Performance

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  • Absolution 1

    Absolution 1

    Presented at NEW ERA TINA B. - The Prague Festival of Contemporary Art with Tomas Ruller / Curated by BBB Johannes Deimling October 9, 2009 / 11 minutes



    For this performance, which I developed for TINA B. 2009, I wanted to address the Festival’s theme of ‘NEW ERA’ by looking at themes of servitude, gender, political power, as well as the sacred/ profane dyad. Absolution 1, performed with Czech artist Tomas Ruller, began as an exploration of pollution taboos of the lower half of the body (traditionally associated with sex and abjection) with the ‘clean’, ‘pure’ upper half of the body (associated with the mind). The performance combined the archetypal action of Christ’s (spiritual) washing of the 12 disciples’ feet with that of the Magdalene’s sensual action of wiping of Christ’s feet with her hair. As the performance developed, it became a way to test the emergence of intimacy from an act of servitude, the limits of giving & receiving, and the interpenetration of sacred anointing and sensual pleasure. Ruller intervened partway through, by reversing the action and washing my feet with his head.

  • Absolution 1

    Absolution 1

    Presented at NEW ERA TINA B. - The Prague Festival of Contemporary Art with Tomas Ruller / Curated by BBB Johannes Deimling October 9, 2009 / 11 minutes



    For this performance, which I developed for TINA B. 2009, I wanted to address the Festival’s theme of ‘NEW ERA’ by looking at themes of servitude, gender, political power, as well as the sacred/ profane dyad. Absolution 1, performed with Czech artist Tomas Ruller, began as an exploration of pollution taboos of the lower half of the body (traditionally associated with sex and abjection) with the ‘clean’, ‘pure’ upper half of the body (associated with the mind). The performance combined the archetypal action of Christ’s (spiritual) washing of the 12 disciples’ feet with that of the Magdalene’s sensual action of wiping of Christ’s feet with her hair. As the performance developed, it became a way to test the emergence of intimacy from an act of servitude, the limits of giving & receiving, and the interpenetration of sacred anointing and sensual pleasure. Ruller intervened partway through, by reversing the action and washing my feet with his head.

  • Absolution 2

    Absolution 2

    Presented at NEW ERA TINA B. - The Prague Festival of Contemporary Art / Curated by BBB Johannes Deimling / October 9, 2009 45 minutes



    Following my performance of Absolution 1, I then performed Absolution 2 (an homage to Janine Antoni's 1992 performance, Loving Care) in which I mopped the expansive marble floor with my hair of the Parkhotel Prague lobby. Using a white maid’s cleaning bucket, I dipped my head upside down in hot, soapy water and scrubbed away until physically exhausted (duration: 45 minutes). In the process, this action created a great deal of speculation from around 100 tourists as they were eventually ‘mopped away’ from the busy hotel lobby. As the floor became cleaner the white wedding dress became progressively gray. Absolution 2, takes the subject of exhausting manual labor as a starting point for re-imaging women’s political role in the new era as leading the way in providing a deeper political cleansing for a world desperate for independence from violent political methodologies of revenge.