Intimations by Cinzia Cremona

Intimations by Cinzia Cremona
20th Nov – 2nd Dec 2014
Thurs - Sat, 12 - 6pm (or by appointment)

http://www.arebyte.com/int/4587204778
https://www.facebook.com/events/341880532661632


Cinzia Cremona
20th November – 2nd December 2014

Come in, play, think …
Intimations includes five videoperformances produced between 2007 and 2013:
1. Regardless (2007) experiments with visual strategies to suggest that the screen is permeable. 2. The Other Person (2010) explores intimacy, trust and zones of proximity. 3. Wish You Were Here (2011) suggests and mocks idealised conviviality, and plays with ideas of liveness. 4. Are You Talking to Me? (2010) denies relationality by focusing on a dialogue internal to the performer. 5. Before You Now (2013) explores the desire for authenticity and unmediated relationality.These videoperformances address you directly and ask personal and self-
reflective questions. It is on you, the viewer, that the significance of Intimations relies. The exhibition will be fulfilled if you accept the invitation to answer my enquires – otherwise they are simply monologues to camera – screen mediated conversations with an imagined other.

There are no technical theatrics, and the DIY aesthetic makes your presence feel more real. Dichotomies such as geographical distance and visual closeness, and relational presence and physical absence arise. I share with you a private moment in which I expose my feelings and thoughts. In addition, I unceasingly try to start an impossible dialogue with you, which triggers feelings of frustration on both sides of the screen. The screen is familiar to us and it is palpable in our daily life where most of our communication is now screen-based. We live in a networked society of hyper- communication, where the screen becomes invisible but, at the same time, shapes our identities. Through the Internet and within mass communications systems we assemble data according to our desires and we construct our personalised hypertext. Consequently, there is a fragmentation of our sense of self and understanding since I have my text and you have yours.

I address the camera in order to evoke an ideal interlocutor who activates a scene of address with me and initiates a chain of relays. We mobilise interpellation, the gaze, awareness and performativity to produce mediated relationality and invite reflection. These videoperformances explore the mechanisms and strategies of interfacing performer, video camera and screen to produce and mediate performative relationality in videoperformance. As a result, relationality emerges as fundamental to the construction of subjectivity.

By performing in my own work, I deploy my subjectivity as a tool to offer and experiment with the relational dynamics of performance, of the mediation of video, of the specific qualities of the screen and of the interplay of subjectivity and relationality. The elements of subjectivity that emerge in my videoperformances are part of my personal history, and are selected and utilised to activate relational offers and strategies. I confront the question of gendered subjectivity and representation directly, and acknowledge the legacy of artists and thinkers who have focused on the politics of representation of the female body (Martha Rosler, Hannah Wilke, Annie Abrahams and Peggy Phelan).

However, these videoperformances aim to integrate and transcend the direct questioning of representation towards the activation of performative relationality productive of moments of reflection. Similarly, they resonate with the theories and discourses of interpellation, the gaze, performativity and their ethics. In other words, I play with you in a way that transforms us both. I become with you, we construct ways of being and theories on ways of beings. What will you do with this experience? Where will you take it?

Cinzia Cremona is an artist and researcher. Her videoperformances focusing on relationships and intimate interaction form an original body of work that extends into networked practice and on-line performance. She is course leader of the MA contemporary Art and Professional Practice and for the MA Art, Design and the Book at the Colchester School of Art.