IKLECTIK is thrilled to announce a brand new ‘Performance Art Curator fellowship’ programme. The new curatorial research will expand out the music programme while still embracing the interests of IKLECTIK for experimentation. The project, led by artist, curator and trailblazer Dyana Gravina, will integrate the medium of the body in performance and live art with a focus on movement, and new technologies.
The year-long programme is divided into three researchers’ perspectives and studies and combines writing with a live and digital public programme of performances and talks.
General framework:
How can new technologies relate to embodied knowledge and practices, and can this conversation redefine narratives for ‘engendered bodies’? What’s the future(s) of gender and sexuality in the 21st century? How do we pioneer possibilities for identities existing outside univocal and patriarchal scripts?
Structure:
The first research, led by Dyana Gravina (Jan-May), looks into transhumanist and posthumanist theories in relationship with contemporary notions of embodiment and pleasure through a feminist lens.
” If Androids, sexual robots, and technologies replicate ideas of heteronormative power structures and aesthetics, sexual violence, and oppression of ‘female’ sexuality, what models of ‘humanity’ are these prototypes perpetuating? What notions of pleasure and gendered gaze exist in the making of these technologies?
Two more guest researchers will be invited by Dyana Gravina and the IKLECTIK team to bring their own perspectives and knowledge into the larger framework.
Creating a bridge between academic research with artistic practices the ‘Performance Art Curator fellowship’ is part of IKLECTIK’s ongoing efforts to make crucial contemporary research and discourses more accessible to a wider audience.
In order to address the exposed issues and invest in social change within an interdisciplinary framework, we used this conceptual expansion to also include performance works at the intersection of tech, somatics, and ritual. To start thinking of cyborg, queer, and ethically repurposed technologies, the aim of the first event organised at IKLECTIK in May 2022 proposed works that both critically raised questions around the above-analised biases and that yet serve as a gateway to imagine a multitude of narratives around gender identities, where the distinction between humans and robots blends into the erotic pleasure and a-gendered reproduction powers.
Research Jan-May by Dyana Gravina. Are ‘human-like’ technologies new figures of oppression in the 21st century? – Digital display and Essay published in June 2022.
Research Jun-Sept by Hydra (Anna Gloria Flores) + Donatella Caggiano. A technology of care is imagined as a way to integrate duality and attain unity to understand reality as perpetually in transition.
Research Oct – Dec. To be announced soon.
About Dyana Gravina (She/They)
Dyana Gravina is an independent curator, birth doula, activist and community builder, a mover and performance artist. MA in Gender Sexuality and Culture at Birkbeck University.
She is founder and creative director of Procreate Project, a pioneering arts organisation dedicated to womxn and non-binary artists who are (m)others.
They have collaborated and curated projects with partners and venues including RCA, King’s College London, LADA Live Art Development Agency, Ugly Duck, Mimosa House, Women’s Art Library, RichMix, Richard Saltoun Gallery, 198 contemporary Art and Learning, to mention a few.
Over the past eight years, they created an ever-growing network of artists and supporters, demonstrating the need for new approaches and infrastructures both for artists and the cultural industries. She has been providing new references for models that can inspire a sea-change across sectors; integrate ways we perceive and balance the private, the domestic and the public as part of the cultural and social landscape.
In this framework, they have been developing their own artistic and curatorial practice with an interest in feminisms, migration, body politics, social constructions/deconstruction of ‘female’ sexuality. Using both autobiographical materials as well as collective stories she produces a transdisciplinary body of work that combines movement, actions, photography, video and text.
