Saturday August 24th, 7:00-11:00PM
Performances: 8:00PM

Josifov’s MANUMISSION (2007) experimented with burning paper as a medium and method of art creation, and, over the years, was explored through the burning of some 300 works on paper – many of which can be viewed at galleries and museums around the world.

RE-COLLECTING MEMORIES, Josifov’s most recent project with PAI as Artist in Residence, is a performance installation that hopes to encapsulate the evolution of the paper-burning medium. Additionally, the project seeks to capture traces of restlessness resulting from a nomadic lifestyle that necessitates the act of being taken out of one’s “comfort zone” and the stresses involved in not having a stable environment to rest one’s head, to sleep. The performance will mark the mental and visual projection of a state of (un)consciousness where fire is the catalyst that liberates the spirit and at once leaves behind marks of the past.

Using large pieces of heavy paper drenched with masking fluid, Josifov will capture various sleeping positions of his body over a period of several days. A solid cube construction formed by four large pieces of the heavy paper, now imprinted with bodily forms, will be burned from inside of the installation thus allowing the audience to observe images being burned/formed while Josifov remains out-of-view.

Happening simultaneously will be Tovera’s TRANSMUTATION exhibit, which has been running live at PAI since July 19th. Tovera will likewise be performing the inception of a new installation connected to TRANSMUTATION and in conversation with RE-COLLECTING MEMORIES.

Igor Josifov’s website: http://igorjosifov.blogspot.com/
Tobias Tovera’s website: http://www.tobiastovera.com/

Opening Reception: Friday July 19th 2013 7-10PM

Closing Reception: Friday September 6th, 7-10PM

The Performance Art Institute (PAI) invites you to our newest exhibition featuring the work of Tobias Tovera in PAI’s newly constructed gallery (adjacent to our performance space) at 435 23rd Street in San Francisco, CA. The exhibition will be on view from July 19th to September 8th with an opening reception July 19th 7-10PM and closing reception September 6th 7-10PM.

Transmutation, is an exhibition investigating the realm of alchemical processes in the pursuit of discovering a ‘third space,’ a zone of possibility that exists beyond the restrictive dualities. Through painting, sculpture, and performance, this exhibit will feature the work of Tobias Tovera who will be pouring live in one of his installations at 8PM each day during the course of the exhibition.

Opening the exhibit, special guest, violist Nils Bultmann will be performing avant-garde improvised musical textures.

The Performance Art Institute proudly presents
“Light Rhapsody”, the second installment of current artist-in-residence, Pio’s, mixed-media installations.

Piotr Bujak (a.k.a. Pio) is an interdisciplinary artist from Poland, graduate of Jan Matejko’s Acadmy of Fine Arts in Krakow, Poland and San Francisco Art Institute. His most current exploration is based on a research in the intersection of violence, mass media and consumption, together with the mechanisms and theories of human perception. In his work he combines the idea of Fluxus’ DIY strategy, the minimalistic approach to new media, and accessibility of the visual impulse in the modern world.

“‘Light Rapsody’ is a mixed-media work depicting my interest in obsessive-compulsive nature of consumerism,” says Pio. “It is a critical study of the notion of ‘Bread and Circuses’ in a modern civilization of unlimited access to information. It also reflects my research into dialogue between digitally manipulated time-based media and very rough materials used in a single installation.”

This event is free and open to the public.

“Glee” is a minimalistic and site specific project that revolves around the dichotomy of bitterness and appeal in modern world of tabloided virtues. It is also a first installment of a brand new cycle “Sublime Pleasures”

Pio Bujak is an interdisciplinary artist from Poland, graduate of Jan Matejko’s Acadmy of Fine Arts in Krakow, Poland and San Francisco Art Institute. His most current exploration is based on a research in the intersection of violence, mass media and consumption, together with the mechanisms and theories of human perception. In his work he combines the idea of Fluxus’ DIY strategy, the minimalistic approach to new media, and accessibility of the visual impulse in the modern world.

A conceptual riff off of the San Francisco Building Code, Building Score 101B is a set of task-based instructions to be carried out through four evenings of live construction and performance. Six carpenters and two performers will come together each night to explore the temporal uncertainties and structural instabilities embedded in every act of construction. Equipped with their own dust masks and safety goggles the audience will be invited to witness the translation processes between what we think will happen and what actually does.

Bios

Angrette McCloskey (Director)

Angrette McCloskey is a New York based set designer and carpenter having recently relocated to the Bay Area. Angrette has worked in theater and film for the past 8 years. Her notable design credits include Swimming to Spalding directed by Richard Schechner and The Bacchae directed by Kevin Kulhke at the Warsaw International Theatre Festival, as well assistant credits on Broadway, the Metropolitan Opera, and English National Opera. As a scholar Angrette writes about the intersections of architecture and scenography, construction as performance, and the work of the “building-body” as an embodied approach to construction. She is currently pursuing her PhD at Stanford University’s Department of Theater & Performance Studies and holds a BFA in Scenic Design and MA in Performance Studies from New York University.

Jamie Lyons (Projection Designer)

Jamie Lyons is an educator, film maker, writer and stage director who received his A.B and PhD. from Stanford Univeristy.  He has worked at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles, Magic Theatre in San Francisco; The Public Theater, and Mabou Mines in New York.  For the stage he has directed the work of Samuel Beckett, Harold Pinter, Sam Shepard, Peter Weiss, and Heiner Müller.  Jamie’s most recent work was as video designer for the Collected Works’ production of Princess Ivona.

Derek Philips (Sound Artist)

Derek Phillips is a composer and sound artist based in San Francisco. Among his credits are original scores for dance-theater: Cockroach,Comedy Ballet, and TUTOR: enter the exclave, with Dark Porch Theatre Company; scores for dance: Heir by Brendan Behan, Slab by Chris DeVita/LINES Ballet; and live sound performance in collaboration: Home in Five Parts by Ryan Tecata/Stanford Drama, and 18 1/2 Minutes by Calderon and Donovan. His work has been played or performed at the DeYoung Museum, The Exit Theater, The Garage, Kunst-Stoff Arts, Stanford University, and The Performance Art Institute. He studied literature at UC San Diego, and is self-taught as a composer.

Ryan Tacata (Performer)

Ryan Tacata holds a BFA (2007) from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and studied briefly at the Experimental Performance Institute with an emphasis in queer activist performance. He is currently a PhD student in the Department of Drama at Stanford University. He has performed at Links Hall (Chicago), the Voice Factory (San Francisco), Duckie (London), The Living Theater (New York) and elsewhere across the US. Most recently, he as worked for/with artists: Ann Carlson, Marry Ellen Strom, Leslie Hill and Helen Paris (Curious), Robert Whitman, and Hugo Glendinning. His current research is at the intersections of performance and architecture and he is writing about the performing body in conceptual architecture from 1965 – 1985.

Raegan Truax (Performer)

Raegan Truax is a New York City based durational performance artist who recently relocated to the Bay Area to pursue a PhD at Stanford University in The Department of Theatre and Performance Studies. Truax’s choreographic scores and installations engage and investigate her concept of the “Misbehaving Body” as a body that acts against a normative figuring of progress and resilience. Her work has been presented at Zentrum für Kunst und Urbanistik (ZKU) in Berlin, The Northern California Performance Platform, Stanford’s Department of Art and Architecture, and Dance Theatre Workshop in New York City. She is also collaborator to Carlos Motta’s international art project “We Who Feel Differently” with recent symposium at the New Museum in New York City. In Spring 2013, Truax will perform a 29-day performance titled Misbehaving Body #28 which culminates with a 28-hour performance in Stanford’s Pigott Theatre.

Please click here for tickets.

NEW ADDRESS FOR LA POCHA NOSTRA SHOW!

Saturday, March 30th, 8PM

NEW venue:  435 23RD STREET, SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94107

Free parking!  Accessible on the MUNI Light Rail!

(Cross Streets: 23rd Street & Illinois, STORAGE facility on the waterfront)

A performance project by Guillermo Gomez-Peña, Roberto Sifuentes & Erica Mott. With La Pocha Nostra Associates: Brittany Chavez, Allison Wyper, Esther Baker Tarpaga, Rico Martin and Marcos Nájera
Producer: Marcos Nájera

Tickets: http://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/350355

What happens when you examine the intersection of the following performance personas: An aging deviant shaman, a Neo-Aztec priest making romantic religious tableaux with a goat, a flamenco drag king and an Oil Spill Madonna?

The newest work of La Pocha Nostra, considered by critics to be “the most influential Latino performance art troupe of the last 10 years.” La Pocha Nostra Live Art Laboratory presents the US Premiere of Corpo Insurrecto 3.0: The Robo-Proletariat. Corpo Insurrecto samples both new work and performance classics, addressing the current global culture of far right isolationism, xenophobia, the violence of organized crime and a broken economy and how these factors impact the human body.

As in most Pocha projects, audience members are invited to participate in this bizarre experiment. They will be invited to collaborate as we incarnate “the dreams and nightmares of our current times,” and to help the performers re-imagine new iconography by intervening the performance with their own bodies in dialogue with the performers. Through this, LPN will invoke a “wonderfully clumsy but efficient form of radical democratic practice.”

La Pocha Nostra is a trans-disciplinary arts organization that provides a support network and forum for artists of various disciplines, generations and ethnic backgrounds. La Pocha is devoted to erasing the borders between art and politics, art practice and theory, artist and spectator. La Pocha Nostra has intensely focused on the notion of collaboration across national borders, race, gender and generations as an act of radical citizen diplomacy and as a means to create “ephemeral communities” of rebel artists.

More info can be found online at:

http://interculturalpoltergeist.tumblr.com/

http://tinyurl.com/apfuygq

Friday, April 26, 2013 at 8:00pm

The Performance Art Institute is proud to present Auroville, a media ritual and an homage to the experimental township of Southern India, organized and performed by composer Nick Hallett in collaboration with visual artists Seth Kirby and Brock Monroe and featuring composers Betsey Biggs, Luciano Chessa, Pamela Z, and Jeff Cook, with performances by Ana Matronic, Monique Jenkinson (Fauxnique), and other guests. This event will take place on Friday, April 26th at The Performance Art Institute’s new location,  435 23rd Street in San Francisco, California.   

While traveling in Southern India in the early 2000s, composer and artist Nick Hallett visited the “experimental township” of Auroville, the City of Dawn.  He describes his experience there as “a futuristic, universalist, minimalist approach to spirituality, through which new models of environmental, economic and social change could be attempted, the dream of the 1960s manifest in urban planning and architecture, a cradle for the new age.”  Hallett’s travels concluded in Bangalore, where he purchased an electronic tanpura (drone) and tabla (drum).

Returning to his home in New York, Hallett’s experiments with these electronic instruments resulted in his creating an homage to the experience at Auroville:  a melding of sound, projections, video art, and new media performances, first in collaboration with artist Seth Kirby, and eventually with other musicians and performers, as a finale to his performance residency at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in 2009.

Now in its fourth iteration Auroville debuts in America’s “experimental township” of San Francisco, CA, and includes the talents of Seth Kirby, Brock Monroe, Betsey Biggs, Luciano Chessa, Pamela Z, Jeff Cook, Ana Matronic, Monique Jenkinson (Fauxnique) and other guests.

Auroville is a one-night-only event.  Admission is $10 in advance or $15 on the day of the event. The Performance Art Institute is a wheelchair accessible venue.  Doors will open at 7:30pm and the performance will begin promptly at 8:00pm. Seating is limited, so please arrive early. Space will be provided on a first-come-first-serve basis. This event will last approximately two hours.

Click here to purchase tickets for the event: http://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/369159

CONTINUA IN LIGHT, THREE ACTS is a video installation by Bay Area artists Cheryl Calleri and Thekla Hammond premiering May 4th, 2013.

A continuum is a continuous path along which an object is transformed by minute shifts and subtle changes into its opposite. Darkness becomes light. One fractures into many. Stasis explodes into movement. Direction loses purpose and becomes random. Scale is altered from large to small, small to large. Multiples coalesce into one. Then the process of transformation reverses itself.

Two projections will illuminate the walls with enhanced images of moving light. One projector will begin at the end of the video, the other at the beginning. They will intersect mid-way and then reverse directions.

Act I: VOICE, will combine the visual experience with music by Morton Lauridsen and Pauline Oliveros, performed live by Sine Nomine and Gioia, two Bay Area a cappella ensembles.

Act II: DANCE, features choreography by Nancy Karp in which the dancers’ movement patterns interact with the visual environment and the music of Nik Bärtsch.

Act III: IMMERSION, will expand the video projection and will integrate vocal ensembles, dancers and members of the audience, accompanied by the music of Tin Hat Trio, in an immersive experience to become physical and psychological elements in CONTINUA IN LIGHT.

When we think of a prosthetic limb, the image that typically comes to mind involves titanium pipes, bolts, mechanical flanges, and a rubber, lifelike foot. The product, though a vital and intimate part of the wearer’s life, appears mechanical and utilitarian, devoid of individuality or personality. The forms appear disjointed and brutal in the context of the fluid forms of the human body. Why do we assume that this must be the definition for something intended to return normalcy to an individual’s life? 

This project set out to explore how design, technology, and a fundamentally new outlook may rethink the prosthetic limb. A combination of 3D scanning, parametric computer modeling, and 3D printing allows design and individuality to be infused into the product on a per-person basis. It invites design and style into an area previously defined only by mechanical necessity. It invites attention and engagement, attempting to celebrate the human it complements.

This panel discussion event is part of a series 2012 ZERO1 Biennial and “The Future Imagined” series of conversations that delve into an in-depth discussion about the intersection of art and technology, and the future of design.

This event is being promoted in collaboration with Codame (www.codame.com)

“Tfisa, or—-?”, a contemporary dance performance, was developed at The Performance Art Institute and is directed, choreographed and performed by Yuriy Pestov, the artistic director of Cloud Dancing Enterprise.

It is based on cantorial and other Jewish music. Beautiful cantorial singing with raspy, ululating, sad and smiling voice creates high drama of existentiality with laughter through tears amid it.

A peculiar guttural, visceral and bodily quality reminds one of the humble position we humans occupy in our daily earthly life as the poor replicas of the Almighty. You can hear crying, laughing, and rasping of metal in this beautiful singing. Having in it this great drama and texture both lures a choreographer and suggests an abundance of movement material. In addition this material together with the addition of Jewish klezmer and other melodies, like nigguns, has a rich possibility for ornate and playful dancing. The merry klezmer dancing inserts roaring laughter into the high drama of the majority of the performance. Laughter through tears..

Says Pestov, “I was attracted to these pieces of cantorial music- mostly sung by Zawel Kwartin- by their performance quality, which is on par with the opera. Yet here the most important universal and existential values I have always been fascinated by come straight at you. These are basically prayers or conversing with God set on sublime melodies. A peculiar guttural, visceral and bodily quality reminds one of the humble position we humans occupy in our daily earthly life as the poor replicas of the Almighty. You can hear crying, laughing, and rasping of metal in this beautiful singing. Having in it this great drama and texture both lures a choreographer and suggests an abundance of movement material. In addition this material together with the addition of Jewish klezmer and other melodies, like nigguns, has a rich possibility for ornate and playful dancing. The merry klezmer dancing inserts roaring laughter into the high drama of the majority of the performance. Laughter through tears…”

Yuriy Pestov performed at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Theater, ODC Theater, CounterPulse, The Garage, Shotwell Studios, Union Square, UN Plaza in San Francisco, Julia Morgan Theater in Berkeley, Mountain View Dance Festival, Mountain View, California, sjDANCEco 4th Annual Dancin’ Downtown Festival, San Jose, California and other venues. He presented his own choreography and structured improvisation at the Garage, Project Artaud, UN Plaza, and other venues including Russia and Finland. His work was commissioned by Independent Arts and Media.

pestov.wix.com/clouddancing