TRACE: Displaced (Wales)
TRACE: is dedicated to the research, investigation, dissemnination and discourse of art through the exploration of living performance activity, and its dissemination through process, documentation and archiving.
The group’s work reflects the theory and discourse of performance art cultivated by the activities of TRACE Installaction Artspace, Cardiff, Wales.
The Trace collective performance work brings together established and emerging artists & academics recognised at an international level.
Investigating memory and the interrogation of space as a primary vehicle for tracing its repression and recovery. Continually searching out those small elusive moments & images that represent and implicate us in a larger global narrative.
Within absence there may be a material counterpart to presence. It is through ‘trace’ and memory that we find absence revealed, and both of these are the core properties of experience and, though partially intangible, possess strong assurances of ontological security in existence.
Group activity will take the form of a series of performance interventions over a 4-day period in Tramway 2, as part of The National Review Of Live Art 2008.
A free-standing structure [plasterboard on wood frame] will be built. This will be a scaled replication of the ‘domestic’ TRACE install-action artspace situated in an inhabited terrace house in Cardiff.
During each day for a period of 3 hours [16.00 - 19.00] the artists will engage in an ongoing dialogue with the installation, navigating it’s physicality and making interventions upon it’s structure.
The public will have full access throughout to experience the ‘live’ activity and the resulting installation/evidence and residual traces.
Simultaneous reportage will be created during the daily activity. Text/reports will be posted and an information table will be available throughout.
The seemingly left-over or discarded matter from performance activity is offered up for contemplation and reflection. In bringing together these discreet elements one becomes aware of a certain unity of practice; a living archive centred on process, events and experiences. ‘traces’ that embody that fragile quality where the object itself is imbued with the performance that created it.
Trace’s slightly ambiguous title as an ‘installaction artspace’ refers to an amalgamation of ‘installation and action-based art’. The exhibition is installed through live performance and once this is completed the installation remains as a documentation and reminder of what has taken place in the room. The art space becomes a container for traces of previous lives, a ghost ship carrying the people and events that have occupied it.
André Stitt
Born in Belfast, N. Ireland, Stitt is considered one of Europe’s foremost performance and interdisciplinary artists. He has worked as a time based artist since 1976 creating hundreds of unique performances at major galleries, festivals, alternative venues and sites specific throughout the world including the Venice Biennale 2005, BALTIC 2005. And The Drawing Centre, New York, 2006.
Stitt is identified with a strain of performance relating more to visual art and art action [identified in Stitt’s work as “akshun”]. His work focuses on difficult and traumatic themes; issues of oppression, freedom, coercion, subversion, experiences of alienation, appropriation of cultures, globalisation, and communal conflict. His work physically and emotionally embodies the divisive forces of capitalism and materialist addiction; processes of building and disintegration and the resulting journey toward redemption.
He is also professor and director of Time Based Art at Cardiff School of Art & Design. There are several books published about his life and work and he is represented by curcioprojects, New York.
www.andrestitt.com
Beth Greenhalgh
Born in Hudderfield, studied Time Based Practice at Cardiff School of Art and Design. As an emerging artist she has presented performances at Experimentica in Cardiff and EXPO festival in Nottingham. Recent solo work includes, Insinuations: Trace Collective at the Switch Room, Belfast, Chapter Art Centre, Cardiff, the ‘My Land’ project, Croatia and the National Eisteddfod, Wales. Her work utilizes highly aesthetic scenes to evoke uncanny rituals and images alluding to a mythical reality based on a distorted “popular culture”.
Heike Roms
Dr Heike Roms is Lecturer in Performance Studies at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth. She has published widely on contemporary performance practice, particularly on work emanating from Wales, for publications such as Performance Research (for which she is a consultant editor), Inter, Frakcija, Live Art Magazine, New Welsh Review and Planet. She has collaborated with a number of Welsh artists on a variety of performance projects and is involved in several artist-led initiatives and networks in Wales, including serving on the Board of Directors of trace installaction artspace. Heike is project director of ‘What’s Welsh for Performance?’ a major research project devoted to uncovering and archiving the history of performance art in Wales.
www.performance-wales.org
Lee Hassall
Lee Hassall has previously made performance work at the NRLA, Glasgow in 2007. As a member of Trace he has also produced work as part of the collectives ‘Insinuations’ event at the Switch Room, Belfast and at Beijing New Arts as part of a Trace studio residency programme in China during 2005.
He is a graduate of the Slade School of Fine Art (1998) and he completed an MA in Fine Art at Chelsea College of Art (1999). He was commissioned by Sustrans for Contemporary Sitings on the National Cycle Network, has presented installation work at, Annely Juda Fine Art, London, Fordham Gallery, London and has screened film works at Tate Britain, London, The Arnolfini, Bristol, The Toronto Biennial, and in Krakow, Poland. He lectures at Herefordshire College of Art & Design.
Phil Babot
Creates live occurrences. His installations embrace the trace elements of the performative act and explore the Zen notion of the space between birth and death.
Based in Wales, he has worked throughout the U.K. and across Europe, the Americas and the Far East, both as a solo artist and with influential performance companies such as Brith Gof, as well as collaborating with other international artists.
Over the last 20 years he has presented site-specific works globally in diverse locations as well as in traditional art spaces. He received a MA in Fine Art in 2002 and is currently researching his PhD Elements of Shamanism Within Performance Art at Cardiff School of Art and Design, UWIC, where he is a core member of the SHIFTwork Time Based Art Research Group.
In 2005 Philip undertook a year long psychogeographical project, The Long Road to the North, and is currently working on another year long project, of Wales, a series of perambulating occurrences throughout rural Wales.
His work has previously been featured at NRLA in 2006 and 2007.
www.babot.org
Roddy Hunter
(b. Glasgow, Scotland, 1970) is a recognised artist, organiser, writer and teacher in the field of contemporary, primarily performance, art practice. He is known for contextual and conceptual works concerned mainly with knowledge and ideology in social contexts. His performances usually take place over extended time-periods and often involve or inhabit both constructed and ‘found’ installations. His work has been seen throughout Europe as well as in North America, Asia and the Middle East for over a decade. Some of this work is featured in Ice Cream: Contemporary Art in Culture (Phaidon, 2007) and in his first monograph Civil Twilight & Other Social Works (Trace Samizdat, 2007) He is currently Head of Fine Arts at York St John University.