Joan Jonas and Anawana Haloba
Friday, 29 May 2009 / 15:00
Aula A, Terese
Dorsoduro 2206, Venice
On the occasion of Anawana Haloba and Joan Jonas's par ticipation in 'Fare Mondi//Making Worlds…', curated by Daniel Birnbaum for the 53rd International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia, the two artists will meet at the Faculty of Ar ts and Design at the IUAV University of Venice to discuss their respective ar tistic practices in relation to video and performance art. Joan Jonas, who has been key in the development of film, video and performance since the 1960s, will speak with Anawana Haloba, an ar tist born in Zambia and based in Norway who explores her own body as a medium to investigate identity as ar ticulated within non-Western parameters. In several of her works, Haloba explores the position of women within varied social and cultural contexts. Both ar tists will accompany the conversation with visual examples of their performances, films and video works, in an effort to discuss a variety of artistic strategies such as the use of sound and voiceovers, and the exploration of concepts of time and memory.
Anawana Haloba (born in Zambia 1978, lives and works in Oslo, Nor way) completed her studies at the National Academy of Fine Art, Oslo, in 2006. She is a graduate of the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam, the Netherlands (2008).
Haloba has par ticipated in the Sharjah Biennial (2007), Manifesta 7 (2008) and the 16th Biennale of Sydney (2008) among other exhibitions. For the 16th Sidney Biennale, curator Carolyn Christov-Barkagiev (currently the appointed Ar tistic Director of Documenta 13 in 2012) commissioned Haloba to produce a video and sound installation titled When the Private Became Public, exploring women's revolutionary passage from the private to the public realm. In 2008, the artist took par t in the project 'The Rest of Now', curated by Raqs Media Collective as part of Manifesta 7, where she exhibited a sound installation titled The Air Between Two Women (2008), a conversation between herself and Francesca Grilli about the word 'residue' as it relates to human experience. In 2007, for the Sharjah Biennale 8, entitled 'Art, Ecology & the Poltics of Change: Still Life', co-curated by Jack Persekian, Jonathan Watkins and Eva Scharrer, she exhibited a video and sound installation titled Lamentations (2006).
Joan Jonas (born in 1936 in New York, US, where she lives and works) received a B.A. in Art History from Mount Holyoke College, Mount Holyoke, MA (1958), studied sculpture at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts from 1958 to 1961, and received an M.F.A. in Sculpture from Columbia University, New York, in 1965. Since 2000 she has taught at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA.
Joan Jonas is a pioneer of video and performance art. Her experiments and productions in the late 1960s and early 70s were essential to the formulation of these media. In works that examined space and perceptual phenomena, she merged elements of dance, modern theatre, the conventions of Japanese Noh and Kabuki theatre and the visual arts. Her influence has been crucial since. Jonas has performed and exhibited her work extensively throughout the world. In 2004 she was honoured with a retrospective at the Queens Museum of Ar t in New York, titled 'Joan Jonas: Five Works'. She has also had major retrospectives at Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam and Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, both in the Netherlands, and Stadtsgalerie Stuttgart, in Germany. Her group exhibitions include the Whitney Biennial (1991), New York; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, US; Long Beach Museum of Art, California, US; Documentas 5, 6, 8, and 11 in Kassel, Germany; and the Montreal Festival du Nouveau Cinema et de la Video, Canada, among many others.
This event has been initiated by the Office for Contemporary Art Norway in collaboration with Facoltà di Design e Arti, Università Iuav, Venezia (Faculty of Design and Arts, Iuav University, Venice).