Enough About You: A Participatory Performance by Einat Amir
● TRIAD presents ‘Enough About You’ - A participatory performance and installation by Jerusalem-based artist Einat Amir
● Concerned with the new implications of virtual socialising, Amir aims to create ‘authentic’ encounters between strangers through a lab-like performance
● Participants and viewers are faced with constructed circumstances in order to interact with one another
● The performance is in collaboration with the MAXXI Museum, Rome and Lilith Performance Studio, Sweden
● Preview at TRIAD Gallery, 28 Field St, London WC1X 9DA from 18:30 – 21:00 on 8 October 2015
● For further information and images, please contact emma.collins@kallaway.com
When was the last time you had a conversation with a complete stranger?
TRIAD is an innovative arts organisation that aims to promote the appreciation and development of contemporary visual art. Through a participatory programme TRIAD aims to engage the local community with international art practice. For their inaugural show TRIAD presents the UK premiere of Enough About You, a performance by Jerusalem-based artist Einat Amir. Staged in collaboration with the MAXXI Museum, Rome and Lilith Performance Studio, Sweden, Amir seeks to engage visitors in this interactive performance.
Enough About You explores relationships in their most organic state, revealing how individuals relate to one another when confronted with a constructed reality, as strangers become intimate and viewers become voyeurs. It is inspired by the impact of virtual socialising and the instant intimacies offered in current times. Amir blurs the boundaries between performance and authenticity constructing lab-like circumstances in an attempt to test the limits and relations between two strangers in an intimate situation.
The work is a product of Amir’s interest in human behaviour and the universal experience of building social relationships. Her work allows participants to test their own limitations, confronting them with decisions to make about how much or little they reveal about themselves.
The performance consists of soundproof booths placed in the gallery space. A maximum of 15 people at a time are directed into the performance. Pairs are then led into narrow booths by a host and asked to respond to a pre-recorded conversational structure from the artist, provoking emotional responses that build a bond between the two.
The spectators who are not chosen to go into the booths stand against the entrance wall, observing those within, through a glass window. Every movement, facial expression, and emotional shift of the room is completely exposed, but not a single word or sound can be grasped from the outside. The piece takes into account different levels of cooperation from its participants, the arising social dilemmas become interesting to watch from the outside, evoking simultaneous emotions from the viewers.
In a world where we have the ability to prejudge a stranger long before we make contact, Amir looks to create ‘authentic’ and universal encounters in an immersive environment dedicated to the analysis of human behaviour.
Enough About You was first produced in 2011 at Lilith Performance Studio in Malmö, Sweden. This performance signals the beginning of ongoing collaboration between TRIAD, Lilith Performance Studio and MAXXI Museum, which will see the performance move from London to the MAXXI Museum in Rome, in February 2016.
LISTINGS
Exhibition: Enough About You - A Participatory Performance by Einat Amir
Dates: 9–18 October 2015
Preview: 8 October 2015, 18:30–21:00
Venue: TRIAD Gallery, 28 Field St, London WC1X 9DA
Tel: +44 (0)741 185 2575 or +44 (0)788 203 1137
Timings: Performances run for 15 minutes, twice an hour. Performances begin on the hour and every half hour. Each performance requires a minimum of 10 participants.
This performance is for those over the age of 18.
Opening Hours: 10:00–14:00 and 16:00–19:00 daily
On Friday 9 October the performance will run from 10:00–14:00
Entry: Free
Recommended Booking Link: http://enoughaboutyou.eventbrite.co.uk
Notes to Editors:
Media contacts:
Website: thetriad.org.uk
Twitter: twitter.com/TRIADLONDON
Facebook: facebook.com/TRIADLONDON
Instagram: instagram.com/TRIAD_LONDON
About TRIAD
TRIAD: TOWARDS REGIONAL INTEGRATION OF ARTISTIC DEVELOPMENT
TRIAD is a registered charity in England and Wales that aims to promote contemporary visual arts and their appreciation and development for public benefit. As a not-for-profit organisation based in London, TRIAD collaborates with museums, cultural organisations and galleries to exhibit emerging and mid-career artists internationally.
TRIAD supports emerging and mid-career artists, to further their progression within the arts sector and art market. With an experienced curatorial committee TRIAD selects artists of conceptual and aesthetic value, commissioning exceptional projects and works of quality. A central concern is supporting the promotion of cultural diversity within local and artistic communities by commissioning and exhibiting artists from different cultural regions. TRIAD provides audiences with the opportunity to develop their cultural and social awareness through the medium of art.
About Einat Amir
Einat Amir works in the media of video installation and live performance. She received her MFA in Visual Arts from Columbia University in 2009.
Amir’s work is infused by a great interest in contemporary social-political issues. She aims to set reality against fiction and confronts the viewer with choices, encouraging her audience to shape their own destiny and set their own limits. Amir’s work has been shown at; PS1 Contemporary Art Center, New York; PERFORMA13, New York; Palais De Tokyo, Paris; Istanbul Museum of Modern Art; Whitechapel Gallery, London; The Kitchen, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art in Roskilde; VOLTA, Basel; VOLTA, New York; Scaramouche Gallery, New York; Winzavod Art Center, Moscow; Bergen Kunsthall; Dallas Contemporary Art Center, Texas; Herzliya Museum of Contemporary Art, Israel; Haifa Museum of Art Israel; Bat Yam Museum of Art, Israel; Rosenfeld Gallery, Tel Aviv; C/O careof, Milan; Fondation d’entreprise Ricard, Paris; MLAC, Rome; Lilith Performance Studio, Malmö; Städtische Galerie, Bremen; Scope Art Fair (featured project), presented by TRIAD, Miami and Digital Art Center, Hulon.
About MAXXI Museum, Rome, Italy
MAXXI National Museum of XXI Century Arts, represents an awareness of the importance of promoting the current creative expressions of a nation such as Italy, characterised by centuries of primacy in the artistic and architectural fields. The aesthetic tensions of our time are, in fact, the extension of the artistic and cultural expressions of past eras, albeit through radically different expressive forms.
MAXXI’s mission is therefore that of promoting and developing this sense of continuity, projecting it towards the future.
MAXXI intends not only to be a container for the exhibition of the works of art of our century, but also a place for cultural innovation and the overlapping of languages, a laboratory for artistic experimentation, a machine for the production of aesthetic materials of our time. MAXXI aims to be a centre of excellence, an interactive hub in which the most diverse forms of expression, productivity and creation may converge, combine and reproduce.
About Lilith Performance Studio, Malmö, Sweden
Lilith Performance Studio is a leading production studio and arena for performance. The studio explores, produces and presents performance aimed at a wide audience. Lilith reunites artists with an international portfolio for the production of large-scale performance works, emphasising continuity and artistic development.
Each year artists are given the opportunity to develop and present a new performance on site, during a long residency in close collaboration with the studio. The invited artists share an interest in exploring their work in relation to the studio as an experimental site and are encouraged to expand their individual artistic mode of expression through the use of live performance, resulting in unique productions.
During the production period the artist is given the opportunities to focus on all the parts of a live piece: site, time, staging, participants and audience.
Lilith has so far created 40 solo productions, curatorial collaborations, guest appearances and festivals.