Today's idea - The National Testing Grounds of Live Art

Perplexing and intriguing live art comes today from the National Testing Grounds of Live Art taking place at The Permanent Gallery in response to The National Review of Live Art taking place in Glasgow next weekend. Pushing the boundaries of practice, the focus is on Boundaries, Fluidity and Dislocations, with the comissioned artists explicitly exploring ideas through artists: Mikhail Karikis, Mitch & Parry, Kristin Sherman, Dori Deng and Meta Drcar.

It's all about:

"The boundaries of the body – and the distance between bodies, the exploration of sound and the confinements of our physicality, the limitations of the gallery space, of the self, of the other, of the individual and of group migrations in our geography, identities and disruption across the artistic and the non artistic."

Supported by Lighthouse and curated with Permanent Gallery, two places known for filling up the South Eats arts scene with rich new ideas and provoking thoughts, the event starts at 7pm and costs £4. I've included 'the blurb' below with more details on what each artist does. It's a fine line I suspect between revealing nothing, and describing every details. It seems quite worth an investigation, and lasts for today only.

"For this Testing Grounds event Mikhail Karikis will draw parallels between the nature of the medium of sound and politics of migration; thinking of sound as a perpetual immigrant, always travelling away from its place and material of origin, penetrating invisibly into spaces where it may not be welcome.

Kristin Sherman explores structures of power made manifest through intricate performance machines. Her work for Testing Grounds paints a dark and humorous portrayal of power and control, a system made of bodies, where each actor monitors the other. Taken to extremes, the work questions and challenges our notions of freedom.
Mitch & Parry’s new working project examines the landscape of the body as a space for collecting and exhibiting the stains and marks of loss, love and labour, by developing their work of creating external discourse with internal bodily fluid – creating a tension between provoking and inviting the spectator.

Dori Deng and Meta Drcar’s Measuring series questions the relationship between space and different medias including the body, visuals and sound. The action of measuring is presented physically, but also through mathematical connections, for instance the connection between musical rhythm and time in order to change the dimension and the proportion of the gallery space, twisting our assumption or expectation of a given context."

Today's idea - Testing Grounds at the Permanent Gallery

Testing Grounds is fond of a Roland Barthes quote and the exhibition is focused around this; the human mind's endless creation of stories to process and interpret the world:

“Myth is not defined by the object of its message, but by the way in which it utters this message: there are formal limits, there are no ‘substantial’ ones,” he says, Myth Today.

The works could be defined for a large part as construction of mythology, and in a big mix of performance, story, sound, and movement all focused around fictionalised realities. Regardless of the words though, the concept of Myth is interesting and has interesting arty potential:

Plymouth-based art duo Got Any Rice will create their sound-based story of Brighton that looks at the history through "stethoscopic exploration" and present a taxonomy of their ethnological finding.

Sylvia Rimat’s work intertwines subtly and gently with the ‘real’ and the ‘imagined’, and wittingly plays with the audience imagination by writing the story of what has not happened yet, or that is just about to happen.

Mim King's movement piece will follow a very personal story reflected through her own body, thinking about ideas of stillness and waiting, of endings, markings and the traces we leave behind.

Anne Gaelle Thiriot and Marcel Sparmann’s performance aims at reaching imagination in adulthood and at involving the audience as story-makers through action with the use of “cards of Propp”, a Russian formalist who analysed fairy tales and folk-tales through a series of functions.

Officially this big mix is know as:

"autobiographic elements; anatomic and sonic examination of a town from an outside stance; stories that reflect an ambiguous presence somewhere between text and reality; and finally the re-exploration of fairy tales and folk tales to bridge the narrative and abstract features of live performance."

It's on today at the Permanent Gallery at 7pm for £4, and you can find the Facebook event here and a map here.