Artist Focus

Facilitated by Martine Viale
Photo credit Jamie Gannon

On Saturday November 25 @11:15am ct | 18:15 ect we are thrilled to begin the Fall Artist Focus with a live conversation with Carron Little from University of Lincoln, U.K. and Martine Viale from Pepignon, France.

About Carron Little
Carron Little is the organizer of outofsite_chi and the convener of Flow • embody in site a public performance art symposium. Carron is Scottish American and is currently a Visiting Artist Lecturer at the University of Lincoln, U.K. Carron graduated with a Master in Fine Arts (MFA) from School of the Art Institute in Chicago specializing in Fiber & Material Studies and Digital Video Animation and taught in the Performance Department from 2014 – 2018. Carron studied a BA Honors at Goldsmiths' College, London University receiving a First-Class Honors in Textiles. Throughout her career she has received numerous awards and grants for her artwork including a British Arts Council residency at Barnett College, London, U.K. from 2000 – 2001, the Propeller Grant from Gallery 400 and Andy Warhol Foundation (2015), the Chicago/Swiss artist in residence (2016) supported by the Swiss Benevolent Society of Chicago and Chicago Sister Cities International, and most recently the Hyde Park Art Center Artist-Run Award (2023) and was a second round finalist for Creative Capital 2022.

To date, Carron has presented her performances and artwork in Illinois, Michigan, Indiana, Maryland, and Oklahoma in the USA and internationally in Bosnia, Bulgaria, Canada, England, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Scotland, Spain, and Switzerland. Significant civic engagement projects to date include Dream Minds (2012-2013), City Alive with Dreams (2014-2015), Neighborhood Magic for Beverly, Chicago (2015 – 2016), Spare Rib Revisited, Lucerne, Switzerland (2016-2018), Gie Ben Ilka Gill | To Give In Each Measure (Spring 2021), an online interactive public performance project for the community of Ludington, Michigan and Eight Acts, a live stream poetry performance written in response to the USA 2020 election. Most recently, Carron has been performing poetry and created a public performance art with Duff Norris (NYC) at Barrowland Park in Glasgow, Scotland called Art to Heart.

As the organizer of Out of Site, Carron is regularly invited to present her artwork & Out of Site’s work Universities, conferences, and museums. Post-pandemic she was invited to present at Intimate Bridges by Theater Entropia in Athens, Greece funded by the European Union, at the University of Darmstadt, Germany and at a symposium organized by ieke Trinks and B Ajay Sharma at Chandigarh Museum, New Delhi, India. Carron writes policy on equity, diversity, and inclusion in the arts authoring the 50 | 50 Initiative that was successfully implemented at the College Arts Association 2020.

As a creative practitioner Carron believes in the blossoming power of art facilitate diverse conversations with diverse communities and publics.

Artist Website: https://www.carronlittle.com/

Facilitated by Carron Little
Photo credit Sonja Ovaskainen

On Saturday December 2 @11:15am ct | 18:15 ect we are delighted to be in conversation with Anette Friedrich Johannesson. We were able to witness and enjoy her work this September through Flow • embody in site and are excited to share her work with you all.

About Anette Freidrich Johannesson
Anette Friedrich Johannessen is a multidisciplinary artist, working with performance, video, drawing and text-based work.

She holds a BFA from Camberwell College of Arts, London, and has participated in several festivals, exhibitions and events (both solo and collaboratively) in Europe, USA and Asia. Working from Bergen (Norway), Anette is today artistic director of Performance Art Bergen and is one of the co-organizers of Public performances in Bergen and the district around the city, called Open Sessions. Her artistic practice is highly inspired by Open Sessions, where the main concept is that art in public space is an expression of democratic thought, where art can, and should, be a shared experience.

The core element in Anette Friedrich Johannesen’s artistic practice is an investigation on sensory experience, repetition, minimal gestures and place identity. She seeks to define different types of systems and how they relate to chaos and order. This process is about understanding human rituals, and to which extent they are a part of our nature. In her work, she discusses mankind’s relationship to nature, social structures, and technology. How should we as humans relate to our ever-changing environment, and how can we as individuals adapt while at the same time figuring out how to balance our instinctive nature and technological progress?

Artist Website: https://anettefj.squarespace.com/

Facilitated by Carron Little
Photo by Jordan Hutchings

On Saturday December 16 @11:15am ct | 18:15 ect Carron will be in conversation with Sandra Corrigan Breathnach who creates socially engaged projects embedded in communities and has an active public performance art practice.

About Sandra Corrigan Breathnach
Sandra Corrigan Breathnach is an Interdisciplinary artist and curator working mainly in Performance Art, her practice includes elements of Sculpture, Drawing, Photography, Video and Sound. Recent performances include, 'Seven' a collaborative piece with Keike Twisselmann - Catalyst Arts - Belfast | 2023, ‘Shift’ | Alive & Kicking - Live Art Ireland | 2022, ‘Severance III’ | MAC - Belfast | 2021, ‘Primal Release’ | Transitstation Online | 2021, ‘Severance II’ | PEPA Online - N.Y. & Madrid | 2021, ‘Human’ | Seeing You - Seeing Me - Revision Festival - Belfast | 2020, ‘Interference’ | Sounding Out – Derry | 2020. Other notable performances include, 'Through the Eye' | PEPA – Madrid | 2019, 'Severance' | 60-120 Breaths - Flax Art Belfast - part of 'Humanism in Process' | 2019, ‘Voids’ | La Chambre Blanche - Inter le lieu's Rencontre internationale d'art performance (R.i.A.P.) Québec Canada | 2018, Corrigan Breathnach was interviewed following her performance and her image was chosen as the feature Image for the Art Publication Inter Art Actuel's event article written by the author Nathalie Côté. ‘Truth ?’ | Pollen Gallery Belfast | 2018, ‘Bound – UnBound’ | B.I.F.P.A 16 (Belfast International Festival of Performance Art) | 2016, ‘Being’ | Acción Mad 16 – XIII Encuentro De Arte De Acción - Matadero Madrid | 2016.

Collaborative works include 'Sentient', Sarah Walker Gallery - Cork | 2022 with artist Alastair MacLennan. Their collaborative work began in 2017 culminating in their 2018 Performance Installation exhibition 'Breath And Blood' | Burren College Gallery - Co. Clare, the exhibition included live performance, drawings, video, sound works and sculpture, another notable work was their 8 hour collaborative performance 'Flux In Flow' | The Golden Thread Gallery - Belfast | 2019, noted by Aidan Dunne as one of the 'Five best art exhibitions to see this week' in the Irish Times. Other collaborations include the exhibition ‘Pollenate' with Artist James King in 2016 in the Void Gallery Derry, a combination of live performance, video, animation, photography and sound works.

Artist Website: sandracorriganbreathnach.com

Facilitated by Carron Little
Photo by Ryan Buchanan

This Artist Focus with Johannes Zits has been postponed until 2024 and will be scheduled for 2024. Johnnes Zits lives and works in Toronto, Canada and engages in different collaborative practices. He recently had an exhibition in Birmingham, U.K. where the participants became collaborators. We are excited to share this work along and engage in conversation with Johnannes about his work.

About Johannes Zits
Johannes Zits's multi-disciplinary practice focuses on the many meanings engendered by a body, both human and non-human, extending the notion of the performer to include nature itself. Based in Toronto, Canada, Zits has presented work across Canada and internationally since the mid-80s. In 2019, the Copenhagen Contemporary Museum commissioned him to create a performance score for their permanent collection, and he performed at the International Biennial of Asuncion, Paraguay. In 2020, Johannes was the artist-in-residence at Western University's McIntosh Gallery in London, Ontario, where he presented the exhibition Listening To Trees. Last year, Zits helped facilitate the performances "Gathering With Young Birches" for TreeWilder in Oundle, UK and "Como Un Jagüey" at ISA, Havana, Cuba. In 2023 for his exhibition at Gallery Stratford he presented a collection of work which also included textile based collage and four performative actions, interacting with trees.

Artist website: http://www.johanneszits.com/

Facilitated by Carron Little
Photo credit Istvan Kovas

On Saturday March 25 @11:15am ct | 17:15 ect we are thrilled to begin the Spring Artist Focus with a live conversation with Yvette Teeuwen form The Hague, Netherlands and Carron Little, organizer of Out of Site.

About Yvette Teeuwen
My name is Yvette Teeuwen (1975) from Delft in The Netherlands. I live and work as visual artist & art performer in cultural sea-city The Hague, a short hour from Amsterdam. I studied at The Hague’s Royal Academy of Fine Arts (Mixed Media; 1997-2001). Besides I am a museum-teacher at Art Museum The Hague since 2007.I followed several performance-workshops for example from performer Johannes Deimling (Performance Art Studies, Germany (2019, 2020,2021,2022), from Dimple B Shah (India) and Kirsten Heshusius (The Netherlands) during Online Symposium Flow, Out of site_Chicago (2021), from duo VestAndPage (Germany) & Marilyn Arsem (US) during International event ID from Performance Site, The Hague (2019) and musician Wade Matthews (US/Spain) (2023).Exhibitions in The Netherlands: The Hague, Amsterdam, Dordrecht, Rotterdam and many more. Abroad: Valencia, Spain (2023), Kassel/Germany (2022), India & U.S. (2022), Chili & Brazil & Bolivia & Argentina & Mexico &India & Colombia & Belgium (2021), India & Mexico & U.S. & Chili & Germany (2020).

Artist Website: www.yveteeuwen.nl

Facilitated by Martine Viale
Photo credit Denys Blacker

On Saturday April 8 @11:15am ct | 18:15 ect Martine will be in conversation with Denys Blacker sharing this recorded interview from her garden in Girona, Spain. Denys Blacker has organized the FEM gatherings since 2001 and works with several ensembles in addition to creating solo work.

About Denys Blacker
Denys Blacker is a visual artist whose practice spans performance art, drawing, sculpture and video. She recently completed a funded PhD titled Interconnection, Synchronicity and Consciousness in Improvised Performance Art Practices at Northumbria University in Newcastle. In 2002, she co-founded Gresol, a non-profit making cultural association and since then, she has organised over 20 international Performance art festivals in Girona and Barcelona, including FEM, an annual festival showcasing the work of women performance artists, now in its 16th edition. She is a founding member of the all-women performance group Ocells al Cap (Birds in the Head) and a member of the International performance group Wolf in the Winter. She is co-founder of the EU funded project ELAA (European Live Art Archive) based in the University of Girona. She also initiated and coordinates Corpologia, a performance artist collective and a magazine of the same name. She regularly collaborates with other organisations and institutions to programme performance art and live art events including; Cara a Cara – an ongoing programme of interviews and residencies, that promotes works by women, at la Bonne, Women’s Cultural Centre in Barcelona, the Cicle d’Art d’Acció at Bòlit, Contemporary Art Centre in Girona and FLARE (Forum for Live Art Research and Education) at the University of Northumbria (UK).

Artist Website: http://denysblacker.com/

Facilitated by Martine Viale
Photo by Gerald Harringer

On Saturday April 15 @11:15am ct | 18:15 ect

About Boris Nieslony
He develops and shows the languages ​​of the body, the body, the gestures, the images, the actions and materials.Boris Nieslony has dedicated his life’s work to developing greater understanding of the philosophical, ethical, social, historical revolutionary and insurrectionary implications of performance art and to disseminating these findings as broadly as possible. He is a tireless and inspiring advocate of the art of performance living, lying in the encounter of meeting. he advocates the practice through organising and attending many artists’ meetings internationally, publishing his and others’ theoretical texts, archiving work and creating performance, photography and installation works that forcibly confront an existential unease and an alchemical, visual poetry.

Artist Website: https://elaa.cat/en/boris-nieslony/

Facilitated by Dimple B Shah
Photo by Rahul Giri

On Saturday April 22 @11:15am ct | 18:15 ect we are thrilled to present the expansive performance art practice of Dorothea Rust who is based in Zug, Switzerland. This live broadcast will be facilitated by Dimple B Shah who has been participating in Performance Art Festivals with Dorothea in India and European continent.

About Dorothea Rust
Dorothea Rust studies in postmodern dance in New York, visual arts and cultural / gender studies in Zurich (ZHdK). From 1983 to 1991 she collaborated and performed in New York with dance artists, choreographers and musicians. She is internationally active in translocal contexts with performances, interventions and lecture-performances, as a guest lecturer, mentor, co-initiator of platforms and networks for performative practices, focusing on the multi-layered curatorial and reflective aspects of Performance (and the) Arts, in collaboration with artists, curators, theoreticians and music groups: SYMPODIUM What’s Wrong with Performance Art? (2017) / LEGS performance relay (2016 ), ACT Sierre/Lucerne performance festival, platform for art students at swiss art academies (2011—2017) / DER LÄNGSTE TAG / THE LONGEST DAY, 16 hours nonstop outdoor performances in Zürich (since 2004 in irregular intervals) / GNOM groupe for new music baden (2009–2015) / stromereien biennial Performance Festival Zurich (2010/2011) / Delhi Workshop and Performance Day 2013 and others. She is also a co-founding-member of PANCH Performance Art Network Switzerland. She does research in ‚Somatics and Performance\Art’ in her artistic practice and in text works on dance and performance: contributions to publications such as «Floating Gaps – Performance Chronik Basel (1968-1986), Formen der Wissensgenerierung – Practices in Performance Art’. Awards, grants and contributions for residencies.

Artist Website: https://www.dorothearust.ch/

Facilitated by ieke TrinksPhoto by Chris RyanOn Saturday May 6 @11:15am ct | 18:15 ect we are delighted to present the performance art practice of Julie Vulcan who lives in the rural part of Australia outside Sydney. Due to time zone differences this broadcast will be recorded. In preparation for this conversation we have had fascinating conversations with Julie about her current research into darkness.
About Julie VulcanJulie Vulcan is an Australian artist, researcher and writer working across performance, installation, and digital media forms. She is mainly known for her durational performances engaging a choreography of repetition. Her works have been presented internationally with I Stand In: A Ritual for the Forgotten, Misplaced, Unrecovered and Removed being one of her most traveled performances (presented at Spill Festival, UK 2013; Performatorium, Canada 2014; 2nd Venice Performance Art Week: Ritual Body – Political Body, Italy 2014; Deathfest, Australia 2016; Taking Place, Canada 2017). A recipient of an Australia Council for the Arts Cultural Leadership grant in 2012 she undertook research trips in 2013 and 2014 to visit performance artists and events in UK, Cambodia, Italy, Germany, Sweden and the US. On return she founded and helped facilitate the performance art practice and research platform base-metal. Underlying many of her performance works is an interest in the veracity of mediated memory and the influences and/or motivations behind how we remember, record and re-write our actions, bodies and traces. In 2020 after a bushfire swept through her home-place, followed swiftly by the pandemic, Julie considered more deeply the performance of her body being performed by her surroundings rather than for an audience. In 2021, a year after the Black Summer fires, Julie temporarily transported ash from her home to perform Rescript, a four hour ritual in honour of the loss of non-human lives and new beginnings. Artist

Website: www.julievulcan.net
Facebook Group: base-metal

Facilitated by Carron Little
Photo by Michael Callaghan

On Saturday May 20 @11:15am ct | 18:15 ect we are delighted to present the performance art practice of Keike Twisselmann who lives in Berlin, Germany. Her research practice explores somatic practices along with a deep investment into current affairs and the politics of our times.

About Keike Twisselmann
Born in Berlin 1967. She was unconditionally admitted to study fine art at the University of Ulster Belfast in 1989, completing her studies 1992 with the Bachelor of Fine Art (Honours) and 1996 with the Master of Fine Art. In-between, she studied philosophy, English literature, politics and law out of interest.She was one of the founding members of Catalyst Arts Belfast, a group of international artists who created their own space for their political, social, and experimental art in the center of Belfast. At her studio flat in a deconsecrated church right at the frontier of the Northern Irish conflict, she organized Belfast’s first art cinema and founded the “provisional German embassy” which gave shelter and protection to anyone and everyone without prejudice. Her public performances are part of the northern Irish “Troubles Archive” by the Ulster Museum in Belfast. She moved back to Berlin in 2000, where she worked in the chair committee of the BBK Berlin (2003-2014).The focus of her artistic work lies on performance and painting with exhibitions and invitations to festivals around the world…such as:Venice, Kassel/Documenta, Cologne, Dessau/Bauhaus, New York, Belfast, Berlin, London, Scarborough, Transylvania, Derry, Hanover, Sheffield, Cleveland, Glasgow, Werkleitz, Dublin, Kilkenny, Galway, Cork, Barcelona, Cardiff, Québec, Kiel, Kleve, Leipzig, Madrid, … to name but a few.

Facilitated by Carron LittlePhoto by Sarah RisebroughOn Saturday May 27 @11:15am ct | 18:15 ect Carron Little was in conversation with James King about his public performance art takeovers working through the Troubles in Belfast and Derry in N.Ireland to the present time. He works collaboratively with many artists in public space and has had a long-term collaboration with Eamonn O’Donnell creating public interventions over three decades. James King was a workshop facilitator at Flow 2021 where we learnt to fuse poetics, vocality with public performance actions. The humor evoked in his work through poetry and performance art is a important element in his practice. Please note we decided to create a Part 2 that was recorded on May 31, 2023 and can be listened to here: Artist Focus with James King Part 2
About James KingJames King has lived in Derry for forty years. Since retiring as Course Director for the Certificate in Community Drama at the University of Ulster in 2004, King has developed his career as a performance artist and sound poet, and maintained his work with vulnerable groups in the community until the time of the Covid pandemic.He has practiced performance in a variety of genres for over forty-five years and lectured in community drama for thirty. Over the last fifteen years, King has expanded his performance practice, ranging from short, open word-play entertainments to extensive events. More recently, he has also incorporated sound poetry and vocal improvisation into his performances. King’s work is organic, spontaneous and site-specific. In his work he interrogates and expresses how he is in the world. His respect for intuitive spontaneity is an invitation to others to question, challenge and freely respond to self, others, and prevailing circumstances.King associated with the Bbeyond Belfast performance art collective in May 2005, during the In Place of Passing performance bus tour. Since then he has been an enthusiastic participant in Bbeyond’s monthly collective improvisations.In 2016, in collaboration with Bbeyond, King organized the Cumulator project. This involved performance artists from several countries and took place in outdoor venues, studios and galleries in Ireland, England, Belgium and Germany. The project began with one artist performing for one hour in January, and cumulated with twelve artists performing for twelve hours in December.Through Bbeyond King was invited to Bergen in 2010, the Spanish Bel-Mad exchange in 2013 and the German-Belgian Bel-Esse exchange in 2014, as well as AcciónMad Madrid in 2016. More recently, in 2022, he participated in the Black Kit Open the Door a Window project in Cologne.Consistently King performs on the streets of Derry and other public spaces, with his shamanic partner Eamonn O’Donnell, and the Bbeyond colony BBDB.With Peter O’Doherty, King has formed a mutually-enriching working relationship that focuses on text-based and vocal explorations. From intuitive abstract sounds, King finds phonemes, syllables and words that are reconstructed into performance poems.In December 2021, King and poet Ann McKay published “Parley Palaver (Distillations and Reasonings)”. In this book McKay responds to King’s gibberish writings by making sense of the closing lines of each poem and the accompanying charcoal illustrations. In 2022 and 2023 King produced three more books of writings and drawings: “ Fun With Words”; “From Palimpsest to Sillybling”; and “Ticlish All Sorts” (cover illustration by Carron Little).Other publications include: “Action: an Introductory Drama Manual” with Terence Zeeman, 2001; “Moving Pitches”, 2008; “Furrowed Lives” with David Hegarty, 2012; “Thoughts” with Sandra Corrigan Breathnach, 2017; and “Swims Diary”, 2021; “ Words, Presence, Traces”, James King and Peter O’ Doherty, November 21.

Facilitated by Carron Little
Photo by Ryan Buchanan

For the last Artist Focus of Spring 2023 we will be in conversation with Janice Parker who lives and works in Edinburgh, Scotland. While attending Edinburgh Fringe Festival last year I really had to search for any public performance art. In this journey I was delighted to discover a durational performance happening along the Union Canal by Janice Parker. We will talk more about this exciting project and her living practice of public performance art.

About Janice Parker
Janice Parker Is an artist based in Edinburgh, Scotland. working locally and further afield. She creates across disciplines, media and art-forms rooted in her primary practice of movement and dance. Collaborating with people, place and context she is known for forging partnerships outwith the dance mainstream, and for questioning the notion of who can dance and what dance can be. Janice has developed a vast body of work in her 40 years of practice – live, performance, film, text and installation, and believes in art as an act of quiet, or noisy, activism that proposes and supports possibilities for positive personal, social and cultural change and how we might live together.Most recently her work is in collaboration with the land, in particular green-space within the city that she lives. Her outdoor daily live practice, which draws on sociologist Richard Sennett’s thinking around how the sense of the body enters the built environment, is a quiet act of resistance to the gentrification and commodification of our public and civic spaces and places, and to our whose and what movement we value. It also connects the artist to the outside of things, to the human and non-human life of the outdoors, providing a sense of sanctuary and belonging.

Artist website: www.janiceparker.co.uk