31 Days Old - Performance, Family and Ethics
(2020)
author(s): Sarah Black, Andy Frizell
published in: Journal for Artistic Research
In this exposition, Dr Sarah Black-Frizell and Andy Frizell, discuss the performance installation 31 Days Old (2016). This involved a full-scale installation performance in Sarah and Andy’s family home, in collaboration with Sarah (43) her mother (age 66), her auntie (age 54) and her daughter (age 3). This project highlights domestic photography as a strategic trigger for personal and family narratives and memory work. The work consists of film, live performance and original music and soundscapes.
The main part of the exposition focuses on the role of the mother-artist, who initiates an art-making practice with her family and considers the ethical implications that can arise. Sarah begins this exposition by situating her mother art practice and ‘mother ethics’, which guides and activates a theoretical and practical approach to the ethical questions arising when developing a research and artistic practice with family. Andy, a composer, shares his audio recording techniques in the home, and the ways he works sensitively with family narratives to create original sound scores.
Love Manifesto; embodying disorientation through erotohistoriography.
(2020)
author(s): Jakub Jan Ceglarz
published in: Research Catalogue
In her book ‘Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories’ Elizabeth Freeman (2010) recognises the erotic body as a method to speak about non-normative experience of chronopolitics for queer identities. Ceglarz’s research borrows Freeman’s method (erotohistoriography) and applies it in practice-led fine art research in order to materialise pleasurable nooks of time and to create experiences of disorientating interruptions. His research seeks to disjoint the dominant narrative of pain and trauma in discourses on LGBTQI+ identities.
Ceglarz does this by focusing on materialising the experience of melancholy that emerges from the loss of spaces that served and cared for gay erotic practices. His
installation titled ‘Love’ (2019) uses a combination of works that reflect on the migration of these spaces from the partially public sphere into pre-dominantly private. In these works he uses phallic imaginary embedding it with the domestic materialities and practices; from plates, egg cups, table cloths and hand towels that are painted, embroidered ironed and displayed. Accompanying the installation is a performance piece comprised of: reading out aloud the ‘Love Manifesto’ (Ceglarz, 2019); a love letter addressed to ‘My Dear Old Faggots’: and phallic shaped glitter pieces thrown sporadically into the air from a coffee cup with the word ‘Cocksucker’ painted on it. To enhance this experience, Ceglarz also uses the poetry of Jean Genet in his pieces, attenuating the non-chrononormative melancholy that allows for the “collapse of past and future into an immediate intensity” (Johnny Golding, 2013).
The installation and performance piece formed the basis of a solo exhibition in the international artist-run space, Lab155, Bologna (2019), and were part of the international conference ‘Un-tie the Knot: Redefining normativity in Love’ (2019) part of ORGAN VITA arts festival in Croatia held in the Museum of Nicola Tesla, Zagreb.