BORN TO BE A STILL LIFE
Workshop Leader: bello benischauer (ART IN PROCESS)
2nd Leader: elisabeth m eitelberger (ART IN PROCESS)
ART IN PROCESS is an Australian/Austrian artist team that has worked interdisciplinarily across installation, new media, performance and live art for over ten years, creating experimental work, that involves interactions with public participants and functions within non-traditional spaces. We develop projects internationally, recently, in Vienna and Sydney.
In our artistic work we explore relationships between humanity, technology and the natural environment in a socio-cultural context, addressing issues related to identity and belonging that arise from globalization. Projects address the elimination of existing distances arising from the borders and barriers that exist between countries, cultures and individual people. We ask questions about how we fit into certain places, what impact we have on our surroundings and what particular impact these surroundings have on us.
The workshop Born to be a Still Life is open for participants from any discipline, who are interested in themes and issues related to identity, belonging, and cultural difference/likeness, and in experimentation with different artistic media that involve new media as a transmitting and fusing element. Born to be a Still Life asks questions about positioning us in this world, about differences of Western and Eastern Culture and how we individually try to accommodate to certain issues (in this case based on surveying public spaces in Istanbul).
During the introduction, session participants will be selected to take active part in the artistic project that will develop from the workshop. Participants will work with us on performances in public space, experimenting with the human body through mime, gesture, movement and voice and utilising improvisation; they will explore how it feels to occupy a particular space and what internal and external reactions are caused by it. We will investigate and discuss the limits of control and release and the layers in between. Performative and temporal actions will ask questions about the original needs of a human being within its surrounding environment/society and within different cultural contexts. The process will be strongly driven by each participant’s commitment. Single performances will be filmed and accessible for an audience in public and private spaces throughout the process. Questions will address our existence, reality and illusion in relation to the co-existence of mind and body and different cultural backgrounds.
From the process resulting, a video and sound installation will round off the whole creative process. A public presentation involving a final live performance in front of an invited audience during ISEA is planned.
Bios of the Presenters
Bello Benischauer was born in Austria in 1966. He lives in Fremantle/Western Australia and short-term in other international places while working across installation, new media, performance and live art practices in residencies. He exhibits and works on an international scale. Since the age of eighteen he increasingly became interested in artistic techniques, finally focusing on new media and video installations, combining word, vision and sound. He spent ten years in South and Central America, Pakistan, Iran, Nepal, South and East Africa, Indonesia, New Zealand, India and Europe, resulting in a deep connection to world cultures in general. Developing his practice through artistic partnerships around the world, he found his own language that he currently presents through numerous installations and projects that aim for a critical social engagement on different levels with his audience. In 2000, he co-founded the artistic partnership ART IN PROCESS together with elisabeth m eitelberger and since then they have been working independently under this partnership. All digital work on DVDs and Blu-Ray Disc and artistic books by ART IN PROCESS are distributed by Contemporary Arts Media, Melbourne (http://www.artfilms.com.au/) – one of the leading consultants and suppliers of films and books for Arts Education. In addition, Bello has been touring a solo exhibition in Australia from 2008 to 2011 called IMPACT & FUSION. Other projects in the past two years include residencies in Ghana, Portugal, Austria and more recently at Artspace in Sydney, Australia. http://www.artinprocess.com
Elisabeth M. Eitelberger was born in Austria in 1974 and lives in Fremantle/Western Australia. She received her Master of Arts (in Philosophy, Theatre and Art History) from the University of Vienna in 1999, followed by various employments at Austrian Cultural Institutions (OK Center for Contemporary Art Upper Austria, States Theatre Linz, and Wochenklausur/ Interventions through Art). Elisabeth is a co-founder of ART IN PROCESS with artist Bello Benischauer and they have worked under their name ART IN PROCESS as an independent entity since 2000. Together they create work that is experimental, that involves interactions with public participants and functions within non-traditional spaces. Elisabeth’s part in the partnership involves artistic creation, voice works and writing short abstract plays, as well as independent research on theoretical questions concerning ART IN PROCESS practice and context. Workshops, lectures, social/school projects and conference presentations accompany their artistic work. Elisabeth is currently writing an artistic monograph called Cross-border and Beyond: work by bello benischauer and ART IN PROCESS. http://www.artinprocess.com
* There will be a fee, that will be announced shortly, for the first introduction day. Further days for project participation will be free.
Posted by: Ebru Surek