Liverpool Biennial - Live Event
New Art Exchange, Nottingham Trent University & Walker Art Gallery, National Museums, Liverpool present
“Lying-down-on-the-ground”
A performance event devised and directed by artist Sonia Khurana as part of Liverpool Biennial’s live participatory events programme
Key dates and venues:
Opening weekend of the Biennial: Sunday 19th September 2010 in the area around Lime Street Station from 1pm - 4pm
Lying-down-on-the-ground...
The live event welcomes people with both arts and non-arts backgrounds to join in. Khurana invites people who can be comfortable with the experience of lying down in an outdoor public space. As participants lie down, their shapes are traced using chalk. Over the time period, a beautiful interlocking trace of images is left on the floor. Lying Down aims to work on so many levels, with the input of different participants and audiences. It’s a fairly simple, essential and non-threatening form of social interaction, and Khurana has drawn large numbers of audiences to participate into this act of lying down. As an ongoing, public performance event, it continues to take place across various international cities, the most recent being Nagoya, Japan as part of the Aichi Triennale and earlier in the summer a workshop derived from this project, at New Art Exchange in Nottingham. Lying Down has both playfulness and poetry, but it gets us thinking on some essential issues: embodiment and resistance; our awareness of the space we occupy; what meanings we give to images of a body lying down; our simple, everyday acts, and how we attach sense and meaning to them, but how that sense and meaning is dislodged when those acts are performed in unfamiliar settings; what happens, when things we do on our own, are done as a group activity or collective utterance?
VOLUNTEERS* – your role as facilitators is to help make the live, and mostly silent, event run by communicating with the audience and participants. You also act as a catalyst for the act of lying down and for the activity of tracing people’s bodies as they lie down. You keep track of what goes on and of who takes part, you encourage, you pass on information to participants and to the general public, you help co-ordinate visitors in the live space over the period of the event.
*Please note volunteers will need to be free for a briefing by Sonia Khurana on Fri 17th September (afternoon) as well as the date of the live event on 19th September as above. If you can also take part in the second event on 18th November, there’s a second briefing on Wed 17th November. There will also be an optional artist talk/workshop for visual and performing arts students which will involve some volunteers in late September 2010.
For up to date information please visit: www.biennial.com/articles/event/Lying-down-on-the-ground/337/995.aspx
Production Consultant: Dave Ellwand www.daveellwand.co.uk
In conversation with Sonia Khurana and Catherine Butterworth
Field notes from the project “Lying-down-on-the-ground”
Monday 20th September, 5.30pm
at Liverpool John Moores University, Johnson Foundation Auditorium
LJMU, Art & Design Academy, Duckinfield Street, Off Brownlow Hill, Liverpool L3 5YD
A project by New Art Exchange and Liverpool John Moores University in association with Nottingham Trent University and Walker Art Gallery
Admission: Free
John Moores University is pleased to present a public talk organized in the context of the Liverpool chapter of Sonia Khurana’s performance event: “lying-down-on-the-ground”
In this talk, Sonia Khurana, Khurana, in conversation with Catherine Butterworth, will present her project, within the larger framework of her practice, focusing on the performative element in her work, and her ongoing reflections on what drives this project, and recent documentation from the ongoing Aichi triennial.
“Lying down on the ground: additional notes” is an ongoing, public, performative event that has taken place in a number of settings, across various cities, in public venues. Using performance, photography, video and poetry, Khurana offers “small acts,” such as lying down in public, which gently but pointedly violate norms of social behavior, both metaphorically and physically, thereby transforming public, social space. By employing a fairly simple, essential and non-threatening form of social interaction Khurana has been able to draw large numbers of audiences to participate into this act of lying down.
First ‘performed’ at ARCO Madrid, in 2009, Currently, a near-simultaneous staging of this event is happening various cities and context around the world: at Aichi / Japan, Delhi, Liverpool, Shanghai, Paris, Eindhoven and London.
September 19th, 2010. 1pm to 4 pm venue: Lime Street train station, Liverpool.
As a curtain raiser event during the opening weekend of the Liverpool biennale, staged on the ‘sidelines’ of a larger art event, “lying down…” can be seen as a day-long rehearsal of a singular act. Sonia is joined in the act by many. The bodies lying thus are continually documented, described or circumscribed; the autographical traces drawn on the ground aim to transform a singular act into a collective utterance.
for further information on joining in, pl see pamphlet and website: www.nae.org.uk/lyingdown.php
About Sonia Khurana
Sonia Khurana’s arts practice centers around the poetics of inner experience, and the polemics of being in the world. Her public performances [ like much of her art practice] stems from Khurana’s interest in the pedagogies of the self and the social, deconstructed into communities. Since the early nineties, Sonia’s art practice has traversed paths between various media; moving on from painting to lens-based media, drawing, performance, happenings, installation and text.
Working equally with lens-based media, the moving image and with performance, she often stages encounters with spaces, cities and people. She continuously reconsiders the space of the political, played out through states of strangeness, alienation, displacement and embodiment. Sonia Khurana’s work has been shown in various public exhibitions including, currently, the Aichi Triennial in Nagoya, Japan, and the exhibition: “elle@pompidou, from May 2009 till 2011, Paris, Gwangju Biennale2008, Pusan Biennale 2004, and ‘global feminisms, Brooklyn Museum, 2007.
Select museum shows include Fukouka Museum of Asian Art, Japan, Brooklyn Museum, New York, National Gallery of Modern Art, Bombay, Asia Society New York, Museum of Contemporary Art, Brisbane, Playhouse Durban, Whitechapel Art Gallery, London, Henie Onstad Kunssenter, Oslo, KusthalleWien, Vienna, House of World Cultures, Berlin, IVAM [Valencia], Rose Museum, Boston, Davis Museum, Wellesley, Kunstmuseum Berne, Arario Beijing, Ecole Des Beaux Artes, Paris, Apeejay Media Center, Delhi, Tamayo Museum, Mexico and more. Ongoing participations include Pompidou Center, Paris, Heart Herning Museum, Denmark, Fotomuseum Winterthur, Zurich, British Film Institute, London.
Sonia studied art in Delhi, and later at the Royal College of Art in London, and the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam. She lives and works in various cities around the world. She is based in New Delhi.
Cathy Butterworth
Cathy Butterworth is currently undertaking PhD research into curatorial practice with a focus on Live Art, at the Liverpool School of Art and Design, Liverpool John Moores University where she has also recently worked as a lecturer in History of Art & Museum Studies. From 1999-2005 Cathy was Live Art Curator at Bluecoat Arts Centre, Liverpool, where she curated many performance programmes and organised a number of seminars and conferences, most notably ‘You Are Here’ in 2002 and ‘Liverpool Live’ in 2004, both in partnership with Liverpool Biennial. She was a founding member of Live Art UK, a consortium of Live Art promoters and agencies, set up to research and develop innovative curatorial projects that subsequently included a collaboration with curators from Beijing and the production of a UK wide tour of Live Art from China. Cathy has published articles in the British Council’s ‘On Tour’ publication and ‘Dance Theatre Journal’ and has presented papers at a number of conferences including Mid-West American Theatre conference, Performance Studies International 2000 and The Arts Symposium at New York University.
