Romane Courdacher, Emily Fielding and Julia Mazur combine efforts in a stellar exhibition that concerns itself with the implications of physical transformation.
Interrogating the impermanence of live performance, and life in general, this trio exhibition makes extensive use of the body, how it is twisted and turned and dehumanised to serve the whims of our desire.
Julia Mazur’s TIREMAN is exemplary of this notion, literally putting three bodies through the ringer, forcing them to contort to the boundaries set for them, unnaturally squirming into an unnatural shape, themselves becoming unnatural-seeming figures. It charges us to interrogate how we put our own selves through various ringers, unnatural constraints, and other such tightrope walks to maintain appearance, to cater to our self-worth (self-image), to seem ‘normal’. Maybe we’d be better off without the tyre round our necks.
And with that, it stresses the centrality of the body to art, to thought, to culture, by showing what performance would look like with the body removed. All definition of ‘performance’ are considered, literal and figurative each taking thematic focus. Concerning itself with the theme of transformation, the body is poised as a revolutionary figure, bringing the mundane into the realm of the sublime.
Romane Courdacher works with the attitude of a gleaner, gathering images, discarded items, fragments of texts and materials, constituting an ever-growing visual and conceptual collection that feeds into their research and making process.