Mythic Beings
curated by Elise Lammer
Every year, Liste Art Fair Basel invites an institution, magazine, artist or curator to conceive a Special Project, which extends Liste’s mission to highlight the latest developments in contemporary art with a cutting-edge approach. This year, Elise Lammer is curating an extensive performance programme titled “Mythic Beings”.
Utopian models once provided artful tools to address society’s ailments through radical thinking. Poetry, fiction and myths were billed as the grammar tasked with establishing an ideal allegorical society. From Christine de Pizan’s literary protofeminism to Octavia E. Butler’s post-apocalyptic Black Renaissance, utopias would fertilise the minds of those ready to spark direct civil action.
In homage to Adrian Piper’s eponymous 1973 work, “Mythic Beings” explores the potential of disguise, camouflage and repetitive action to transcend one’s own condition. Showcasing newly commissioned works by Wren Cellier, Astrit Ismaili, Florence Peake and Luana Vitra, among others, the programme considers some utopias’ blueprints of anti-normative potentials to address art’s transformative function, while simultaneously promoting the idea that artists are the mythic beings embodying revolutionary power.
In their new work, performer, composer and singer Wren Cellier explores how the world’s vulnerability can be expressed through music and sound. Combining singing and live instrument playing with soundscapes of flutes, guitars, voices, effect pedals and field recordings, the work aims to express and make audible the current shift in social ecosystems and how collective transformation can resist norms in order to thwart systems of oppression.
In collaboration with the Institute Art Gender Nature of the Basel Academy of Art and Design FHNW, Astrit Ismaili has been guiding a cohort of fine art students over the course of a few months to develop a new performance exploring the transformational and performative potential of bodies and spaces through a queer lens. Together they researched historical, personal and fictional subjects that, through creativity, overcome certain limitations – whether physiological, social, geopolitical, or other. For the first time, fragments of outcomes from Ismaili’s seminars will be presented to the public.
“Factual Actual” by Florence Peake is an ongoing series of performances and paintings which explore the relationship of painting to movement and propose the overturning of static representations often found in Western museum’s collections. Through chaotic shifts and ever-changing compositions, figurative painting and performance are combined as large, exuberantly painted canvasses are folded, dragged and suspended by three performers, moving between flat and sculptural forms and theatrical elements of concealment and revelation. As part of “Mythic Beings”, Peake will stage a new iteration of “Factual Actual”.
Artist, dancer and performer Luana Vitra investigates the possibilities of drawing by repeating simple gestures while working with extracted minerals. During her residency at La Becque | Artist Residency, Vitra developed a new performance for Liste’s Special Project using iron powder, indigo and earth, further exploring the relationship between her body and the bodies of the minerals while intertwining personal and geological memories. Born in the Brazilian state of Minas Gerais, where most of the country’s mineral wealth is located, Vitra’s experience with iron has allowed her to observe iron beyond its hardness and to understand its powdered state as the moment of its maximum freedom.
Timetable:
Mon, 10 June – 2pm & 6.30pm, Florence Peake
Wed, 12 June – 2pm, Florence Peake
Thu, 13 June – 6.30pm, Astrit Ismaili
Fri, 14 June – 2pm, Astrit Ismaili & 6.30pm, Luana Vitra
Sat, 15 June – 2pm Luana Vitra & 6.30pm, Wren Cellier
Sun, 16 June – 2pm, Wren Cellier
Elise Lammer (born in Lausanne, CH) is a curator committed to questions related to the role of space (public, domestic) in defining identity construction. Working across media and with a transgenerational and intersectional approach, her work aims to question and re-assess narratives that have suffered from monolithic, one-sided integration within History, while looking at such problematics from a contemporary prism.
She is currently a PhD candidate at Institute Art Gender and Nature in Basel, and University Linz, Austria, doing research on the garden of British artist, filmmaker, author and gay rights activist Derek Jarman (UK, 1942-1994). Since 2019, she’s been developing a garden in homage to Jarman's Prospect Cottage at La Becque | Artists Residency, La Tour-de-Peilz. In 2015 she founded the research platform and collective Alpina Huus, a performance-led project and research collective dedicated to investigating the relationship between performance and domestic space. Elise Lammer is currently teaching the BFA and MFA Fine Arts Course at Institute Art, Gender, Nature in Basel and is a regular contributor to Mousse Magazine, CURA.
Special thanks to our partner Kulturstiftung Basel H. Geiger | KBH.G for their generous support. Furthermore, thank you to La Becque | Artist Residency and the Institute Art Gender Nature of the Basel Academy of Art and Design FHNW.