C U R R E N T - P R O J E C T S

Perceptions of Promise will soon be at the third venue of its tour, McMaster Museum of Art, Ontario (February 9 - March 31)

The Body in Question /Le Corps en Question (touring exhibition), Galerie UGQM, Montreal

Marilene is currently working on a couple works for an exhibition curated by Canadian choreographer Isabelle Van Grimde which will start its tour at Galerie UGQM in May. The first work is an existing piece, Dreamcatcher, and the second is a new creation entitled Dancing Melanix, an interactive video installation envisioned for both the gallery visitor during the exhibition and Van Grimdes dancers during her choreographed performances.

In each of her works, choreographer Isabelle Van Grimde attempts to pierce the secrets of the human body, evoking numerous dimensions of it into resonance. She envisions each new piece as a mystery in action, which she keeps alive by offering it to the public in a context of open creation. Her collaborations with artists in other disciplines allow her to probe that mystery while enriching it, multiplying perceptions of the creation and points of access to it. Driven by an unquenchable thirst for learning and an insatiable desire to push back the limits of her understanding, Isabelle Van Grimde has, since 2004, conducted a research into perceptions of the body with many artists and intellectuals throughout the world. The interviews compiled in this study, entitled The Body in Question, have generated a complete choreographic corpus in which the very meaning of dance and gesture becomes more and more refined as our understanding of the human body gains in depth. The primal body of our origins and instincts enters into a dialogue with the body of the future, a sum of energetic vibrations subjected to the influences of an environment in perpetual mutation.
In offering this theoretical and gestural matter as a source of inspiration to visual and media artists, Isabelle Van Grimde, taking on the role of exhibit curator, delves further into the transposition, transformation and even deconstruction of her choreographic materials, in order to enhance the theme of the body. In echo to the creations of the invited artists, five solos developed from the same materials will inhabit the space of the exhibit, which is also named The Body in Question. Through their thoughts and writings, several authors, philosophers, historians and anthropologists will broaden perspectives on the overall process.

In Conversation with Stuart Sutcliffe

Marilene has made a new work for an exhibition dedicated to Stuart Sutcliffe, a founder member of the Beatles who died prematurely of a brain aneurysm in 1962. This touring exhibition starts its tour in Hambur at the CCA&A Gallery in Hamburg on 10th April.

http://www.stuartsutcliffe.org.uk/

Talking Wounds

http://talkingwound.wordpress.com/

TALKING WOUNDS is a blog for sisters Marilene and Sophie Oliver to test and nuture a possible collaboration. Sophie is a cultural theorist and Human Rights philosopher, and Marilene a Visual Artist. As sisters they have been very close to each other’s work and after a decade long exchange of proof reading essays and presentation testing on the one side, and being the subject of artworks, an installation assistant and a serial private view attendee on the other, they now feel that perhaps it is the time for them to try and bring their two fields closer together.

Marilene Oliver works with medical imaging (such as MRI and CT scans) to create sculptural artworks. Marilene’s work is concerned with the status of the human subject in an increasingly digitised world. Most recently Marilene has started using anonymised datasets to embody specific narratives / identities, much like a gamer who creates an avatar/ or avatars. Marilene is experimenting with the power of a wound, a scar, a dissection of disembodied, digitial dataset to create artworks that deal with political issues.

Sophie Oliver (PhD) has for the last five years or so been working on the question of witnessing, specifically the secondary witnessing of trauma and human rights abuses. Trying to develop an ‘ethics’ of secondary witnessing – that is, an ethical approach to viewing the suffering of distant others – Sophie’s work engages with numerous disciplines, including cultural studies, philosophy and psychology. She is particularly interested in the possibility of seeing the body as a catalyst for ethical witnessing – a possibility that is of course complicated by the discomfort and dis-ease many experience when forced to confront real suffering bodies. It is perhaps this interest in the body – with all its possibilities and constraints – that marks the first point of coincidence between these two sisters’ ideas.

And yet, although their minds feel close in this and many other ways, their own bodies are regrettably far flung: Sophie is based in Berlin and Marilene is living in Angola. The space of the blog will thus become a pinboard for ideas, inspirations, texts to read, images, quotes, links etc. What will come of this ‘collaboration’ is still purely speculative – possibly an exhibition, possibly a conference, possibly only this blog.