Events
PAI introduces four exciting events all opening Friday, June 27th 2014
6:00-9:00pm at our new space 120 Turk Street in San Francisco.
Scott Sherwood
Upcycling Extinction
PAI will introduce the first show in its new gallery space, the first in a series of exhibits based on the theme “Upcycling.” Sherwood makes use of the now forgotten and often discarded 35mm slide, the pre-digital equivalent of the smart phone. These majestic works form cathedral-like stained glass windows in homage to the slide.
Qween Amor
A performance by PAI artist in residence Qween Amor. This colossally charming trans(per)former came all the way from NYC to blow our minds with her fiercely independent, semi-illegal, and undeniably compelling street theatrics. A Must see.
Vicky Marlene Street Naming
Please join PAI, Supervisor Jane Kim, Scott Shields and esteemed guests in commemorating our 100 block of Turk Street to legendary trans performer Vicky Marlane.
The Human Infrastructure Project
Christopher Selland
Come learn how infrastructure affects how we interact with each other in our communities by playing the parts of different elements of urban environments. The Human Infrastructure Project seeks to discover how the urban village unites communities, while the suburbs divide us. By playing the parts of a tight knit urban village (public transit and high density housing revolving around town squares), before transforming into suburbs (separate houses divided by fences), we will see that conversations and relationships thrive in the former situation and dwindle in the later.
Post-Media Work by Xavier MTW
Opening Night April 18, 2014 at 7PM with a live video/performance at 8PM by the artist.
Though trained as a painter and having exhibited primarily as a painter in San Francisco, Xavier MTW believes that this is his first “post-media” exhibition since he started making art some 15 years ago. “What the data age has caused — aside from the ease of access of information and the ability to learn new skills — is a sudden influx of obsolete objects: I believe that my job as an artist is not to produce the new (as we’ve produced all the new we could possibly ever need), but to re-think, re-purpose, and re-animate the old, both objects and ideas, into something that captures the now.”
The exhibit features paintings from Xavier’s previous series “Under the Light of a Digital Moon” (a collection of abstract paintings that capture the changing San Francisco landscape during its present period of transition) as well as a selection of video work presented as an amalgam of video, performance, music/sound, sculpture, painting, and installation-based modalities. Xavier, a self-titled “pop expressionist,” is known for his signature vibrant palettes, flat, expressive style, and often humorous yet critical approach to serious subject matter.
“This collection of work”, he states, “is about the aftermath of the rise of the data age and how I as an artist and we as people must sense of life inundated with technology and information: indeed, the absurdity of excess.”
Xavier MTW’s website: www.xaviermtw.com
Tobias Tovera: TRANSMUTATION, a closing reception
September 6th, 7-10PM
Performance: 8PM
The Performance Art Institute (PAI) warmly invites you to our new gallery space for Artist in Residence Tobias Tovera’s TRANSMUTATION closing night reception, which has been running live at PAI since July 19th.
Through painting, sculpture, and performance, 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 restrictive dualities.
The centerpiece of the exhibit is a performance-installation Tovera began at the opening night event on July 19th. Since then, every Wednesday he has been pouring live, layer-by-layer, performance-by-performance
The final performance will culminate during the closing night reception.
check out Tobias Tovera’s website: http://
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RE-COLLECTING MEMORIES: A performance installation by Igor Josifov
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://
Tobias Tovera’s website: http://
Building Score 101B, by Angrette M. McCloskey
March 14 – 17 at 8:00pm
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. More info>>
“Corpo Insurrecto 3.0: The Robo-Proletariat, a performance by Guillermo Gomez-Peña, Roberto Sifuentes & Erica Mot.
March 30 at 8:00pm
Employing La Pocha Nostra’s trademark “robo-baroque” aesthetic, cyborg-kitsch and acid humor, Corpo Insurrecto 3.0: The Robo Proletariat is LPN’s newest experiment in “corporeal transformations.” Using this format, the ritual presentation of live art and live language, 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 on the human body. More info>>
2012 ZERO1 Biennial event: The Future Imagined: What’s Next?
November 9, 2012 – January 15, 2013
As part of the 2012 ZERO1 BIENNIAL, the performance Art Institute presents: The Future Imagined: What’s Next?, an exhibition curated by Hanna Regev. The exhibition will feature interactive models, electronic objects multimedia digital video, augmented reality, sound installations, emerging forms and new genres installations. These works will seek to facilitate a fresh discourse about contemporary art in the Digital Age: One that is deeply rooted in the innovation and entrepreneurial spirit of the Silicon Valley. More info>>
The Bay Area Premiere of “Princess Ivona” by Witold Gombrowicz
Thursdays, Fridays, and Saturdays at 8:00pm from January 24th through February 9th, 2013
Princess Ivona (or Ivona, Princess of Burgundia) is the first, and most internationally performed, of the plays of Witold Gombrowicz, the influential Polish novelist, playwright, and diarist, whom John Updike has called “one of the profoundest of the late moderns” and Milan Kundera “one of the great novelists of our century.” Widely performed and celebrated throughout Europe and on the East Coast, Gombrowicz’s timeless and wickedly funny allegory is finally being introduced to Bay Area audiences, by a brand-new company of gifted and experienced theatre makers, in the exciting new warehouse space of the Performance Art Institute.
Written in 1935, the play was published in 1938 but not performed until 1957, after which it was immediately banned by the Communist government in Poland. Serious professional productions of the play began to emerge in Europe in the 1960s, quickly establishing Gombrowicz’s status as a major Modernist playwright.
The play follows the bizarre intrigues of a self-confident Royal Court, whose members enjoy an unchallenged sense of privilege, luxury, and control – over both themselves and others. The presence of a strange, awkward, silent young woman who mysteriously wanders into their world soon throws the court into a tailspin – the King and Queen begin to unravel at the core of their being, and the rational functioning of the court’s administrators becomes increasingly lunatic. As the play spirals towards its astonishing ending, both the story and Gombrowicz’s inventive language become more outlandish and theatrical.
More info>>