Knitted by Tihana Valent
Congratulations to the women of LAVU and Raddox Studio in the Czech Republic who will be presenting the first SWAN Prague this Saturday.
A highlight of the evening will be a photo exhibit and documentary about Sacrifices, an interactive site-specific labyrinth installation theatre piece which the women of LAVU created in 2014.
Conceived by LAVU’s Artistic Director Vanessa Gendron (Canadian) & Producer Lucie Nepeřená (Czech) and developed with a multi-national cast of women, Sacrifices explores the final moments of the lives of five strong-willed women saints through photography, video, dance, sound scape and performance. SWAN Prague will feature an exhibit of photography from Sacrifices as well as a video about the creation of the piece by Bosnian filmmaker Maša Hilčišin. You can watch an excerpt of Hilčišin’s documentary in which the company members talk about the ways the production put them in touch with the sacrifices that are so often taken for granted in women’s lives.
The evening will also include a video installation by Croatian artist Tihana Valent, whose work often explores her relationship to her immediate surroundings. Her piece “Knitted” (shown above) is a perfect example. She has wrapped a laptop computer in red yarn that needs to be pulled aside to view the computer screen or use the keyboard. It juxtaposes two kinds of “women’s work”, knitting and clerical work, and humorously suggests the limitations of each.
From Christine Maldonado’s “What She Does”
Another highlight will be a “film intervention” by Christina Maldonado, a Mexican artist
who has developed a system where audience members can see her hands in front of the image while they are watching old films. For instance, in What She Does, Maldonado shows excerpts of the Blake Edwards 1962 horror film Experiment in Terror, but while the woman on screen (Lee Remick) seems helpless, Maldonado is creating another reality through her live performance that is superimposed over the screen. Thus the audience feels the strength of a woman artist in real time as a counterpoint to the helpless woman in the original film.
To see a sample of Maldonado’s work, check out this video excerpt of What She Does.
The final segment of the evening will include dance and physical theatre by Marta Sobotková and Dagmar Spain, and music by Valerie Vasilová and Blanka Maděrová, a composer, performer and professor, who recently completed Fulbright research at Harvard about Czech and American alternative female musicians.
SWAN PRAGUE
Date: March 28, 2015
Times: Exhibition Opening at 5:00 pm; Screenings at 6 p.m.; Music & Dance at 8 p.m.
Place: Artek, Kozácká 10, Prague, Czech Republic
Tickets: Free, but reservations are required.
For more information, please visit the SWAN Prague website.
Sacrifices – Labyrinth of Sacred Paths [Excerpts], 2014 by Maša Hilčišin.