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STAGE SET STAGE presents a series of works by artists and thinkers who engage in new forms of research that explore, via the performative, how identity and gender are manifested in relation to site specificity and institutionalism. Consisting of an exhibition, a research station and a series of events, STAGE SET STAGE investigates how the Self, as a contingent entity, continuously rewrites itself into - as well as out of - various cultural, educational and urban socio-political contexts.

 

 

The invited participants engage with, and put on display, the parallel institutionalization of new forms of performative and site-specific practices in relation to the politics of authorship and identity. By doing so, they reflect upon the relevance of those practices as cultural devices and as tools of insistence and resistance. Their gestures, poses and actions - from still and moving images to spoken text or song - challenge instigated, upheld and contested relationship(s) with cultural institutions, the public sphere and historical as well as educational frameworks.

 

At the heart of STAGE SET STAGE is the mobile structure “Space Set / Set Space” (2013), a site-specific collaboration by Andrea Geyer and Sharon Hayes that responds to and creates an architectural framework for the artworks presented and for the research station. The research station will house its own website, a selection of reading materials, various documentary sources, as well as artists’ talks, writings and web sites by Andrea Fraser, Walid Raad, Rebecca Belmore, and Terre Thaemlitz as well as all participants in the larger project. STAGE SET STAGE is a space within a space that offers the participants a platform on which to speak about and to act out ideas and issues related to identity and institutionalism(s), allowing the visitor to step in and take part, or to simply remain an observer.

 

From the 15th to the 19th of January 2014 a series of performances, screenings, talks and workshops will weigh the possibilities for change and consider the agency of linear narratives inherent to performative practices, by altering the sequence of the event: returning, remaining and existing. These practices engage SBC’s focus on discourse and living research, a growing archive dedicated to discourses on identity and sovereignty.

 

Barbara Clausen, curator

 

Barbara Clausen is a curator and professor for performance theory and history at the art historiy department of the Université du Québec à Montréal. She has worked at Dia Art Foundation (New York), and Documenta11 (Kassel) and was a participant in the DeAppel CTP in 2000. She has curated a series of exhibitions, symposia and performance events such as After the Act (2005), Wieder und Wider/Again and Against (2006), and Push and Pull (2010/2011) at MUMOK (Vienna), Tate Modern (London) and Down Low Up High (2011) at Argos (Brussels). In 2012 she curated the performance series Something to Say, Something to Do, as well as the first retrospective of Babette Mangolte both at VOX, centre d'art contemporain. Clausen writes extensively on performance art and performative curatorial practices and is the editor of After the Act: The (Re)presentation of Performance Art (2006). 

 

This exhibition is part of SBC Gallery’s Focus Program on sovereignty.

 

SBC Gallery of Contemporary Art wishes to thank the Canada Council for the Arts, the ministère de la Culture et des Communications, the Conseil des arts de Montréal, The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, the Canadian Center for Architecture, the Austrian Cultural Forum, AXENÉO7, and Jessica Schouela.