Festival d'art action et de performances

The 5th edition of VIVA! Art action will take place in Montreal, from October 7th to 10th, at Les Ateliers Jean-Brillant (661 Rose de Lima, Montréal, H4C 2L7). Unique and friendly, this biennale enables memorable encounters between artists, the public and various remarkable contemporary action art practices from Quebec and abroad. For complete programming, visit vivamontreal.org.

As part of this programming, La Centrale is very proud to present the conference Art is Facing Fire : Désobéissance féministe et décoloniale dans la performance publique engagée face au conflit russo-ukrainien en 2014-2015 by Nataliya Tchermalykh and the performance On Focus: The Interior by Boryana Rossa!

Conference by Natalya Tchermalykh : Art is Facing Fire : Désobéissance féministe et décoloniale dans la performance publique engagée face au conflit russo-ukrainien en 2014-2015

Performance by Boryana Rossa : On Focus: The Interior

The body has been perceived differently at different historical times. These historical comprehensions had produced images that are often in contradiction, revealing how complicated for us is to understand our body and how it relates our social life.

For instance the liberation of female body and sexuality, proclaimed by feminists during the sixties, was often built on empowerment of women through the iconography of the goddesses and by essentially feminine imagery. This perception, which power, especially at the time, can not be denied, had been challenged not only by the persisting mysoginism, which continues to endorse the feminine as subordinate to the masculine, but also on another level by technological enhancements that provide with an ideal feminine shape those who may not have it, creating new territory for women’s objectification. Additionally, the contemporary feminism and queer ideas started involving androgynous and trans-gendered aesthetics and social practices that extended the previous ones.

This piece will be homage of the “Interior Stroll” by Carolee Schneemann, perhaps one of my favorite and most influential performance art pieces and iconic for the sexual revolution from the last century in the Western world.

As an Eastern European I gather different history, but also I am a different generation - grown up during the time of sharp technological acceleration in the 1990s that produced new territories inhabited by both misogyny and feminism, such as the virtual space and the plastic surgery, by that creating new contradictions, which resolution requires new approaches. I will be wearing my "Amazon Armor Bra" - it is a lens-bra that shows my after-mastectomy scars and the text that I will read will be different to Schneemann's worship of vagina, attempting to update the performance towards contemporaneity.

Nataliya Tchermalykh is a feminist curator and art theorist. From the Ukraine, she is currently a PhD candidate at the IHEID (Geneva). Her article Will Pussy Riot Dance on #Euromaidan? New Dissidence, Civic Disobedience and Cyber-Mythology in the Post-Soviet Context was published in issue 1-2014 of the magazine Gender and Religion. In 2015, she published the art book Paysages instables : artistes ukrainiens entre révolution et guerre with Éditions de la Galerie Pangée (Montreal).

Boryana Rossa is an interdisciplinary artist, writer and curator. Most of Rossa’s individual works are engaged strongly with feminism and gender issues and shown internationally and included in collections such as the performing art archive re.act.feminism; Kontakt. Art Collection Erste Group/ERSTE Foundation, Sofia City Art Gallery and others. In 2004 together with the Russian artist and filmmaker Oleg Mavromatti, Rossa establishes UTRAFUTURO–an art group engaged with issues of technology, science and their social implications, whose works have been shown at Foundation for Art and Creative Technologies (FACT), Liverpool; Society for Art and Technology (SAT), Montreal etc.

Rossa has PhD on Post Cold-War Gender Performances in Film from the Department of Arts, at Rensselaer, Troy, NY and currently is an assistant professor in the department of Transmedia at Syracuse University, NY. She is also a director of Sofia Queer Forum, together with philosopher and activist Stanimir Panayotovand a NYFA Fellow for 2014 together with Mavromatti.