O V A
Performance: 45 min
Exhibition: Anti Bodies, MoMA PS1
Queens, New York, January, 2018
Curated by: Topical Cream
Photographic documentation
Photography courtesy of the artists and MoMA PS1
Performance text below
O V A, a collaboration between Analisa Teachworth and artist Jonas Wendelin including three performers and three young goats. O V A stages a contemporary ethical discussion referencing the artificial fertilization of a cell, implying a current and future co-dependence, questioning genetic technologies and their possible effects.
Within the performance O V A, a trio of performers and goats, situated in the center of MoMA PS1’s geodesic dome, traverse an oral narrative on subjects of artificial manipulation, humans bring upon themselves and the surrounding world. Performers orbit a ceramic installation by Wendelin while reading from projected dialogue in a microcosm of darkness. The domes round interior lead audience and architecture to foster a relationship between the space as an atmosphere of the embryonic and audience as membrane.
The ever-present, increasingly vast, experimentation of nature, seeds, and genetics are aspects synonymous with modern science, human development, and innovation. The alteration of matter on a rudimentary level and its consequence produce a wellspring of tech that now enters the sphere as products; an offering of capitalism's unforeseen altering of collective environment and shared society. But far beyond modified plants or clean meat" biotechnology companies advance in genome editing/mutation. Viagen Pet's, a site that specializes in cloning your beloved pet after death is the next step in facilitating essential endless life...
Within the performance, each person's specific set of dialogue crafts an interlacing narrative on topics of degeneration, scale, re-birth, trauma, delivering a mash-up of critique. Language highlights the unintended consequences of power and progress via physical growth and conceptual origin. The projected text fragments, spring from the vantage point of elsewhere, being atomized, belonging to neither the past or future within the continuum of so-called advance.
The goats in this piece represent the voice of the other by being. A double-sided leash conjoins animal to human exhibiting the symbiotic reliance between the pairs. Here we investigate the domestication of ourselves by the domestication of the other and the attached responsibility that comes along with young anthropogenic awareness. In this sense, the goats and their relationship to human become a fundamental junction from which we can explore the transformation of the dome architecture into a cell and the critical magnifying of interdependent relationships through the elements - water, animal, human, earth-ware, plastic.
Included performers: Kellian Delice, Cara Diaz, Analisa Teachworth
- Painting / Sculpture
- Altered
- Alter
- Configurations
- Othering
- Fish Soda
- Installation / Video
- Anthem of Flowers
- Tribute Pallet
- Plunge
- Birds
- Performance
- O V A
- Dependency Demographics
- Conjure Migration