image credit: Sharon Koelblinger
In September 2013, our first AUX Curatorial Fellow, Marissa Perel, began her research in the Philadelphia performance community preparing for her live programming in AUX. She developed two series titled Counter/Acts and Subject Worthy. Intensive and innovative programs were presented at AUX in November and December 2013.
Perel utilized the AUX performance space to investigate performance as a form of communication between and among art forms. Performance art, as we know it, has its roots in multiple disciplines, from visual art to dance to theater to music to literature. It is a form that has been historically comprised by artists fed up with the status quo within their own mediums, who sought to break down boundaries and find new conceptual and physical spaces for their bodies and ideas.
In this spirit, Perel curated and hosted a series of public education and lecture events entitled Subject Worthy. Perel lectured on pain, embodiment and resistance across the forms of performance art, body art and dance, as areas of her artistic research. The Subject Worthy talk series explores the subjectivity of the artist in live performance, addressing identity and difference as these issues come to bear on the values, desires and aesthetic concerns in the making of performance.
Perel also curated and hosted the Counter/Acts series that presented artists from multiple disciplines seeking to break through perceived confines of their respective disciplines, and bridge seemingly disparate artistic discourses. Counter/Acts included artists from multiple cities, creating a dynamic exchange between artistic communities, making Philadelphia a hub of and home to emergent ideas, conversations, and forms of performance research.
Download Marissa Perel’s Text and Essays for Subject Worthy and COUNTER/ACTS
Read an article in Title Magazine about Marissa Perel’s Curatorial Fellowship
Artists
Asimina Chremos, Eileen Doyle, iele paloumpis, Risa Puleo, Jules Gimbrone, Aretha Aoki, RJ Messineo, Geo Wyeth, Meg Foley, Sandra Parker, Talibam!, Beth Heinly, Melissa Krodman, Miguel Gutierrez, CA Conrad, Katy Pyle, J. Makary
Programs
Sunday, November 10th 2013
COUNTER/ACTS
Jules Gimbrone and Devynn Emory
Sunday, November 17th 2013
COUNTER/ACTS
Meg Foley and Sandra Parker
Saturday, December 7th 2013
COUNTER/ACTS
Talibam, Beth Heinly, & Melissa Krodman
Wednesday, December 11th 2013
COUNTER/ACTS
Miguel Gutierrez and CA Conrad
Saturday, December 14th
Subject Worthy
J. Makary and Katy Pyle
Bio
Marissa Perel is an artist, writer, and independent curator who hails from Brooklyn, NY. Her work spans performance, video and text-based installation and poetry. Her installations and performances have been presented internationally, including at Dance Theater Workshop, Danspace Project, and The Chocolate Factory Theater (NYC), The D.I.V.O Institute (Prague, C.R.), Medium Gallery (Bratislava, Slovakia), The Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, and commissioned for the Chicago Cultural Center. She currently organizes Lobby TALKS, a forum for open and in-depth discourse on contemporary issues in dance and performance at New York Live Arts. Perel writes the column, “Gimme Shelter: Performance Now” for the Art21 blog. She recently served as co-editor of Critical Correspondence, an on-line journal of Movement Research, for which she co-curated live interviews and events at Judson Memorial Church and New Museum, NY. She was also a curator of the Movement Research Festival Spring 2012: Push it. Real. Good. She received her B.A. in Writing and Literature from the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University, and her M.F.A in Studio and Performance from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
