LIVE DREAMS: IRL (ON DEMAND)

LIVE DREAMS

Performance Space’s LIVE DREAMS is a platform for artists to share works-in-progress and ideas in development in a dynamic and responsive environment. LIVE DREAMS takes place both in-theatre at Carriageworks and digitally via our live streaming channel, Live On The Line. This platform offers us an exciting glimpse into current developments in experimental art, creating a crucible for experimentation and conversation.

This October, Performance Space presents the 5th season of LIVE DREAMS, inviting artists to present works-in-progress that imagine radical futures. Our three guest curators—Alex Wisser, Louana Sainsbury and River Lin —have themed each stream with a powerful forward-looking provocation, inviting us to interrogate the role of art in shaping and reshaping our collective future in an ever-shifting world. What agendas do we want to advance and how might art dispel myths, illuminate concerns or provoke radical visions?

IRL – by River Lin

Responding to the initiation of LIVE DREAMS during lockdowns in 2020 and while entering the post-pandemic phase of our times, the notion of IRL invites artists to critically rethink what makes real lives real in both contexts of human encounters and the digital culture. Working methods/ formats/ processes conflating virtual and in-person settings are encouraged.

Artists:

Raymond Liew Jin Pin, Maria Cencaru
As a child in Malaysia, my mother dressed me in a gold sequin dress and I won 3rd prize in a talent show - even though cross-dressing and homosexuality were and still are illegal and taboo in Malaysia. More than 20 years later, I am recalling that moment together with other members of the queer Southeast Asian diaspora. Maria Cencaru is my drag name, she is a desire to relive a childhood memory, she dances movements of oppression, and together we can be loud and proud.

ena_groz (Ena Grozdanić), waterbeds, watersheds (the river as life—the river as death)
“The river is losing its flow, as many rivers are. Locals murmur that it is slowly disappearing, dissolving itself, collapsing from the margins. Every year it forfeits more depth. In my memories, the river is radiant, expansive, gushing…it flows forcefully from its home high in the mountains through the alluvial plains, mapping a wild, snaking course. I now witness it in a meeker form, its body stretched thinly across the rocks, weeds piercing its surface like warts. The water is still crystal clear, so that every formation on the armour of its bed—every rock, scratch, and pebble—is visible, rendering the form sadder and shallower still. I remember that willow trees once grew all around here, their spindly, elegant branches stroking the rushing water. The trees have been ripped out / yanked out / swallowed by short-sightedness. Now a concrete wall manifests on part of the river’s course instead, and if you follow it long enough, you’ll encounter graffiti that reads: fuck your walls, give us back our trees…”
The Sana river, like all rivers, carries a multitude of stories: stories of violence and trauma, but also stories of healing and resistance. Waterbeds, Watersheds (water as life, water as death) considers these stories, untangling their world-making possibilities.

Jacinta Larcombe, GFE (girlfriend Experience)
GFE (Girlfriend Experience) is a new project born out of isolation and hard border closures, that examines the social and anti-social animal in all of us. Drawing on experiences in the sex work industry, living with BPD and managining lonlineless, GFE merges together child-like visual aesthetics, Full-Body-Puppetry, Body-Masks and the rules, regulations and rituals of sex work and client interactivity.

M@ Cornell and Merinda Davies, Fully Automated Human Touch
Fully Automated Human Touch is a video installation and sci-fi dance performance by collaborators Merinda Davies and M@ Cornell (and an AI named CAKE) that runs for 30mins. It is 2083. There is no human contact in our food systems. Food manufacturing has become yet another human exclusion zone. CAKE (an AI) and Merinda and M@ (humans) are researchers attempting to address the lack of human touch by synthesising ‘HT+’ — the theorised 'Human Touch' vitamin. Welcome to the experiment, you are the audience, but you are also test subjects. Fully Automated Human Touch is a sci-fi dance and installation work born from a disagreement between the creators, Merinda Davies and M@ Cornell, namely: can you taste the human touch?

Emma Varker, Tendercore
Tendercore is a durational performance exploring the contemporary notions of authenticity, the augmented body and performativity as understood within our current digital landscape and through popular online aesthetics. The developing work touches on the internet thought experiment Roko’s Basilisk, Social control via technology, the commodification of our data and surveillance technology.

Mark Kleine, Fossils
Mark Kleine is a photographer and performance artist who illustrates, interrogates, and celebrates the multifaceted nature of identity. Drawing from lived experience, Kleine performs in a variety of guises through photography, video, installation, and interactive projects to express the evolution of identities over time. This results in work that speaks to their identity as a ‘mestizo’ (i.e. a person of ‘mixed’ Filipino descent), gender fluidity, and identities considered ‘in-between’ while questioning those notions that keep identity static and colonised.