PAWA - Performance Evening 1

PAWA 2023 presents an evening of performance art featuring local and international artists at Altiora.

ARTISTS:

Ivan Lupi (ITL/NZ) 

enormousface (Cascadia/NYC) 

Tomasz Szrama (POL/FIN) 

Works presented will be:

IT WILL NOT EVAPORATE (act I) by Ivan Lupi

A taste of nostalgia and alienation served in two acts. 

NoOOtHHHHInnnnGGGG by enormousface

enormousface's performance is an insane faux-shamanic cannibal warble, a self-destructing anti-narrative machine made from rotting toys, dead waste and the smoldering wreckage of post-capitalist systems of meaning.

Don't expect any kind of childish faery-tale. Dadaist chortles, inverting piles of guts and hair, strange scraping sounds, and impossible beings floating across blurry philosophical landscapes: this yes. Inchoate non-representational objects having alternately violent and tender sex with one another, a drippy black hole opening from the anus of god, time, babies and death: also. Adult-friendly, ecological, against everything.

Described alternately as "Anarchist Literary Theory and Philosophy about Deleuze & Cthulhu", "NYC's Most Avant-Garde Nihilist Street Performer", and "The Best [/Worst] Thing I've Ever Seen", this is the kind of show that might turn reality inside out. Steel your nerves. Ready your analytical scalpels. See if you can take your eyes off the arcane liminal merchandise. Don't worry about it. It's Nothing.

Untitled by Tomasz Szrama 

Engaging in improvisation, the artist will use the surroundings and found objects to make the work. Risk, the diversity of expression, site-specificity and direct contact between the artist and the audience are principles of the work. 

“I promise nothing but potential failure. I hope that in my desperate gestures' viewers will find for themselves something meaningful, even transcendent. I still naively believe,that anyone can create a phenomenon on a cosmic scale, and I feel it will be a meaningless sacrifice of an insignificant man.” – Tomasz Szrama

**Please note performances may contain nudity and adult themes**

ARTISTS: 

Ivan Lupi (born 1972, Ferrara, Italy) has a Masters in Queer Studies in Arts and Culture from Birmingham University. Since 2001 Lupi has been one of thefounders and active member of the collective Amae with which he has taken part in various collaborations and exhibitions in China and Europe. In 2016 Lupi starts his own production as a single performer showing his work in the United States, France, Germany, Switzerland, South Africa, Lithuania, India, Canada, New Zealand. The most relevant events: ‘The Voice and the Lens’ - Whitechapel Art Gallery (London 2014), ‘The slip of the tongue’ - Palazzo Grassi Punta della Dogana (Venice 2015), ‘Transformations’ by LiVEART.US - Queens Museum (New York 2016), ‘Morni Hills Performance Art Biennale’ Government Museum of Art(Chandigarh, India) —‘Experimenting with a wunderkammer of vanitas - MACT/CACT Contemporary Art Ticino (Bellinzona 2016), ‘MAKING SPACE’ - CoCA - Centre of Contemporary Art (Christchurch 2017), ‘Visualeyez Annual Festival of Performance art’ - Latitude 53 Art Gallery (Edmonton 2017),‘Performance Arcade’ (Wellington 2019), ‘Towards the Forest’ - The Vivian Gallery (Matakana 2019) - ‘Not as simple as it sounds’, The Audio Foundation (Auckland, 2021) ‘La citta’ del Silenzio’,Pavilion of Contemporary Art (Ferrara,2022). ‘I am a conceptual performance artist, mainly working in the long durational format. My work acknowledges the fluidity of otherness within the dynamics of performance art. I am interested in the expression of our uniqueness and identity through vulnerability and intimacy. I explore how the artis and the audience come together to perform a caring community.’ -Ivan Lupi

Tomasz Szrama (b. 1970 in Poland) graduated in 1998 from the Academy of Fine Arts in Wroclaw, Poland. Currently he lives in Helsinki, Finland. Szrama shifts between multiple disciplines, including photography, video and other time-based works. Regardless of the medium, a dominant thread, common in his work is the use of his own body and methods of performance art, which he has practiced since 1993. Characteristic features of his work are the use of spectators and improvisation. Szrama has been regularly performing internationally in various live art events and festivals in 30 countries across Europe, Asia, Africa, North and South America. Further, over the past 16 years, he has been an active performance art event organiser. Szrama has worked as a producer, designer, technical manager and has been responsible for organising live art events at HIAP – Helsinki International Artist Programme. Currently, Szrama teaches, gives lectures, and offers workshops. Szrama is a working grant recipient from the Arts Promotion Centre Finland for the year 2016, 2022 as well as the years 2018–2020, from the Kone Foundation for 2017 and from the Finnish Cultural Foundation for 2021.

enormousface is a slime mold who lives in a (w)hole in the sky with dozens of feral pups. As a street physicist, xE has toured post-animist puppet shows and Not-Happenings across most of Europe and the Americas. A student of Comparative Literature and Misunderstandings, xE also periodically lectures on Ontological Nihilist Cosmogony, granting PhDs to passersby. New York Magazine decribes xErr as “NYC’s Most Avant-Garde Nihilist Subway Performer”. xE is a double Henson grantee and also organizes Garbage Fest.