Site-specific performative installation in collaboration with Eduardo Alcón Quintanilha (Dudu), Bhagavan-David Barki de Lima, Chuyia Chia, Eloise Fornieles, Andrés Knob, Belen Romero Gunset, Joshua Seidner, Lolo y Lauti.
Commissioned by Faena Arts Center, Buenos Aires, Argentina, 2014.
Hours performed: 30
Curated by Marcello Pisu and Ximena Caminos
Installation by Atelier Marko Brajovic
Video Installation by Ilya Pusenkoff
Photo by Guta Galli and David Prutting X Billy Farrell Agency
The Performance Carousel brings together different individual artistic wills in a collective unconscious intention.
It is a number of independent solo shows: each artist signed an agreement not to reveal the details and meaning of their work to fellow participants; they perform separated by walls; all artists enter and exit the museum space in blindfold.
From another point of view, The Carousel is a stream of collective will: even if one work is not interconnected with another, and it might not even automatically ‘argue’ with the other works, the works are united by the theme of shame, a recurring topic in Fyodor Pavlov-Andreevich's work, one that also reconnects the artist to his Jewish great-great-grandfather, Ilya Sergeevich Veger (1865-1945) who was head of the Soviet Health Committee in the mid 1920s.
The Committee’s mission was to bring to life a new lifestyle that was at a certain point connected to Soviet Constructivism. Part of the propaganda was a government-backed movement called “Down With Shame” (1924-1925), which involved activists organising naked guerrilla interventions into public areas, screaming out loud, “Down with shame! Real communists show no shame!”
Every nation, every individual, every artist, has their own sense of shame – and their own reasons for it. Nine artists from various parts of the world joined together by The Carousel are talking to each other about their personal, or collective, or even national shame.
The carousel doesn't move if the three cycling stations situated at its edges are not used by the members of the audience, as participants. The performances literally move away from the viewer if the viewer does not attempt to catch up with them physically, to penetrate their insides, to overcome the centrifugal force that keeps the viewer out of the sacred space of live art.
This rotation, slowly but surely, might well help us to answer those questions that had been so successfully answered by artists in the 1970s - from Abramovic/Ulay and Gina Pane to Leticia Parente and Vito Acconci, at the very peak of the history of performance art.
photos by Guta Galli and David Prutting X Billy Farrell Agency