Peter Baren
ARK (Featuring Bridge of Sighs, Sleep of Reason and Wailing Wall)
Performance: Thursday, October 27 and Friday, October 28, 2005 at 10:00 pm.
Presented as part of the LIVE Biennial of Performance Art
Presented with the support of The Netherlands Foundation of Visual Arts Design and Architecture and the Royal Netherlands Embassy, Ottawa.
Amsterdam-based artist Peter Baren will be performing this monumental work over a period of two days. ARK is an ongoing performative piece that has continued to evolve and change shape over time, recently in places such as Biel, Cardiff, New York, and Krakow. A multi-sensory opera, Baren’s performances in Vancouver will include nude performers, molasses, fog, drawings, texts and boomerangs, to create an environment that evokes primordial mystery, public yearning, fear and drastic socio-political reformation.
Baren’s practice uses the public assumptions of performance—the promise of drama, duration and theatricality—to evoke a disquieting sense of primordial mystery, public yearning, fear and cultural reformation. Blending props common to show-business with cross-cultural signifiers, Baren’s work creates a site of what Vancouver photographer and art critic Kristoff Steinruck dubbed “radical mystical fundamentalism.” ARK finds a meeting ground between sensual bewilderment and political commentary which points out the constructed nature of our ideas of cultural memory and our sometimes superficial notions of identity. As the Trace Gallery in Cardiff, Wales warns of Baren’s performance: Everything you are about to experience has been put under the spell of a floating device (BLOW BLOW).
Peter Baren has been active in performance art for more that 20 years and has shown his work worldwide, including Franklin Furnace (New York), the Teutonic Castle (Torun), the Shedhalle Zurich, and at the Tel Aviv Biennial of Performance Art. He is the recipient of the Prix de Rome Art & Theatre award.
Click here to read more