Performing Rights Glasgow

National Review of Live Art

Sunday 10 February 2008
11.00 – 22.00
Tramway, Glasgow

Performing Rights Glasgow is a day of performances, presentations, discussions, screenings, and interventions around ideas of performance and human rights that has been curated in collaboration with the Live Art Development Agency for the 2008 edition of the National Review of Live Art (NRLA) programme. The NRLA is Europe's longest running festival supporting radical live and mediated performance work.

In these times of increasing conflicts, injustices, and inequities, Performing Rights Glasgow sets out to reflect the kinds of creative strategies artists are using to effect social, cultural and political change; to illustrate new models of relationships between art and activism; and to consider the role and responsibilities of artists, curators, and performance itself, in the understanding, enactment and sustenance of human rights.

The Library of Performing Rights

Stable 6
11.00 – 20.00
www.performingrightslibrary.org/

In collaboration with Lois Weaver, Performing Rights Glasgow hosts The Library of Performing Rights, an actual and a virtual library housing resources, research materials and technologies submitted by artists, activists and academics from around the world to explore and enable the transmission and documentation of human rights and performance.

The Library welcomes contributions from artists, activists, academics, commentators and others attending the NRLA, which might include photocopies of articles, publications, videos, DVDs, CD ROMs, brochures, posters, links to digital and web-based initiatives, or real and virtual archives.

The Library of Performing Rights was originally developed for PSi #12: Performing Rights in June 2006 and has continued to grow and be transported, reassembled, and further developed in different locations and contexts.

The Long Table

Festival Bar
14.00-18.00

“If you can imagine something you can make it. If you can make something, you can make it change. Artists help us imagine the future and Live Artists remind us of what it mean to be alive in the present.” Lois Weaver.

Lois Weaver hosts a space where artists and audiences are invited to gather for informal conversations on serious topics.

The Performance Panel

T1 Theatre
11.00 – 13.30

Occupying a space somewhere between practice and discourse, The Performance Panel is led by the artist Lois Weaver and writer Adrian Heathfield, and brings together the artists Guillermo Gómez-Peña (Mexico/USA), Jenny Sealey (UK), Adalet R Garmiany (Kurdistan-Iraq/UK), Margareta Kern (Croatia/Bosnia/UK), John Jordan (UK), Ange Taggart (UK), and Arvand DashtAray and Sara Reyhani of Virgule Performing Arts Company (Iran) for presentations, creative interventions, and discussions around questions of performance and human rights, and art and activism.

Illustrated Lectures

Adrien Sina
Performance, Politics, Ethics and Human Rights
T1
14.00 – 15.00
The architect, artist, curator and theoretician Adrien Sina offers an overview of twentieth-century artists', dancers' and performers' responses to war, politics, racism, injustice and repression. Adrien Sina will articulate and illustrate a history of performative practices and strategies in relation to ethical and human rights issues by the following artists: Josephine Baker, Valentine de St-Point, Vaslav Nijinski, Isadora Duncan, Rudolf von Laban, Mary Wigman, Valeska Gert, Martha Graham, Bertolt Brecht, Kurt Jooss, Tadeusz Kantor, Hijikata, Josef Beuys, Günter Brus, Hermann Nitsch, John Lennon, Yoko Ono, Martin Scorsese, Adrian Piper, Ana Mendieta, Chris Burden, Michel Journiac, Gina Pane, Henri Maccheroni, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Valie Export, William Kentridge, Jean-Michel Bruyère, Krzystof Wodiczko, Zhang Huan, Liu Jin, Marina Abramovic, Guerrilla Girls, Yinka Shonibare, Mona Hatoum, Shirin Neshat, Fred Forest, Sigalit Landau, Franko B, Sasha Waltz….

the vacuum cleaner
The Problem Is The Solution
T1
16.00 – 17.00
Solution 14. “Exhaust Socks' can reduce emission from cars by 60% to 74%. The Exhaust Sock', made from durable recycled tyres, works much like a condom. Simply roll it over your exhaust pipe and it will collect all your emissions. In the future you will be able to come and go as you want. Depositing the waste will be as easy as recycling is today”. If the problem is the solution, then the solution is the only problem. That's why we've developed a new range of solutions to the world's most pressing problems. Glasgow-based artist/activist the vacuum cleaner will present here, for the first time, the findings from years of research and development that will enable the future to happen.

the vacuum cleaner – the future solved

James Thompson
In On The Act
– a collaborative work with the artist Pamela Neil
T1
17.00 – 18.00
James Thompson, the director of the research and practice project IN PLACE OF WAR, explores the role of the international researcher in communicating information about the Rwandan genocide to non-Rwandan audiences, and relates the shift of the researcher from passive observer to participating investigator in Rwandan memorial sites. This 'lecture' replicates the style of travelogue to comment on the partial readings of the genocide by international visitors and how their transitory status within Rwanda has been co-opted by the current government so that visiting researchers are enrolled as advocates and 'academic scriptwriters' to promote a certain version of the genocide to international audiences. This 'lecture' uses performance to comment on the performance demanded by these situations.

James Marriott/PLATFORM
Exit Strategy
T1
19.00 – 20.00
How is each one of us involved in driving forward oil and gas extraction? In driving forward the movement of carbon from the lithosphere to the atmosphere? How can each one of us cease to play this role? James Marriott will present images and stories from the end of the Carbon Era, and illustrate the work of PLATFORM.

Performances, interventions, and installations

Leibniz
The Book of Blood
Stable 4
13.30 – 18.00
The Book of Blood is an ongoing performance project developed through collaborations and workshops with local artists and groups to explore questions of human rights in relation to the realities, constraints and pressures experienced by displaced and marginalised peoples in the UK. Around a central mise en scene, and amongst a montage of performances, audiences will be received by a nurse and a scribe and invited to donate a drop of blood, which is used to write one letter from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in a thick, leather-bound book. Throughout the performance the text progresses drop by drop and letter by letter as spectators are turned into active participants: re-inscribing their commitment to human rights, and sealing the contract with their own blood in a colourful and celebratory event with echoes of age-old rituals of sacrifice and dedication.

Monica Ross
rightsrepeated
Project Room
15.00 – 16.00
A recitation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights as an act of memory. Prompted by events in London in July 2005, rightsrepeated is the artist's attempt, despite flaws and gaps in her recall, to internalise the Declaration as part of her own consciousness, and to respond to the largely unheeded first call of the Declaration for signatory countries and their citizens to: publicise the text causing it to be disseminated, displayed, read and expounded, principally in schools and other educational institutions without distinction based on the political status of countries or territories. rightsrepeated negotiates the gap between calling for social utopia and the necessity to continually work towards its attainment by maintaining the desire for it to be achieved.
First performed at Beaconsfield, London 2005 and at PSi #12, Performing Rights, London 2006. The text of rightsrepeated is available as an A1 poster from [email protected]
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights is at www.un.org/Overview/rights.html.

Stacy Makishi
You Are Here…But Where Am I?
Throughout
13.30 – 18.00
Part installation, part performance, and part interrogation, You Are Here…. explores the politics of language, borders, immigration and cross-cultural identity. Through a series of strange and poetic questions, participants co-create a new passport.

You Are Here…But Where Am I? was originally created for the Liverpool Biennial 2002 and reworked for PSi #12 Performing Rights 2006.

Yara El-Sherbini
A Pub Quiz
Bar
18.00 – 19.00
Is the wife of a Sultan a Sultana? Name one Hollywood movie in which an Arab was not shown as a bomber, or a belly dancer, or a billionaire?

Join the quiz-mistress, test your knowledge and win a prize in this entertaining and irreverent pub quiz. Over the last two years, Yara El-Sherbini has been hosting pub quizzes to explore questions about art and the nature of its public engagement. The work looks at how, by answering her playful and provocative questions, audiences are not only active participants, but also complete the work.

Commissioned by Breathing Space, initiated by Arnolfini (Bristol), and partnered with greenroom (Manchester), Tramway (Glasgow) and The Junction (Cambridge). A Pub Quiz was also commissioned by the BBC Power of Art project.

Richard DeDomenici
J'accuse!
Greenhouse
13.30 – 18.00
Join Richard DeDomenici for a heated yet informal debate on the ethics of the live art industry.

Rabih Mroué
Make me stop smoking
– a presentation of ideas under study
T2
20.15 – 21.30
“I have been collecting worthless material for almost ten years now, taking good care arranging it, documenting it, indexing it, and preserving it from any possible damage. …Today I possess what resembles an archive, or let's say I possess a real archive that relates only to me: a kind of added memory that occupies different corners of my domestic space, despite the fact that I do not actually need it. It is an invented memory that is exhausting me, and which I cannot liberate myself from. For this reason, I will uncover some parts of my archive, hoping that by making it public I can get rid of its weight. This will be my attempt to destroy a memory that doesn't know how to erase itself.” Rabih Mroué

Mroué reconstructs the radical heterogeneous landscape of Lebanon, destroyed by crises and wars, with the aid of countless anonymous and personal documents, videos, photos, newspaper clipping and eyewitness reposts, that he pieces together to create a complex system of meandering narrations. In so doing, he questions the veracity and cogency of the archive documents as much as he negotiates the validity of the reconstruction of “reality”.  What happens when a lost landscape is re-appropriated through its archived representation?

Ori Gersht
The Forest
T4
11.00 – 20.00
The genesis for this project was Gersht's interest in exploring landscapes embedded with both personal and historic resonance. The forest in question surrounds Kolomyia, in the Ukraine, and is a remaining fragment of the once vast primeval forest that covered much of continental Europe. Much mythologised and idealised in the period of the Enlightenment, epitomised in the German Romantic artist Caspar David Friedrich's paintings, the area was to bear witness to appalling atrocities during World War II.

Commissioned by Film and Video Umbrella in association with The Photographers' Gallery, with support from Arts Council England.

Screenings

Stable 6
11.00 – 20.00
Grace Ndiritu
High Noon (2006)
Darfur (my child) (2006)
Desert Storm (2004)
High Noon deals with the consequences of the North American Free Trade Agreement between Mexico, Canada and USA, and the continued low intensity warfare waged against the indigenous people of Chiapas by the Mexican government. Darfur remembers those who have died during war in Darfur in a monumental video painting. Desert Storm honours the female victims of war whose bodies are violated and then depicted throughout Western media as tabloid stories.

Mad For Real
A selection of Mad For Real's witty and provocative interventions in art institutions and the public domain that test the boundaries of cultural and artistic conventions.

Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination
13 Experiments in Hope
Thirteen videos of creative actions, interventions, tactical media, pranks and other activities that fall between the spaces of culture and politics, resistance and creativity. Contributors: 0100101110101101, Conglomco, Clandestine Insurgent Rebel Clown Army, Lab of II during the European Social Forum, My Dad's Strip Club, The Assembly Against Permanent War, Reverend Billy and the Church of Stop Shopping, Richard Dedomenici, The Space Hijackers, The Vacuum Cleaner, Yomango. The Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination is a network of culturally and politically engaged artists and activists.

Richard Dedomenici
Fame Asylum
A screening of the Channel 4 documentary following Dedomenici's Fame Asylum project of 2006, in which he invited four young male asylum seekers to form a vocal harmony boyband with the aim of altering attitudes towards immigration issues among the difficult to-reach opinion-influencing female adolescent demographic. Fame Asylum was developed in a collaboration between Richard Dedomenici, Channel Four, Refugee Week, PSi#12 Performing Rights Conference, Queen Mary, University of London and the Live Art Development Agency.

The Yes Men
SurvivaBalls
Posing as Halliburton representatives, The Yes Men launch SurvivaBalls  – an advanced new technology that will keep corporate managers safe even when climate change makes life as we know it impossible. “The SurvivaBall is designed to protect the corporate manager no matter what Mother Nature throws his or her way,” said Fred Wolf, a Halliburton representative who spoke today at the Catastrophic Loss conference held at the Ritz-Carlton hotel in Amelia Island, Florida. “This technology is the only rational response to abrupt climate change,” he said to an attentive and appreciative audience. A NRLA 2006 Commission.

Cabula 6
Crime Europa: Berlin
Crime Europa is a series of six films investigating the reception of local criminal cases around Europe that somehow captured a town's imagination. The films are less interested in the cases themselves, than in how people retell the story, try to make sense of what happened and negotiate what it might mean for their collective identities. Case: Berlin, Germany. Bus Stop. February 7th, 2005. A 23 year old Turkish/German woman Hatun Sürücü is shot three times in the head at point blank range by her youngest brother. News reports proliferate and spread throughout Germany, Europe and the rest of the world. The film reflects how different interests use the death of Hatun Sürücü to reinforce or alter their different visions of the worlds they live in.

Selections from The Library of Performing Rights
Lois Weaver will chose a small selection of films from the Library that have been donated by artists, activists and academics from around the world over the last two years. 

Performing Rights Glasgow is curated by the Live Art Development Agency in collaboration with the National Review of Live Art, and builds on Performance Studies international (PSi)#12: Performing Rights (London, June 2006), and Performing Rights Vienna for Tanzquartier (March 2007). Performing Rights has developed from a partnership between the Agency, Queen Mary/University of London, East End Collaborations and PSi, and continues as a collaboration between the Agency and Lois Weaver of Queen Mary.

The National Review of Live Art is produced by New Moves International and is funded by the Scottish Arts Council and Glasgow City Council.

Venue:
Tramway, 25 Albert Drive, Glasgow G41 2PE