of the Body in Performance (Arnolfini Live, 1997). His writing has also appeared in Hybrid, Performance Research, Cultural Studies, Art and Design, Connect, and Space and Culture. He is a Principal Research Fellow at Nottingham Trent University. www.adrianheathfield.net
John Jordan merges the imagination of art and the social engagement of politics. Co-director of social practice art group Platform (1987-1995) he then went on to be a co-founder of the infamous cultural resistance collective Reclaim the Streets (1995-2000). He is interested in the role of the artists dissolving into social movements, applying creativity directly to activism and social change. He has written and lectured extensively about the space between art and activism, and the global anticapitalist movements of the last decade - including at the Museum of Contemporary Art Barcelona and the Tate Modern, London. In 2003 he co-edited the book "We Are Everywhere-the irresistible rise of global anticapitalism" published by Verso and now being translated in 7 languages. He was senior lecturer in fine art at Sheffield Hallam University from 1994 until 2003, when he gave up academia to go Argentina to work on the film "The Take" with Naomi Klein. Most recently he co founded the Clandestine Insurgent Rebel Clown Army (CIRCA) and the Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination that toured the UK leading up to the G8 summit in Scotland in 2005.
Hubsi Kramar lives and works in Vienna. He graduated from the Reinhard Seminar Vienna, studied at the Film Academy in Vienna and undertook postgraduate studies in arts administration at Harvard University. He has been working as an actor at various state theatres and independent theatres and in over 100 films. He has written and directed over 50 theatre pieces. Since 1980 he has been working as an independent artist and has founded various experimental theatre groups with special focus on actions in public spaces, such as WEARD t.atr, THEATER DIREKT and TAT-t.atr. Hubsi has also written numerous political essays and works upon theatre theory, socio-cultural structures, etc. such as the First Ecological Theatre Manifest (1986). Hubsi Kramar is notorious for his direct actions and political performances in public spaces. One of his most famous interventions was his appearance as Hitler at the Vienna Opera Ball - a protest against the elections in 2000 in Austria - for which he was arrested. In 2003 he won the NESTROY prize for the best OFF theatre production. www.hubsikramar.net
Florian Malzacher (Multitude e.V. / Unfriendly Takeover) studied Applied Theatre Sciences at the University of Giessen/Germany. He worked as a freelance theatre journalist for daily papers like Frankfurter Rundschau or taz - die tageszeitung, and magazines like Theater Heute or Ballettanz. As a curator he has been charge of the International Summer Academy in Frankfurt 2002 and 2004. He is founding member of the curatorial collective Unfriendly Takeover and took part in the curating of several theatre- and performance festivals like Festival Theaterformen 2004. In 2004 he co-published Not Even a Game Anymore - The Theatre of Forced Entertainment (2004). He was member in several juries, such as for the Mülheimer Dramatikerpreis 2005. Guest lecturer in Leipzig, Vienna and Frankfurt. Since October 2005 he is programming for the festival Steirischer Herbst in Graz/Austria. www.dictionaryofwar.org
Gini Müller lives in Vienna and works as dramaturg, performer, and ar/ctivist.
She studied in Vienna and Berlin, (2005 Dissertation: Posse, theatrum mundi and
performative power to do), and since 2003 lectures at the University of Fine Arts,
Vienna about Performative Practices and Transgender. Between 2001 and 2004 she was part of VolxTheaterKarawane/PublixTheatreCaravan, activist and nomadic theatre/media-project in public spaces. Since 2002 she has also worked with theatercombinat wien, and since 2003 has been a member of the Performanceband SV Damenkraft.
Áine Phillips has been exhibiting multi-media performance works in Ireland and internationally since the late 80's. She has created work for diverse contexts; the street, club events and exhibitions including Moving Image Gallery and The Kitchen New York, National Review of Live Art Glasgow, Wolfsberg Castle Austria, Factorio Theatro Madrid. In Ireland at the Irish Film Centre, Arthouse, EV+A and the Hugh Lane Gallery. Her work has been shown at Museums of Art in Stockholm, Liechtenstein and Cleveland USA. She is Head of Sculpture at Burren College of Art, Ireland and is curator of Tulca Live, festival of live and video art in Galway. Her work is centered on autobiographical performance.
PLATFORM is based in London and has been working for over 20 years, promoting creative processes of democratic engagement to advance social and ecological justice, Their recent projects include And While London Burns, an operatic audio tour across the City of London about climate change, and Remember Saro-Wiwa in which they commissioned a living memorial for Ken Saro-Wiwa, the Nigerian writer and activist who was executed in 1995 for highlighting the impact of oil companies in the Niger Delta. www.platformlondon.org
Lisl Ponger works in media, film, photography and installation. She studied photography in Vienna and works and lives in Vienna. She has received the following awards, 2005 Prize for Visual Arts - City of Vienna, 2005 Golden Gate New Vision Award 48th San Francisco International Film Festival, 2003 Prize for Visual Arts - County of Lower Austria, 1994 Austrian Appraisal Award for Film, and 1988 Austrian Prizewinning Award for Film. In 1998/99 and 2001/02 she was Professor for Artistic Photography at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna.
Oliver Ressler was born in 1970 and lives and works in Vienna. Ressler is an artist who carries out theme specific exhibitions, projects in public space and videos on issues such as racism, migration, genetic engineering, global capitalism, forms of resistance and social alternatives. His ongoing project Alternative Economics, Alternative Societies was produced 20 times, including solo-exhibitions in Galerija Skuc, Ljubljana, 2003; Kunstraum Lueneburg, G, 2004; Centro Cultural Conde Duque, MediaLabMadrid, Madrid, 2004; Platform Garanti Contemporary Art Center, Istanbul, 2005; Museum of Contemporary Art, Novi Sad, 2005 and Museum of Contemporary Art Belgrade, 2005. Many of Resslers works are being realized in collaborations, such as European Corrections Corporation with Martin Krenn and Boom! with David Thorne. In collaboration with the political analyst Dario Azzellini he produced the films Venezuela from Below (2004) and 5 Factories-Worker Control in Venezuela (2006), which in an 6-channel video installation was presented at the Berkeley Art Museum, USA. Ressler participated in numerous group-shows, including the biennials in Prague (2005), Seville (2006) and Moscow (2007). www.ressler.at
Rajni Shah is a performance artist, writer and producer currently based in London. Her work explores the fine boundaries between performers and audience, between fiction and stark reality, and between stereotype and inner truth. She has performed in the UK and USA, including the National Review of Live Art 2006 and 2007, Chisenhale Dance Space, The Place, and Chelsea Theatre. Rajni is currently an Artist Associate for Chisenhale Dance Space, a Creative Adviser for Oxfordshire Touring Theatre Company, a member of the board of directors for the New Work Network, an active member of Alternate ROOTS, and Project Director for 'Restock, Rethink, Reflect' for the Live Art Development Agency. Rajni's work combines bold visual statements with a gentle invitation to dialogue and is committed to finding beauty and concern in the midst of the everyday. www.rajnishah.com
Adrien Sina is an architect, artist and theoretician who lives and works in Paris and London. He has curated cross-disciplinary exhibitions involving architecture, performance, video and philosophy including Fugitive Fluctuations, Tragédies Charnelles, Immanences Spatiales. In 2003 he was advisor to Tate Liverpool for Art, Lies and Videotape: Exposing Performance and from 2004 to 2006 he was Thinker in Residence at the Live Art Development Agency developing issues and ideas for PSi12:Performing Rights where he was an Artist in Residence. He is currently planning the Performance, War, Politics and Eroticism programme for the Centenary of Futurism at Roselee Goldberg's PERFORMA Biennale, New York, in 2009. He is advisor to the Pompidou Centre for the exhibition 'Traces of the Sacred'. 2008. www.adrien-sina.net/performingrights/
Christine Standfest studied literature, linguistics, gender and cultural studies at FU Berlin and at the University of Lancashire. As well as being a political activist, she has worked as a drama advisor, translator, writer, lecturer and professor. Since 1997 she has worked with the performance collective theatercombinat and participated as a researcher and performer in their various productions, such as fatzer, massakermykene, sieben, anatomie sade/wittgenstein, madcc psukb, schlafgegen düsseldorf, mauser, firma raumforschung, où est donc le tableau, palais donaustadt, and tragödienproduzenten. www.theatercombinat.com
Superamas have, since their first work Building (1999), seen their task as taking on dance with materials from other areas of life. The group uses untreated, often unspectacular circumstances as well as readymades coming from everyday culture, and it treats those elements equally. SUPERAMAS are especially interested in attributes developing from the combined presentation of materials and their newly derived connections. Showing here means letting see, expose to view. In the context of public performance, SUPERAMAS call their work dé-montrer, separating and dismantling that which in its original state presented a unit or entity. According to this concept, visible facts are questioned. Samples from films and cutting techniques are implemented in the artistic work. www.superamas.com
the vacuum cleaner is an artist and activist collective of one fashioning radical social and ecological change. By employing various creative legal and illegal tactics and forms the vacuum cleaner attempts to disrupt concentrations of power and reverse the impending ecological collapse of planet earth. the vacuum cleaner work in very varied contexts from corporate interventions, disinformation and hacktivism to presenting documentation and making installations and videos for galleries and festivals. the vacuum cleaner is a co-founder of the Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination and founder of the very co-operative. www.thevacuumcleaner.co.uk
Lois Weaver was the Artistic Director of Performance Studies international 12: Performing Rights in June 2006 and teaches at Queen Mary University of London. She was co-founder of Spiderwoman Theatre and the WOW Theatre in New York and Artistic Director of Gay Sweatshop Theatre in London. She has been a performer, director, and writer with the Split Britches Company since 1980. Her interests include live art, solo performance, feminist and lesbian theatre, and performance and human rights. She recently developed a guerilla video performance entitled Dirty Laundry commissioned by Franklin Furnace in New York. She is involved in 'Staging Human Rights', a People's Palace Project initiative that uses performance practice to explore human rights in women's prisons in Brazil and the UK. In collaboration with Holly Hughes and Eleanor Savage, she recently developed the solo performance, What Tammy Needs to Know.
