LIVE Biennial of Performance Art 2005
EVENT SCHEDULE AND BRIEF DESCRIPTIONS

October 27 to November 3
(Ordered by date/time and by programme: first event of a day highlighted in green)
Schedule subject to change. All events in association with LIVE Biennial.

Thursday, October 27, 8pm
MARTINE VIALE

Performance: OBJECT SCULPTURAL
Western Front, 303 E. 8th Avenue, Vancouver. 604-878-7563 www.front.bc.ca
Tickets $5/$8
Viale uses various objects and materials that reference anatomical laboratories of the 16th-17th Centuries. "I
present myself as an anonymous anatomical icon without precise social, cultural or sexual references. My body is
my raw material and this project was born of a desire to present a reflection on the essence of the common body,
made of flesh, bone, blood, air and nerves but also imperfect - strong and fragile at the same time".
To date, Viale's "Object Sculptural" project has been presented at Galerie La Centrale-Powerhouse (Montreal),
Chashama (New York), Tupada International Action Art event (Philippines) and Contenedores:Muestra
international de arte de action de Sevilla (Spain).
Thursday, October 27,10pm AND
Friday, October 28,10pm
PETER BAREN

2 Performances: ARK (FEATURING BRIDGE OF SIGHS, SLEEP OF REASON AND WAILING WALL)
Helen Pitt Gallery, 1 0 2 - 1 4 8 Alexander St. Vancouver 604-681-6740 www.helenpittgallery.org
Amsterdam-based artist Peter Baren will be performing this monumental work over a period of two days. ARK is
an ongoing performative piece that has continued to evolve and change shape over time, recently in places such
as Biel, Cardiff, New York, and Krakow. A multi-sensory opera of sorts, Baren's performances in Vancouver are
rumoured to include nude performers, molasses, fog, drawings, texts and boomerangs, to create an environment
that evokes primordial mystery, public yearning, fear and radical socio-political reformation. As the Trace Gallery
in Cardiff warns: "Everything you are about to experience has been put under the spell of a floating device".
Peter Baren has been active in performance art for more that 20 years and has shown his work worldwide. He is
the recipient of the Prix de Rome Art and Theatre award.
Sponsored by the Mondriaan Foundation and The Netherlands Foundation of Visual Arts Design and Architecture.
Friday, October 28, Time tba
Lida Abdul
Video In Studios, 1965 Main Street (west side of Main), Vancouver 604-872-8337 www.videoinstudios.com
As an artist who works both in performance and video art, Lida Abdul creates poetic spaces that allow the
viewer to interrogate the familar and the personal. Her work is guided by a ritualized formalism that
insinuates the immediacy of myth and the playfullness of a mind seeking to understand the surrounding world.
In many ways, witnessing her pieces is like attempting to understand the riddles of the gestures and the
repetitions that highlight her work. Abdul's work is located at the intersection between art and architecture; it
invites the viewer to see the unfolding of new forms but never resolves the contradictions and the paradoxes, the
purpose of which seems to be to make us doubt our claims of understanding.
Born in Kabul, Afghanistan in 1973, Lida Abdul lived in Germany and India as a refugee before moving to the U.S.
Her work fuses the formalist traditions she was trained in the US with the numerous aesthetic traditions-Islamic,
Buddhist, Hindu, pagan and nomadic-that collectively influenced Afghan art and culture.

Media Contact: Gwen Kallio 604-215-2345 / sisuproductions@telus.net

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She graduated from the University of California at Irvine with an MFA and has since exhibited both in the US and
abroad. She has produced work in many media including video, film, photography, installation and live
performance. Her most recent work has been featured at the Venice Biennale 2005, Kunsthalle Vienna and Miami
Cantral, CAC Centre d'art contemporain de Bretigny and Frac Lorraine Metz, France. She has also exhibited in
festivals in Mexico, Spain, Germany, Uzbekistan,, Kyrgyzstan.Afghanistan, U.Kand Japan.
As a performance artist, she has also performed at numerous Los Angeles venues such as Highways, Track-16,
Knitting factory, and LACE. She was also a featured artist at the Central Asian Biennial 2004. Recently she was in
Kabul, Afghanistan working on projects exploring the relationship between architecture and identity in post-war
Afghanistan.
PERFORMANCE PIECE
In today's culture repetition-the insistence on what one considers necessary-can often shock people because of
the single-mindedness of the action. People are discomfited when they see the raw stubbornness of a resolve
such as the one poetically depicted in Lida Abdul's performance.
The act of eroding the cold hardness of a slab of ice is an apt metaphor for the trajectory of our thoughts: the
initial hardness of thoughts and ideas; the later fluidity that comes from its mingling with action; and finally the
ghostly quality of the mingling of action and thinking that is the province of art making itself.
Friday, October 28, 8pm
Opening: JENNY HAM - New Installation
Performance & Artist Talk: Saturday, October 29, 2pm
Exhibit runs: October 28 - December 3
Centre A, 425 Carrall Street, 604-683-8326 www.centrea.org / centrea@centrea.org
Jenny Ham is a New York-based interdisciplinary artist, educator and independent curator whose work is fuelled
by the complexities of her Korean-Canadian background.
In her performance, Ham will express her personal interest in these themes: the underside of the American
vernacular, the racialized body, everyday life and theatricality. Ham's inter-disciplinary practice attempts to
question the position of the viewer in relation to larger social and political ideologies.
Ham's artistic practice consists of various media including video, installation and performance. She was actively
involved in developing a community based public art installation in Mount Pleasant through collective echoes, a
non-profit arts organization in Vancouver, BC. In May 2000, she curated a series of exhibitions for Asian Heritage
Month Society in Vancouver and recently, she co-curated Empire's Feast, a New York/Vancouver video
exchange. She received her MFA at Hunter College, City University of New York and currently lives and works
in New York.
Presented in conjunction with Heart of the City Festival and Out of the Rain

Saturday, October 29, Sunset to 11pm
PAULA JARDINE

Family-oriented, community-based participatory event: A NlGHT FOR A L L S O U L S A T THE MOUNTAIN VIEW CEMETERY

Mountain View Cemetary, 5455 Fraser St- at 41 s t Avenue, Vancouver
www.vancouver.ca/allsouls
A Night for All Souls at the Mountain View Cemetery, conceived and directed by artist-in-residence Paula Jardine,
will provide opportunities for the public to commemorate their dead through a series of workshops and
presentations, culminating in a family oriented community art event.
Public workshops will be offered in Memorial Lantern Making, Prayer Flags and shrine making in advance (check
website for details).October 29th preparations will begin in the afternoon, and move into the evening, beginning
with a commemorative silence. Throughout the night there will be illuminated processional musical elements, solo
musicians, storytellers and poets moving through the cemetery where people have come to decorate their graves,
contribute to the artist-made shrines, buy flowers and food. The Night for All Soul's at the Mountain View
Media Contact: Gwen Kallio 604-215-2346 / sisuproductions@telus.net
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Cemetery is a non-denominational sacred event, and an opportunity for people to share their own customs and
experiences.
PANEL DISCUSSION: Sunday, October 30, 2pm
ALTERED COMMUNITIES

grunt gallery, #116 - 350 East 2nd Avenue, Vancouver (between Scotia and Brunswick)
Moderator: Daina Warren
Panelists: Nimi Langer (Vancouver), Pam Hall (St Johns) Dinka Pignon (Vancouver) Margaret Dragu (Vancouver)
Communities change with time. This panel explores strategies artists use to perform, create, or alter communities.
How have performance artists negotiated changes in communities overtime? How do performance artists juggle
the sometimes competing demands between the individual and the communal? From the virtual to the real, the
rural and the urban, performance artists are challenging the way we traditionally define community, tribe, and
nation.
Sunday, October 30 - November 7
DtSASTEROIDS

Performance Installation Series: ALTERED PIECE
Video In, 1965 Main St. Front Window
ALTERED PIECE is an installation in the front window at Video In - a giant altar that the artists begin building on the

inside of one of the Video In front windows, then inviting people/passers by to build on the outside. The result will
be one big mixed media altar in two parts, separated by the window pane. The alter- making will begin October 30
and continue until Nov. 7th. The live performance is in the exhibited collaborative process and participation in altar
creation.
Disasteroids is a collective for mixed media experimentation, collaboration and celebration
(See also Nov. 5*: LIVE PROCESSION: Short Circuit)
Sunday, October 30, 8pm
MARTIN BEAUREGARD

Performance: FIREWORKS
grunt gallery, #116 - 350 East 2nd Avenue, Vancouver (between Scotia and Brunswick)
Martin Beauregard is an emerging artist from Montreal. His performances flirt with disaster: reckless inventions,
scenery that falls apart, half-finished machinery that explodes. His pieces are conceived in a universe where
natural laws of physics don't apply. When these ideas come into contact with the physical properties of the real
world, chaos ensues. It is in this ensuing chaos that his work emerges. Failure looms large; success is not an
option.
For LIVE, he will produce his performance "Fireworks" using a slide projector and live sound effects. Beauregard's
simulations fall flat, never reaching the needed climax. He says it is his intention to wipe out wonder and make a
big deal out of nothing.
Beauregard is a perfect choice for LIVE 2005 and its theme of Altered States
Wednesday, November 2 nd , 8pm
DANIEL ANDERSON
Performance: CHINA CLIPPER

Video In Studios, 1965 Main St. (west side of Main), 604-872-9516 www.videoinstudios.com
An evening of solo performance and video. Performance artist Daniel Anderson, under the pretensions of
academe, will consider the curious dimensions of Asian-Caucasian relationships within Vancouver's multi-ethnic
queer community. Lines will be drawn, allegiances professed, passions unveiled, desires betrayed.
Daniel Anderson is a social and creative expatriate practicing in video, sound and performance. He has exhibited
in Canada, the US and Australia, and will present versions of the China Clipper project at festivals in China and
Japan.
Media Contact: Gwen Kallio 604-215-2345 / sisuproductions@telus.net
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Thursday, November 3rd, 8pm (time tbc)
PAM HALL & MARGARET DRAGU

Performance Installation: MARGINALIA
Installation runs: November 4, 5, 6
grunt gallery, #116 - 350 East 2nd Avenue, Vancouver (between Scotia and Brunswick
MARGINALIA is a performance and installation work by Dragu and Hall that began February - March 2004 during
their VASISTAS' residency at Theatre La Chapelle in Montreal. Since then, they have been extremely busy:
exchanging e-mail/snail mail correspondence, collecting video imagery, writing and exchanging text, and
especially creating/scanning/e-mailing daily postcard/journal/snapshot echoes of their lives in the form of textile
"squares" that echo and contest the domestic traditions of women's handwork.

Media Contact: Gwen Kallio 604-215-2345 / sisuproductions@telus.net
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