LiVEART.US, independent Performance Art initiative created and organized by artist Hector Canonge, continues with its 2017 season program featuring the work of transmedia artists from Iran, Russia, Italy and the United States.

This month’s program consists of performances by artists coming from various disciplines and approaches to Live Art. April’s event  is an exploration in performance art through diverse manifestation of sound, spoken word, and visual narratives.

Participating Artists: Polina Riabova (Russia), Julia Santoli (Italy). Joshi Radin (United States) and Maryam Taghavi (Iran/Canada).

Organized and Curated by Hector Canonge.

LiVEART.US was established as a platform to present and feature local, national, and international artists working in Live Action Art and its diverse manifestations. The program features works where the body, as main instrument for artistic creation and expression, is the catalyst for sensorial experiences, cultural interpretation, and critical reflection. LiVEART.US main objective is to further support the creation and presentation of new works in Live Action Art in an environment suitable for reflection and dialogue. The series follows and complements the monthly program TALKaCTIVE: Performance Art Conversation Series initiated by Canonge in September 2014.

About the Artists:

Polina Riabova is a Russian-born poet and writer and co-founder of a cooperative independent record label based in Brooklyn, Borrowed Birds Records. In her performance work she explores the intersection between public and private life and the influence it exerts on our understanding of ourselves and others as well as themes of vulnerability using a mix of found objects, visuals and sound. At the Queens Museum she will present, ‘Objects In the Mirror are Not What They Appear’, a work which explores the past as a limitation, agent and active factor of the present.

Julia Santoli is a multi-media artist and musician whose work synthesizes image, gesture, and sound while navigating memory and presence—how past experience manifests in the present as ruins, and how these traces transform through mediation to/from the body within the ghost-nature of sound. Bringing an expertise in vocalization and engaging in close-listening as impetus for sound making, one of her long-term projects is of a resonant body fluctuating between sonic transcendence and failure. Using microphones interacting with speakers in space, gestures—determining distance between the elements—create audio feedback, while the nature of the sound (a drone, sometimes deep or high pitched) simultaneously determines the gestures. She has presented as a soloist and collaborator at Flux Factory, Issue Project Room, Judson Church, Disjecta, Widow Jane Mine cave, GRACE Exhibition Space, Panoply Performance Laboratory, Knockdown Center, and on a 5 month residency in the Spinnerei, Leipzig, Germany.

Joshi Radin works independently and collaboratively in performance, video and photography to contend with issues of ideology, empathy and human relations with non-human kinds. She is currently a merit scholar in the Visual and Critical Studies MA program at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her collaborative artist research group with Linda Tegg and Brian M. John, A Program for Plants, received a Shapiro Center EAGER grant in 2015 for their investigations with plants and empathy. She received her MFA from SAIC in 2016 as a New Artist Society Scholar.

Maryam Taghavi is an Iranian-Canadian artist based in Chicago completing her MFA in Performance as the recipient of the New Artist Society Scholarship. Her practice is interdisciplinary and manifests in photography, installation, video, and performance. She works with the emotional and historical labour of language and turns them into tangible material and corporeal forms. She has performed in venues and festivals such as Rapid Pulse Festival, ExTeressa Museum and Xpace Emerging Artist Series (Toronto), Sazmanab (Tehran) and her work has appeared in FUSE Magazine, Art Metropole and Tandis Magazine.

About the Curator:

Hector Canonge (Founder and director of LiVEART.US) is an interdisciplinary artist, independent curator, media educator and cultural entrepreneur based in New York City. His work incorporates the use of new media technologies, cinematic narratives, Live Action Art, and Social Practice to explore and treat issues related to constructions of identity, gender roles, psychogeography, and the politics of migration. He has exhibited and presented broadly in the United States, Latin America, Europe and Asia. As cultural entrepreneur, Canonge created and runs the Annual Performance Art Festival NYC, ITINERANT, started ARTerial Performance Lab (APLAB), an transcontinental initiative to foster collaboration among performance artists from the Americas, and directs his independent programs: PERFORMEANDO, a program that focuses on featuring Hispanic performance artists living in the United States and Europe, NEXUSURNEXUS a virtual platform for Live Action Art, and PERFORMAXIS, an international residency program in collaboration with galleries and art spaces in Latin America. After living most of his life in the United States, Canonge returned to South America in 2012, and lived abroad for almost 3 years. The artist returned to New York City in late 2015 to continue with the development and execution of new projects, exhibitions, and initiatives such as ITINERANT, Performance Art Festival NYC, taking place in the 5 boroughs in the city. He also launched TALKaCTIVE: Performance Art Conversation Series, CONVIVIR, the international residency program at MODULO 715, his new space in Jackson Heights, Queens. In 2016, Canonge initiated the Performance Art program LiVEART.US hosted at the Queens Museum, started teaching Performance and Media Arts at City University of New York, and continue with his program PERFORMEANDO, the performance art program that focuses on featuring works by latino/a artists in the USA.

Email: liveart.us@gmail.com

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