Asian Contemporary Art Week is a proud media sponsor of PERFORMA 09. 

Asian Contemporary Art Week (ACAW) invites you to the third edition of the internationally acclaimed biennial of new visual art performances held in New York City from November 1 – 22, 2009. The three-week festival will showcase new work by over 100 international artists, including a number of cutting edge artists working both inside and outside of Asia.

Guy Ben-Ner, Rabih Mroué, Keren Cytter, Omer Fast, Tan Lin, Ahmet Ögüt, Yeondoo Jung, Shoval Zohar, Alexander Singh, Sung Hwan Kim, Nikhil Chopra, and Khatt Foundation,  

Performa 09’s innovative program will break down the boundaries between visual art, music, dance, poetry, fashion, architecture, film, television, radio, graphic design, and the culinary arts, presenting over 110 events. These events are presented in collaboration with a consortium of more than 80 arts institutions and 40 curators, as well as a network of public spaces and private venues across the city, PERFORMA 09 will ignite New York City with energy and ideas, acting as a vital “think tank” bringing audiences together for new performances, exhibitions, broadcasts, screening, installations and public education programs accross all displines.

For a complete list of participating venues and agenda, please see the calendar!

To learn more about PERFORMA, please visit at http://performa-arts.org/.

Guy Ben-Ner
Untitled

Performa Hub
41 Cooper Square
Sunday, November 1, 7:00pm – Sunday, November 22 7:00pm
FREE

Filmed and edited over the course of twelve months, Israeli artist Guy Ben-Ner will present an unusual “live film” that captures an ongoing phone conversation between the artist and himself as he flies to and fro between Berlin and Tel Aviv, the respective locations of his girlfriend and his family. Unlike a regular film, which is edited externally after all of the shooting is complete; Ben-Ner’s film never leaves the camera during a twelve-month period. The film always remains “live,” awaiting the next shot, which might take place in either Israel or Germany. Ben-Ner’s “storyboard” is life itself, and each scene occurs in real time. Since the only editing is done entirely in-camera, the move from one shot to the next requires a real physical move: the camera traveling the full distance from Tel Aviv to Berlin and back as the dialogue progresses. Shot in Hebrew, and subtitled in English, the film presents a conversation in rhyme, which discusses how art can be at the service of life and the repercussions of such a unified relationship.
Guy Ben-Ner was born in Israel in 1969 and currently lives and works between Berlin and Tel Aviv. Since the early 90s, Ben-Ner has filmed a series of videos starring himself and his family. Mixing sophisticated cinematic devices and crafty, do-it-yourself elements, Ben-Ner’s videos brim with witty cross-references to specific episodes and genres within the histories of cinema, video, and performance. Ben-Ner has been featured in numerous exhibitions internationally, including shows at the Hayward Gallery, London (2008), the ICA Philadelphia (2008), Sculpture Project, Munster (2007), and Musee D’Art Contemporain de Montreal (2007). Ben-Ner represented Israel at the 51 Venice Biennial (2005).
A Performa Commission with Artis Contemporary Israeli Art Fund. Supported by the Consulate General of Israel.

Omer Fast
Untitled

Abrons Art Center
466 Grand Street
Wednesday, November 11, 7:00pm – Friday, November 13 7:00pm
Nov. 11, 12, and 13 at 7pm
Tickets: $20 / $16 Performa Members

A Performa Commission with Artis Contemporary Israeli Art Fund
For Performa 09 Omer Fast will combine the familiar childhood game of “Broken Telephone” with the confessional talk show format. In a theatrical setting, invited guests will recount personal memories with direct links to current global events and the projection of power and freedom. As each guest begins speaking, an actor appears alongside, as an observer, listening to the guest’s account for the first time. When the guest is finished, the actor retells what he or she has just heard, while another actor listens to the account and subsequently narrates his or her own rendition of the story. This sequence repeats several times over the course of the evening, allowing the story to spontaneously transform from individual memory to communal recitation, from version to version into its own fluid text.
Working with film, video, and television footage, Omer Fast examines how individuals and histories interact with each other through narrative. He mixes sound and image into stories that often veer between personal and mass media-based accounts of current events and history. Fast was born in Jerusalem in 1972, studied in the United States, and currently works and lives in Berlin. His video installation, “The Casting” (2008), was presented at the 2008 Whitney Biennial and won Fast the 2008 Bucksbaum Award.

Ahmet Ögüt
The Pigeon-Like Unease of my Inner Spirit

Bidoun Magazine
47 Orchard Street
Sunday, November 15 7:00pm – Sunday, November 15 10:30pm

For Performa 09, artist Ahmet Ögüt develops a conversation with Devorah Greenspan, a blind painter in order to create a homage to the Turkish-Armenian newspaper editor, columnist, and journalist Hrant Dink. Ögüt not only shares what he knows about his physical characteristics, but also his philosophy, his writings, his love for his country, and his dreams as well as his fears, particularly referring to Dink’s last article that was published in the Armenian-Turkish newspaper Agos on January 10, 2007, titled “The Pigeon-like Unease of My Inner Spirit.”

Ahmet Ögüt (born 1981 in Diyarbakir, Turkey) is a conceptual artist living and working between Amsterdam and Istanbul. His practice incorporates a variety of media including video, drawing and installation, with performance often playing a major role in the conception or realization of the work. His subtle references to complex topics including religion, social and rural customs and the specter of war in this region are offset by an edge of humour. In 2009 he represented Turkey in the Pavilion of Turkey at the 53rd International Art Exhibition of the Venice Biennial. Ögüt has been a guest artist at the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten in Amsterdam in 2007-2008.

New York artist Devorah Greenspan enrolled in a drawing class a few years ago. Prior to that she considered creating visual artwork, aside from doodling, “off limits” due to her vision loss. Her artworks have been featured at New York City’s Viridian Gallery, Object Image Gallery, the Bay Ridge Art Fair, and the Educational Alliance

Curated by Defne Ayas with assistance by Ozge Ersoy. Commissioned by Performa. Co-presented by Bidoun Magazine and Performa. Supported by the Moon and Stars Project.
FREE

Shoval Zohar
Futurist Life Redux

Anthology Film Archives
32 Second Avenue
Monday, November 16 8:00pm – Monday, November 16 8:00pm

A Performa Commission
The only truly “Futurist” film, “Vita Futurista” (Futurist Life) was made in 1916 by Arnaldo Ginna and several other Futurist artists, including Giacomo Balla, Remo Chiti, and the founder of Futurism, F.T. Marinetti. Comprised of eleven independent segments conceived and written by different artists, “Futurist Life” contrasted the spirit and lifestyle of the Futurist with that of the ordinary man in a series of humorous sketches—“How the Futurist Walks,” “How the Futurist Sleeps,” “The Sentimental Futurist,” etc., many of which used experimental techniques in the new medium such as split screens and double exposures. The only-known copy of this film was lost several decades ago, and now all that remain are written accounts by Ginna and the journal L’Italia Futurista as well as a few still images.
For the Performa 09 biennial, Performa, with SFMOMA, has commissioned eleven contemporary film and video artists to create their own, 3-5 minute versions of the eleven segments in “Vita Futurista,” re-imagining this film in relation to our own future. Artists contributing films or videos to the new film, “Futurist Life Redux,” are: Trisha Baga, chameckilerner, Martha Colburn, Ben Coonley, George Kuchar, Lynn Hershman Leeson, Shana Moulton, Shannon Plumb, Aida Ruilova, Matthew Silver and Shoval Zohar (The Future), and Michael Smith. Each of the original segments of “Vita Futurista” was assigned to a contemporary artist via random drawing, and ultimately the shorts will be compiled into one, all-new version of Futurist Life for the twenty-first century.
For Futurist Life Redux, Silver will be working with Shoval Zohar (b. Haifa, Israel, 1982), a filmmaker, writer, and performer whose collaboration with Silver is known as The Future.
Curated by Lana Wilson and Andrew Lampert. Commissioned by Performa with SFMOMA and Portland Green Cultural Projects. Co-presented by Performa and Anthology Film Archives. Special thanks to Sally Berger and Marie Losier.
Tickets: $9 / $7 Students, Seniors, and Children / $6 Performa and AFA Members, available at the door.

Yeondoo Jung: Cinemagician
Cinemagician

Asia Society
725 Park Avenue
Thursday, November 19 8:00pm – Saturday, November 21 8:00pm

A Performa Commission
Yeondoo Jung’s new theater piece, Cinemagician, aims to recreate the tensions between the magician and audience that arise from watching the unfolding of an unknown event or trick. Inspired by the nineteenth-century French filmmaker George Melies, whose experiments as a magician and cabaret illusionist led him to play with special film effects such as the “stop trick” (stopping filming, substituting something in front of the camera for something else, and then resuming filming), multiple exposures, dissolves, and hand-painting colors on film, Cinemagician will present a live “happening” juxtaposed with a projected one. As a live magician (South Korean celebrity Eungyeol Lee) manually constructs the setting of the stage that he is standing on, a camera will simultaneously shoot the stage, and project its feed on a screen hanging above. As the performance progresses, the version shown on the screen will drift from a strict live feed to one transformed by illusions only possible in cinema, leaving the audience to oscillate between the “suspension of disbelief” and a paradoxically ravishing spectacle. Supported by The Korea Foundation and the TOBY Fund.
A Performa Commission with the Yokohama Festival for Video and Social Technology. Co-produced by Tina Kim Gallery, New York, and Kukje Gallery, Seoul.
One of the most prominent artists working in Korea today, Yeondoo Jung was born in 1969 in Jinju, South Korea and received his MFA from Goldsmiths College in 1997. He is the recipient of the 2007 Artist of the Year Award, given annually by the National Museum of Contemporary Art in Seoul. He has had solo exhibitions in Asia, Europe as well as the United States and his works have also been shown in numerous museums and biennales worldwide, including the 51st Venice Biennale and the Liverpool Biennale in 2008.
Nov. 19 at 8 pm

Nov. 20 at 8 pm
Tickets: $20 / $16 Performa Members

Art Must Move
A Collaboration with Khatt Foundation
Performa Hub
41 Cooper Square
Sunday, November 1 – Sunday, November 22, times vary
FREE

Yog Raj Chitrakar: Memory Drawings IX
Nikhil Chopra
The New Museum
235 Bowery
Wednesday, November 4 12:00pm – Sunday, November 8 6:00pm
FREE – with museum admission.

Rabih Mroué’s Gift to New York
Rabih Mroué
PS 122
150 1st Ave.
Saturday, November 7 – Sunday, November 8, 8:00pm
Tickets: $10 at PS122. www.ps122.org

3 Lectures + 1 Story = 4 Evenings
Alexandre Singh
White Columns
320 W. 13th Street
Monday, November 9 – Thursday, November 12, 7:00 pm
FREE







History in the Making, or the Secret Diaries of Linda Schultz
Keren Cytter
The Kitchen
512 W 19th Street
Wednesday, November 11 8:00pm – Thursday, November 12 8:00pm

Tickets $15 at www.thekitchen.org

Chalk Playground, LitTwitChalk
Tan Lin
Asian American Writers Workshop
315 West 36th Street
Saturday, November 14 10:40am – Saturday, November 14 1:00pm
FREE

In the Room
Sung Hwan Kim
The New Museum
235 Bowery
Sunday, November 15 7:00pm -Thursday, November 19 7:00pm
Tickets: $12 / $10 Performa and New Museum Members.

Scratch the Grand Finale
Le Poisson Rouge
158 Bleecker Street
Sunday, November 22 8:00pm
Tickets: $15 / $11 Performa Members


Click here for full calendar.