Ei Arakawa
NEMESIS PAINTING (PURR … formance!)
2022
Performance, video
6’43”
Ei Arakawa co-organized this performance in 2022 along with three artist friends from Performance Space New York, inviting the audience to explore the dynamics between painting and performance. Visitors could have their body penetrate a “canvas” and enter the impossible space on the reverse side. With this highly performative gesture, the artist revisits the performativity of painting as proposed in the mid-20th century, while questioning how, in a cross-disciplinary context, performance as a medium could possibly provide justification for painting and contemporary art in general. Meanwhile, nine artists including Ei Arakawa held a talk on painting as Nemesis, deliberating how painting and performance can be collapsed on each other. The recording was transcribed into AI-generated voice-overs in the performance video, further investigating the tension between body and technique, materiality and immateriality.
About Ei Arakawa：
Ei Arakawa is a performance artist based in New York since 1998. He relocated to Los Angeles in 2019. His performances are created through collaborations with various people including contemporary artists and art historians. The means of these collaborations are diverse, with such figures physically participating as performers, and in other instances their works themselves making appearances. Arakawa also invalidates the boundary between the performers and the audience by inviting the audience to participate in an improvisational manner, thus converting them from the role of passive viewers to active subjects of the performance. In the context of contemporary art that is based on notions of individualism as articulated in western modern ideology, Arakawa’s act of establishing the intersection between collaborations with other artists and the audience as his very practice, can be seen as an intention to liberate his works from the subjective framework of the “self.”
Previously in: Tate Modern, London (2021), Honolulu Biennial (2019), Liverpool Biennial (2018), Sculpture Project Münster (2017), Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (2017), Museum Ludwig, Cologne, Germany (2017), The 9th Berlin Biennale, Germany (2016), Museum Brandhorst, Munich, Germany (2015), Gwangju Biennial, South Korea (2014), The Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw, Poland (2014), Whitney Biennial, New York (2014), Carnegie International, Pittsburgh, USA (2013), Mori Art Museum, Tokyo (2013), Guggenheim Museum, New York (2013), The Museum of Modern Art, New York (2013), Pavilion of Georgia, the 55th Venice Biennial, Italy (2013), 30th São Paulo Biennial, Brazil (2012), Le Printemps de Septembre, Toulouse, France (2011), Yokohama Triennial (2008), Performa, New York (2007), Echigo-Tsumari Triennial (2006).