THE LOST ASTRONAUT: APF LAB
Press Release
ALICIA FRAMIS
THE LOST ASTRONAUT
A PERFORMA PREMIERE
TO BE PRESENTED NOVEMBER 3-17
Artist’s First Live Work in New York to Feature Instructions by
Marina Abramovic, Mark Beasley, Virginie Bobin, Kim Ann Foxman, Brian Keith-Jackson, Shelley Jackson, Angie Keefer, Matthew Licht, Rita McBride, John Menick, Katie Paterson, Silvia Prada, Frances Richard, and Michael Schulman
Performance traveling around NYC from Nov 3-17
Installation on view Tues-Sat from 12-6 pm daily at APF LAB (15 Wooster Street, New York)
Opening reception Tues Nov 3 from 9-11 pm, with a DJ set by Silvia Prada
FREE
Presented by Performa and Art Production Fund
Curated by PERFORMA Curator Defne Ayas.
Premiering in New York as part of the Performa 09 biennial of new visual art performance, Alicia Framis presents Lost Astronaut- an ongoing performance-installation based at APF LAB that explores the potential of living on the moon through the ironic and fictional character and activities of a woman astronaut portrayed by Framis. Left on Earth like all women who were never part of the moon race, she settles in at her “BaseCamp” (APF LAB, located at 15 Wooster Street), where she will live for two weeks wearing a customized astronaut suit, residing among drawings and prototypes that aim to both parody and make a serious claim for women’s presence on the moon.
The astronaut’s activities will be pre-determined by scores written by a group of internationally acclaimed authors and artists, and the audience will be able to interact with her as she stays in her BaseCamp or wanders the streets of New York City.
In conjunction with this live performance, a collection of architectural models designed for the moon in collaboration with a number of architects will be on view at APF LAB, presenting various possible spaces to build and inhabit in the future, while offering a realistic scheme that seeks to fit the context and conditions offered by the moon as a habitat. Lost Astronaut provides a plausible fiction that humorously responds to the Futurists’ preoccupations over the evolution of architecture, design, or way of life for the future through the crossing of disciplines and artistic and intellectual collaborations, at a time when humans’ settlement in space is becoming scientifically possible.
Follow the Lost Astronaut!
On Twitter: http://twitter.com/lostastro
On Facebook’s Lost Astronaut fan page
On Performa’s website: www.performa-arts.org
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Alicia Framis (b. Barcelona, Spain, 1967) lives and works in Amsterdam and Shanghai and has exhibited her work in international venues such as the MOCA Museum, Shanghai, Mass MOCA, North Adams, the MUSAC, León, and the Palais de Tokyo, Paris. She was part of Utopia Station, curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist, in 2004 and represented the Netherlands in the 2003 Venice Biennial. Through the collaborative project Lost Astronaut, presented for Performa 09, Framis continues her ongoing exploration of new ways of living together that she begin in projects such as Guantanamo Museum and New Buildings for China (both 2008).
WRITER BIOGRAPHIES
Born in 1946 in Belgrade, Yugoslavia, Marina Abramovic studied in Belgrade and Zagreb and is currently based in New York. Abramovic pioneered the use of performance as a visual art form in the early 1970s, exploring her physical and mental limits by withstanding pain, exhaustion, and danger in the quest for emotional and spiritual transformation. She collaborated with Ulay from 1976-89, created some of the most iconic early performance pieces, and is one of few artists of her generation who continues to make important durational works.
Kim Ann Foxman is a vocalist for the internationally known band Hercules and Love Affair, a designer of her own line of jewels, Foxman, and a very well respected DJ of classic aesthetic dance music. Kim Ann Foxman was first known in NYC for her party Mad Clams @ the Hole and as a resident DJ at Susanne Bartsch's party at Happy Valley. She has been a guest DJ in many famous international clubs and in New York in places such as Avalon, 205 Club, Studio B, Santo's Playhouse, EastVillageRadio.net, Tim Sweeny's Beatsinspace.net, and more.
Brian Keith Jackson is the author of the critically acclaimed novel, The View From Here, which received the First Fiction Literary Award from the Black Caucus of the American Library Association. He has received fellowships from Art Matters, the Jerome Foundation and the Millay Colony of the Arts. He lives in New York City. People compared Brian Keith Jackson's remarkable first novel, The View from Here, to the works of Alice Walker and Toni Morrison, and Publishers Weekly called it "an extraordinary debut...[by] a formidable craftsman and exceptionally gifted storyteller." A novel rich in humor and insight, The Queen of Harlemwill earn Jackson a much—deserved place in the center of today’s literary landscape. - (from http://www.randomhouse.com)
Shelley Jackson is the author of The Melancholy of Anatomy, Half Life, Patchwork Girl, and several children’s books. Her writing has appeared in many journals, including Conjunctions, McSweeney’s, The Paris Review and Cabinet Magazine. The recipient of a Howard Foundation grant, a Pushcart Prize, and the James Tiptree Jr Award, she is the cofounder (with artist Christine Hill) of the Interstitial Library, and the author of SKIN, a story published in tattoos on 2095 volunteers.
Angie Keefer is a partner in ExCorporation, a design practice based in Gowanus, Brooklyn; co-creator of tomorrownowforever.com; a sometimes contributor to Paper Monument and Dot Dot Dot; and editor of The 8-Train, forthcoming from Art in General. Her mother, a rocket scientist, went to work for the space program in 1962.
Matthew Licht is a writer, artist, and filmmaker. He got an education in New York City. He learned escape is impossible. He's done many jobs, from driving the delivery truck for a VIP liquor store in Beverly Hills to being The World's Oldest Copy Boy (Save One) at the Newspaper of Record. He is the author of the novels The Crazy-House Gag and the detective trilogy World Without Cops, among others. The Moose Show (Salt Pubs.), a short story collection, was nominated for the Frank O'Connor Prize. His writing explores genre and subculture in witty, delightfully provocative ways.
Rita McBride is a prominent American artist based in Duesseldorf, whose sculptures and installation deal with fiction and public space and often provide a set for performances and lectures. She has edited a series of books for which she invited other artists and writers to write short stories involving constraints and a relationship to the art world. Each of the books corresponds to a sub literary genre (crime novels, SF, soft-eroticism...). She is currently working on a new novel, Westways, in collaboration with writer Mathew Licht.
New York and Mexico City based artist John Menick makes digital films, visual art, and the occasional essay on art and culture. His work has been exhibited at the P.S.1 Center for Contemporary Art, New York; La Maison Rouge, Paris; Palais de Tokyo, Paris; CCA Wattis, San Francisco; Midway Contemporary Art, Minneapolis; Artists Space, New York; The Centre for Contemporary Arts, Glasgow, among other venues. He is currently a visiting artist at the Cooper Union and lectures regularly about art and film. In 2008 he was awarded a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Video and a New York City Film and Video Grant from the Jerome Foundation.
Katie Paterson’s artistic practice is multi-disciplinary, cross-media, and conceptually driven, often exploring landscape by means of technology, and connectivity by way of moonlight, melting glaciers, and dead stars. Recent works include Earth–Moon–Earth (Moonlight Sonata Reflected from the Surface of the Moon), the transmission of Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata to the moon and back; Vatnajökull (the sound of), a live phone line to an Icelandic glacier; and All the Dead Stars, a large map documenting the locations of 27,000 dead stars. She has recently exhibited at Modern Art Oxford, Altermodern: Tate Triennial 2009, Tate Britain, Universal Code, Powerplant, Toronto, (2009), and will present new work at Performa 09.
Silvia Prada’s work incorporates a strong ideology of movement within a broad range of contemporary pop culture. She contributed to different magazines like The Face, Dazed and Confused, Blackbook, Vman or Fanzine 137 and she showcased her work in several museums and galleries including Deitch Projects, Colette, Centro de Arte Santa Monica, Museo de Arte Contemporaneo Carrillo Gil, Musac or Moca Shangai. She recently published her latest work in a book called the Silvia Prada Art Book. Silvia Prada’s work is deeply connected with specific events and parties in order to diffuse her discourse in different contexts like design, music, fashion and art.
Frances Richard’s book of poems, See Through, was published by Four Way Books in 2003; in 2005, with Jeffrey Kastner and Sina Najafi, she organized an exhibition and accompanying monograph titled Odd Lots: Revisiting Gordon Matta-Clark’s “Fake Estates.”She writes frequently about contemporary art, teaches at Barnard College and the Rhode Island School of Design, and lives in Brooklyn.
Michael Schulman is on the editorial staff of The New Yorker, where he writes about theatre and other subjects for The Talk of the Town and Goings On About Town. In 2007, he covered Christian Jankowski’s Performa commission “Rooftop Routine” for the magazine, and he wrote about Francesco Vezzoli’s contribution to Performa 07 for the Charta book “Right You Are (If You Think You Are).” His work has appeared in The Believer and the New York Sun.
Also:
Mark Beasley is a Curator at Performa. Prior to Performa, he worked at the public art organization Creative Time; his recent projects include the first New York public art quadrennial, Plot09: This World & Nearer Ones; Hey Hey Glossolalia: Exhibiting the Voice, and the Russian and South American touring show Electric Earth: Film & Video from Britain for the British Council.
Virginie Bobin is a Curatorial Assistant at Performa. She is also working on various independent projects, including a forthcoming sound installation in Coney Island with artist Hong-Kai Wang and an Internet database on performance and documentation with bo-ring, a curatorial collective she co-created in 2008 with Austrian artist Julia Klaering.
ABOUT PERFORMA
Performa is a non-profit multidisciplinary arts organization established by RoseLee Goldberg in 2004, dedicated to exploring the critical role of live performance in the history of twentieth century art and to encouraging new directions in performance for the twenty-first century.
Performa 09, the third edition of the internationally acclaimed biennial of new visual art performance, will be held in New York City from November 1–22, 2009, showcasing new work by more than 150 of the world’s most exciting contemporary artists. Over its three week-run, Performa 09’s innovative program will break down the boundaries between visual art, music, dance, poetry, fashion, architecture, film, television, radio, graphic design, and the culinary arts, presenting over 110 events in collaboration with a consortium of more than 80 of the city’s leading arts institutions, 40 curators from around the world, and a network of public and private venues throughout the city. For more information, please visit www.performa-arts.org
ABOUT ART PRODUCTION FUND
Art Production Fund (APF) is a non-profit organization dedicated to producing ambitious public art projects, reaching new audiences and expanding awareness through contemporary art. Projects include: SHOW, Vanessa Beecroft, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 1998; PLAN B, Rudolf Stingel summer 2004, Grand Central's Vanderbilt Hall and The Walker Art Center; Prada Marfa, Elmgreen & Dragset, Valentine, TX, 2005, permanent; Greeting Card, Aaron Young, Park Avenue Armory, 2007; Electric Fountain, Noble & Webster, Rockefeller Plaza, 2008; The Whitney Biennial, Park Avenue Armory, 2008; Members Only, Kalup Linzy, 2008; Scribble, Karl Haendel, 2009; Kalup Linzy, Kembra Pfahler and Haim Steinbach for Proenza Schouler on the occasion of Pitti W, Villa Della Petraia, Florence, Italy, 2009. Co-Founders: Yvonne Force Villareal and Doreen Remen; Director: Casey Fremont
Press Contacts:
Casey Fremont/ Art Production Fund / casey@artproductionfund.org
Dan Tanzilli / FITZ & CO / 212 627 1455 x226 / dan@fitzandco.com
Lana Wilson / Performa / 212 366 5700 / lana@perfoma-arts.org
