Supported by mac Birmingham
The visual arts programme is based on a bi-annual call for artists. At the end of 2012 we will re-open the call for visual artists. This year, the European visual artists Federico Sancho and Mikel Nieto, residents in 2011, will present during the festival the results of their research. The information bellow corresponds to last year’s programme.
BE FESTIVAL’s ethos of ‘crossing borders’ attempts to show the shifting notions of what constitutes a border. According to TJ Demos “with the eventual crisis of globalisation and the failure of many of the promises of neo-liberal capitalism, we have seen borders emerge everywhere. For many, that has been a poignant sign of global inequality.”
Borders are new conditions that increasingly define and divide our lives politically, economically, and socially. We could also add artistic and linguistic borders. Classification and labeling are artifices created to define concepts but hence divide them. BE FESTIVAL aims to devise a collective experiment that combines utopian aspirations with critical awareness.
Exploring Borders
BE FESTIVAL explores the ‘borders’ between performative and visual arts. In this regard, the festival presents performative and visual arts as applied forms inserted in a ‘social sculpture’ –using Joseph Beuys term –, that challenge assumptions about who is performing, who is taking part and who is viewing as part of a holistic and collective experience.
All events take place in a versatile old factory (1880): a temporal and spatial framework that embodies the ephemeral. Exchange, open-endedness, collaboration, participation and activation are also core concepts of BE FESTIVAL.
In 2011, we pushed our boundaries a little further and opened a call for proposals from visual artists that best embodied the ethos of BE: to cross borders.
The programme crossed the borders between ‘plastic’ and ‘performed’ work and explored the cross-fertilisation of ideas between artforms. The featured artists focus their practice on cultural and national identities, or explore identities connected to industrial places, as well as the artist’s role in enabling and reflecting the shift in usage of such places.
Our programme included the renowned Anne Bean, who for over 40 years has undertaken numerous solo and collaborative projects worldwide. Anne offered a public talk and a workshop leading to a performance on Friday: The Un-knitted Lives of Young Girls, by Anne Bean & the 21 year-old KurdishIraqi artist Poshya Kakl. With this performance / action Annemanages to bring Poshya between us, and the two artists collaborate despite being in different countries.
Film director Nihad Kreševljakovi? presented his documentary Do you remember Sarajevo? (2002). During the siege of Sarajevo between 1992 and 1995, several hundred citizens of the city recorded everyday events on their video cameras. It was the first time that European warfare had been documented in this way. Compiled from these materials, the film presents a story of ordinary people in an epoch of genocide and technology.
From an open call we selected the following artists to present their work: With the aim of crossing the border between performance art and theatre we selected Suspended by Natasha Davis, and we have included the piece in the main programme on Saturday.
Kurdish artist Behjat Omer Abdulla recalls ‘Being in exile is the source of my inspiration. My work developed directly from investigation into ID cards, people’s origins and how they are presented through governmental processes. I use drawing to listen to people’s specific psychological dramas, with the work aiming to show a point of struggle between thought and appearance. I am trying to question the effects and the outcomes of categorization in the system we live in. It is shocking to see how codes and numbers have classified and shaped us within a system that is almost invisible to us.’ Behjat’s work will be displayed at AE HARRIS and at mac Birmingham. In Limbo (2010): ‘The chosen participants were asked toperform as if they were sitting for an ID photo for a document that may determine the course of their life. I chose the photo I thought best captured the person’s core, framing their true identity. The moment captured within the photograph encapsulates an impression of the subject being absent from their own life, absent from misfortune, raised from the misery and anger caused by their destiny being held in the hands of a disengaged authority.’
New Place of Origin (2009) is a video installation showing 64 frames of portraits of 11 people. It was part of a screening show in Oslo (2009); HEP (Human Emotion Project) Portugal (2009) and London (2010); and Staffordshire University final degree show (2010). It is the result of hours of filming performers in a dark space and taking thousands of still images.
Where is the line between the framing of an action and the creation of a sculptural object which contains activity? Should a stage separate performers from an audience or physically form a link between the two? How near to an object in its own right can a stage get before it fails to enhance the performance? Matthew Foster in View/function/object/target proposes to create a performative container to host the musical component of the festival. Exploring the idea that a stage can be an object without aperformance, this object will shift from day to day, drawing on elements of historical architecture and spatial design, to more abstract concepts of an object which defines a space for performance. These propositions will exist for one night only. Through an approach of repetitive construction and deconstruction of appropriated structures, Matthew assesses the worth of designed spaces for performance.
Finally, for our EUROPEAN ARTIST RESIDENCY, FedericoSancho & Mikel Nieto will undertake their proposed project: AE Harris Security Devices. This project will be produced in collaboration with BE Mix, and proposes a collective response to the industrial activity of AE Harris. The project looks at the relationship between the still working factory and the old one opposite, which contains the festival. ‘To do so, we only need to cross the road and generate that link by researching particular aspects of the location: sound recordings, analyses of the working machinery,feedback from the workers, etc. In order to reinforce this industrial and cultural link, we will put on stage this collective experience using ephemeral tools to generate a meeting between what AE Harris was and what it is.’
