Arctic Action

Lives and works in Zürich, Switzerland
Ali Al-Fatlawi & Wathiq Al-Ameri won the Price performance Switzerland in 2011, which was followed more recently with the prestigious Swiss Art Award 2012. awarded the Ali Al-Fatlawi & Wathiq Al-Ameri are based in Switzerland and collaborate together as part of the studio Urnamo founded in 2002. They have known each other since their childhood and they studied together at the Bagdad Arts Academy in Iraq. In 1994 they decided to set off on an Odyssey. With false papers and just three US dollars in their pockets they crossed the border into Jordan. There they worked as ‘Copyists’ – reproducing classic Arabic paintings and so earning enough money to travel to Sudan and take a truck through the Sahara, into Libya and finally to land in Switzerland. There the two artists founded the studio Urnamo with the idea of further developing their work through collaboration. Ali and Wathiq have already graduated from their studies at the F+F Art and Media Academy in Zurich.

Artists statement :
The performances, which we present since 10 years, all have the same basic idea. We want to find a material with which we are as another substance, and combine it with the locality, in order to display different images. Does it positively or negatively affect our work? That is questionable. Certain, however, is that the action by the many areas of content and other art works differ. The large volume of material that go from place and time and the inexhaustible possibilities of topics, always makes the actions renewable and expressive. The same work can be monotonous, although no changes in the resulting images can be perceived. In another art form, these images of a work are not possible.
We believe that the whole action art work is designed to present images; but also moments without images. Under this form of experimental work in our presentation: images, moments, change, and disappear only remaining in our memories. We hope that this is what the audience will come across. Together, all the images of an action target, our present topic. You will be welcomed by images through translated feelings and not through the intellect. This makes a pure mediation possible.

Born in 1959, lives and works in Gothenburg.
Joakim Stampe is today one of the leading performance artists in Sweden. Since 2006 he has created more than 100 performance art works and is frequently invited to festivals and events all over the world. He has showcased his work in more than fifteen countries in Asia, Europe, as well as in North and South America.
Born into a creative environment, his parents were both renowned and socially engaged artists, Joakim Stampe started out to draw and paint in his early childhood. Going from easel painting to object painting, he became in the early 1990’s more and more involved in ephemeral street art. From 2006 and the start of Live Action, which he co-founded, Joakim Stampe subsequently started to focus on performance art. However, without leaving his work with Public Street art behind which he today has developed into the ephemeral world of water painting.
Highly imaginative, Joakim Stampe’s performance work cannot be categorized to a certain style. In his work he has a predilection to find and use new and unexplored materials. Having understood the inherent qualities of performance art, i.e. time, body and mind, human scale, and the role played by imagination and immediate intuition, he usually refuse to repeat or reproduce earlier works. He is also known to consciously expand the palette of materials used in his performances. Going beyond the traditional and more and more banalized materials in performance art, Stampe tries to invent and renew his own immediate world of materials, objects, and how to work with them. As such his work is very much intuitive and imaginative, although he usually have a story to tell. Whether it is about his own personal background, contemporary politics or both, he creates images of poetry, conceptual but always with an emotional mind.

Born in 1948, lives and works in Toronto
Tanya Mars is currently teaching performance art and video at the University of Toronto Scarborough and is part of the graduate faculty at the University of Toronto.
Mars is a dedicated feminist performance and video artist who has been involved in the Canadian art scene since 1973. She was a founding member and director of Powerhouse Gallery (La Centrale) in Montreal (the first women's art gallery in Canada), editor of Parallelogramme magazine for 13 years, and very active in ANNPAC (the Association of National Non-Profit Artist-run Centres) for 15 years. She has also been an active member of other arts organizations since the early 70's. Her work is often characterized as visually rich layers of spectacular, satirical feminist imagery.
In the 70s and 80s Mars’ work focused on creating spectacular feminist imagery that placed women at the centre of the narrative. Since the mid-90s her performances have included endurance, durational and site-specific strategies. Her work is political, satrical and humorous. She has worked both independently and collaboratively to create both large-scale as well as intimate performances.
She has performed widely across Canada, in Valparaiso, Chile, Mexico City, at Lilith Theatre in Malmö and at Live Action in Gothenburg, Sweden, in Helsinki and at Open festival in Beijing, at Infr’Action Paris, and Infr’Action Sète, France.
She is co-editor with Johanna Householder at Ontario College of Art & Design of Caught in the Act: an anthology of performance art by Canadian women (2004) published by YYZ books. She is also a member of the 7a*11d Collective that produces a bi-annual International Festival of Performance Art in Toronto.
In 2004 Mars was named artist of the year for the Untitled Arts Awards in Toronto. In 2008 she was International Artist in Residence at La Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris, and futhermore the recipient of the prestigious 2008 Governor General's Award in Visual and Media Arts. In addition a book on her work was published by FADO and edited by Paul Couillard, Ironic to Iconic: The Performance Works of Tanya Mars.

Born in 1950, lives and works in Dublin.
Nigel Rolfe has been active as a performance artist since the 1970s, more recently moving into photography and video, though nearly always trading in images relating to his performance work, or to specific objects used in his performances. He has developed an international reputation over the last 30 years for his careful execution of aesthetic gesture through the interaction between his body and the material world. Rolfe’s work encompasses many media that include sound and audio production, video and photography. His primary reputation for the past thirty years is working live, making performances throughout Europe, and the former Eastern Block, North America and Japan. He has participated in the Biennales of Kwangju in 1997 and Sao Paulo in 1998. His retrospective exhibition Archive was shown at the Irish Museum of Modern Art in 1994, and Nigel Rolfe Videos 1983 – 1996 was exhibited as an installed retrospective at The Musee d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris in 1996.
He is Visiting Professor in Fine Art at the Royal College of Art in London, and Senior Visiting Critic to postgraduate fine art courses in the United States and Europe. In the 1980s and 90s he worked with the pan-European group Black Market International.
Since the late 1990s he has made solo performances in Ireland at the National Sculpture Factory in Cork in 1998, the Cork Film Centre in 2002, The Church Gallery, Limerick in 2003 and Mount Shannon, Co. Clare in 2004 both as part of the Irish Museum of Modern Art’s National programme.

Emeritus Professor in Fine Art, University of Ulster, Belfast, Northern Ireland

Honorary Fellow, Dartington College of Art, Devon, England

Honorary Associate, National Review of Live Art, Glasgow, Scotland

D.o.B. 3 February 1943, Blair Atholl, Scotland

Education

1960-65 Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art, Dundee, Scotland DA and Post Diploma.

1965-66 Teacher Training, College of Education, Dundee, Scotland Specialist Art Teaching Certificate

1966-68 School of Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois, USA MFA Degree

The work of John Giorno embraces two disciplines: poetry and art, which have been a source of mutual fascination and inspiration for the artist. Harboring a close kinship with William Burroughs, Robert Rauschenberg, and Andy Warhol, for whom he starred in the famous film, Sleep (1963), Giorno is recognized today as one of the most influential poets of his generation. He is also considered the inventor of Performance Poetry, and of Dial-A-Poem - a free telephone line to connect listeners to recordings of original works of poetry. Giorno's words transform to images in his Poem Paintings which are short excerpts from his writings, phrases that have continually haunted him. At the crossroads between poetry, visual arts, music and performance, Giorno's work directs itself toward a broad public, redefining the capabilities of poetry and linguistic form.