Theertha Performance Platform: ‘Borders and Lines’ from 13-16 March
Friday, 13 March 2015 00:32
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The ‘Theertha Performance Platform 2015,’ a performance art event that engages the Borella junction area, organised by the Theertha International Artists’ Collective, is scheduled for 13-16 March.
The event will also engage the gallery spaces of the Red Dot Gallery and Lionel Wendt for exhibitions, workshops and seminars around performance art that will be a part of this event.
Performance art is an offshoot of visual arts where the artist uses his/her body as a medium of communication. Performance art is a well-developed art practice in many countries, including many countries within the Asian region.
This artistic initiative, in many ways, focuses on the history, learning and practice of performance arts, and creates a space for sharing this practice with students, young artists, peer groups and art viewing public.
Organised by the Theertha International Artists’ Collective another focus of the event is to engage the collective’s most immediate community of Borella, and evoke curiosity and interest in the contemporary art presence that has resided for a year in the Borella town area.
The Theertha International Artists’ Collective is an autonomous, artist-led, non-profit visual arts organisation that works to support the needs of the contemporary Sri Lankan art community.
Theertha started in 2000 as an informal group supporting art exchange across artistic, geographical, and ethno-religious borders. The Theertha base moved to Borella in 2014, and in a creative attempt to ‘meet the neighbours,’ established performance artists from Sri Lanka and the South Asian region, and emerging student artists exploring performance art will take to the streets, and public spaces in the area. These performance events will be framed by the theme ‘Borders and Lines: the temporality of landscape.’
‘Borders and Lines’ explores the nature of changing landscapes (physical, imaginative, experiential), our individual and communal sense of space and how we inhabit/negotiate space. ‘Borders and Lines’ impact how we move, how we live, how we engage, even how we know our own selves. The performance art work that will emerge out of known and unknown spaces, it is hoped, will both connect people to a landscape, while calling into question the ideologies of place.
The program for the Theertha Performance Platform opens on March 13 with an exhibition on titled ‘Performed’ that looks at performance art histories and narratives in Sri Lanka and the region.
There will also be artist’s talks conducted during the course of the day by artists – Pushpamala N (India), Janet Meaney (Australia) and Godwin Constantine (Sri Lanka).
The performance event is scheduled to run on 16 March from 10 a.m. onwards around the Borella junction area. The event is open to the public – it will probably even question our ideas about ‘public,’ ‘space’ and ‘spectatorship.’
For more details on the event contact the Theertha International Artists’ Collective on 0773672789 or 773665548.
