Decrypting Performance Art – A One-Day Seminar by Rocío Boliver

On Sunday 9th October at noon, join ]performance s p a c e [, LADA and VSSL Studio for Decrypting Performance Art, a one-day seminar led by Rocío Boliver reflecting on key performances (via photographic and video documentation) she has created across the last 30 years of practice.

For this seminar, Rocío invites 25 participants to spend the day with her as she examines five recurrent themes which continue to shape the aesthetic and surrounding discourse of her work: pain, excretions, sex, old age, and politics.

In addition, the artist will elucidate upon the three core aspects of her personal, performance art-making methodologies: the pre-performance, performance and post-performance moments. Rocío will share intimate details of these making processes through lively discussion with participants. 

Decrypting Performance Art is conceived and convened by Rocío Boliver and produced by ]performance s p a c e [ with support from the Live Art Development Agency and VSSL Studio. 

Biography

“I devote myself to transgress limits. I dig into human behaviour. I disrupt accepted reality, absurd as the one I situationate. I was born a seductive Nabokov’s “Lolita”. I lived censorship, scolding, fear and guilt, typical of a repressive society. I break the conventional woman scheme. My aesthetic is grotesque, in search of severity. I’m a human reaction voracious hunter, consumer and provocateur.”
– Rocío Boliver

Rocío has presented her work in Europe, Asia, North and South America. Since 2012, Rocío’s performances have focused on the ageing female body – a body, and a body of work, that she describes as ‘between menopause and old age’. She aims to demystify the horror of old age in an ironical way, inventing her own deranged aesthetic and moral solutions for the problem of age. She revels in the cultural unease the ageing female body tends to provoke, and she embraces, on the one hand, shame, disgust, and embarrassment, and on the other, pleasure, laughter, and great beauty, in often dizzying and un-navigable recombination.