PAB OPEN 24 - SEMINAR “The challenges performance art faces”
PAB OPEN SEMINAR
“The challenges performance art faces”
Where: Bergen Assembly - Halfdan Kjerulfs gate 4
When: 11:00-16:00 October 4th
Language: English
Performance art requires the presence and time of both the audience and the artists. In an increasingly busy and digital world, performance art engages with time, politics, and entertainment. At performance art events, one encounters various methods and strategies depending on the artists' age, interests, and performance art environments. How can organisers facilitate the diversity of these different strategies without compromising the experience of the audience and the artist?
Performance art encompasses everything from political statements to visual poetic presentations. The purpose of the seminar is to discuss and exchange experiences on how performance art can adapt in an increasingly digitised and busier world, while still maintaining its essential requirement for the presence of both the audience and the artists.
The seminar has invited artists from the organisations Bbeyond, PAN & PAB who will have talks by Kurt Johannessen, Rita Marhaug, Bronagh Lawson, Siobhán Mullen, Thomas Wells, Greig Burgoyne, Finn Adrian Jorkjen, Ollie Hermansson and Benedict Beldam; and it will be moderated by Eleanor Clare.
Program seminar “The challenges performance art faces”
11:00-11:10(10 min)
“Introduction”
Performance Art Bergen - Mia Øquist, coordinator of PAB Open Festival, and Anette Friedrich Johannessen, board leader of PAB
11:10 - 11:50 (40 min)
“A fragile contemporary reality”
Performance Art organisation Bbeyond (Northern Ireland) - Bronagh Lawson, Siobhan Mullen, Thomas Wells
12:00 - 12:30 (30 min)
“Planning”
Performance Art Bergen - Kurt Johannessen & Rita Marhaug
Lunch 12:30-13:30
13:30-14:00 (30 min)
“What is beyond the visible”
Artist/performance art organiser Greig Burgoyne (England)
14:10 - 14:50 (40 min)
“Confessions of a performance artist”
Performance Art Norway - Finn Adrian Jorkjen, Ollie Hermansson & Benedict Beldam
15:00 - 15:45 (45 min)
“Open Forum/discussion”
Moderator - Eleanor Clare
Information Organisations
Bbeyond
Bbeyond is committed to promoting the practice of performance art and artists in Northern Ireland and further afield. Our aim is to raise people's consciousness of live/performance art as being integral to the world in and around us, inspiring reflection and enriching lived experiences. We host artists of international reputation throughout the performance artworld and encourage newer artists to experience performance art practices for themselves.
www.bbeyond.live
Performance Art Norway
Performance Art Norway is an artist-run association started in 2023. The group was established by a group of younger artists longing for a community and collegial space to discuss challenges related to performance art. Performance Art Norway aims to create meeting points for artists with performative practices, mediate performances happening in Norway and facilitate events concerning performance art. Since their conception they have been arranging workshops, meetings and performance events.
Performance Art Bergen
Performance Art Bergen (PAB) is a membership organisation for performance artists and others interested in visual performance. PAB has arranged hundreds of performance events since its establishment in 2011. PAB aims to strengthen and make visible performance art by arranging academic forums, workshops, open sessions, festivals and international exchanges. The organisation is located in Bergen, but works locally, nationally and internationally.
Seminar speakers
Kurt Johannessen (b.1960) works mainly with performance, and artists books. He has performed in Europe, Asia and America since the early 80's. His performance often has a poetic and minimalist expression. He works with text and publishes his own artist books. The text works are often short, visual, poetic, and sometimes contain humour. Johannessen was one of the founders of PAB and was on the board between 2011-2020.
Rita Marhaug (b. 1965) is a visual artist living in Bergen, Norway. She was a professor in the Fine Art Department (2001-13) at her alma mater KHIB (now University of Bergen). Since the 90’s Marhaug has participated in many solo and group exhibitions and performance festivals. Marhaug was one of the founders of PAB, and has been on the board since 2011.
Bronagh Lawson is an artist, curator and author based in Belfast, Northern Ireland. She writes a weekly Art column for Belfast Media Group and published a book based on her experience of visiting every church in Belfast for a service over a twelve-year period. Called Belfast, City of Light, looking and listening to Belfast, come with me. Bronagh Lawson has twenty years experience of being a chairperson and has been chair of Bbeyond since 2023.
Siobhán Mullen, born Belfast, N. Ireland, is an artist with a practice spanning performance, experimental video, sound work and sculpture. Her live work often concerns spaces of poetic resistance and the metamorphic. Since the mid 90s, she has shown her work at major international festivals, exhibitions in the UK, Europe, North, South America, New Zealand, and the Arctic. Active with the renowned performance organisation Bbeyond in its early projects, she also held the Chair 2016-2019.
Thomas Wells (he/they) is an artist and curator based in Belfast. Their work is based in socially engaged practice involving LGBTQ+ spaces of collective experience. Originally from Manchester, England they have been working in the north of Ireland since 2017. Thomas’ recent projects include 'Neverlandz', a performance work for Outburst Arts Festival 2023 exploring research interests of hospitality as a political space of engagement.
Greig Burgoyne is interested in the paradox of visible/invisible, whereby the active body is a celebratory event space of powerful, if absurd weakness. His work features in “Performance Drawing-New practices’ published in - 2022. Burgoyne regularly exhibits, writes and presents papers in museums and institutions across Europe and beyond. He is co-Writer for 'Drawing as Placemaking: Environment, History, and Identity' to be published by Bloomsbury Books in 2025.
Ollie Hermansson (1991, Denmark, they/them) is a visual and performance artist, based between Vienna and Oslo. Their works are expressed through body, text, drawings, and tactile gestures. Topics include gender, identity, love and community.
Benedict Beldam (b. 1994, Norway, they/hän) works with performance, installation, text and sound, rooted in Kvääni culture. Their practice integrates relational aspects of the culture, like sauna, soured milk and tar burning.
Finn Adrian Jorkjen (b. 1990, Norway, he/him) is a visual artist based in Oslo. He works with text, performance and video. His works are concerned with questions about identity, how digital spaces affect bodies and big ambivalent feelings.