23 February - 9
March 2013
Jeff Khan &
Bec Dean
Performance
Space Co-Directors
Reviewed by Benjamin Oxley
Matters of Life
and Death is Performance Space's program of international and Australian works
exploring the ultimate driving force of life: our fear of death. These works
offer a rich and unconventional collection of ideas about aging, longevity,
ancestry, extinction and the anxieties of the living. you are invited to delve
deep into the unknown and become intimately comfortable with 'the other side'.
So pack up your most primal fears and your brightest hopes, and join us for an
inspiring three weeks of participatory performance, unsettling installations,
contemporary dance, food preserving workshops, discussions about the great
beyond, and much more!
List of Works
1
The Great Plague
2013
Found objects,
glass, sugar, soil, epoxy resin, live ants
2
Corpus Nullius/
Blood Country 2011
Installation and
performance
3
Bone Library
(fragment)
2011-ongoing
Untitled 2013
digital video
4
Take this, For
It Is My Body 2010
performance
Heirloom 2013
5
The River’s
Children
installation and
performance
Unsettling Suite
| A cycle of performance works by Sarah-Jane Norman
From the
perspective of a 20th century Australian of mixed British and Aboriginal descent,
Sarah-Jane Norman considers the complex legacy of colonialism as an embodied
phenomena. A three way dialogue between
body, material, and history, Unsettling Suite is a cycle of performance works,
each centered around a material focus on one of seven household substances:
flour, sugar, wool, tea, meat, cotton and milk. These substances, which gave
reason to the project of European Colonialism, remain the cornerstones of our
everyday sustenance. How then, might history be considered not as a record of past
events, but as a living entity to which our bodies play host? Within the formal constraints imposed by
these simple materials, Norman seeks a vocabulary for articulating her own
experience as a descendent of both coloniser and colonised. The artist considers
what it means to be “mixed”: how does the so-called “half-caste” continue to
destabilize the assumptions of the dominant culture? How may binaries, of black
and white, grief and responsibility, them and us, then and now, be collapsed in
the presence of such a complicated body? How is our blood itself owned by the
cultural moment, and judged as either a source of shame or pride, a contaminant
or a vital serum? Norman will work with
a team of peer collaborators in the development of her performance cycle.
Sarah-Jane
Norman has become known for her intimate performance encounters. Works such as
Rest Area (2006) and the four-part series Songs of Rapture and Torture
(2007-10) explored the territory of romantic love and the tensions of intimacy
between audience and performer. At the core of her practice lies an interest in
the body as a siphon for personal and collective memory, and a desire to create
performance environments where the bodies of performer and audience are equally
implicated. Aside from her performance
practice she works in a range of other media, and is known as a writer of
fiction, essays and poetry, placing in a number of awards including the
Overland/Judith Wright Prize for poetry.
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