performance

HOW MUCH SPACE DO WE HAVE?

Response to Petra Gell “Instant Composition” 

Elma Riza 

Thursday, June 25, 2020, 8 pm

Opening: Thursday, June 25, 2020, 7 pm

Venue: philomena+ project room, Heinestraße 40, 1020 Vienna

Elma Riza, “”How much space do we have?”, 2020, performance © philomena+

In my performance, I take up a question Petra Gell posted on social media during the COVID-19 curfew: “HOW MUCH SPACE you have, you need”. She uses a language that connects the abstract and the everyday. Everyday actions are moved from private to public space. 


In order to create a structure that I can orientate myself by during the performance, I choose to work with the terms “limitation” and/or “(sub)division”. These boundaries are defined by means of materials, spaces, lines or colours and allow me to move between freedoms (open spaces) and constraints (fences). It is a body of work that foregrounds both the spectator’s and the art-maker’s experience. My performative installations propose a visual experience in which temporality plays an important role, inherent in the space created in the moment, inviting the viewer to take on the role of observer, the observer. The practice of Instant Composition creates ephemeral images of short duration and is to be understood as a draft of a fiction.

artists

Is a Franco-Tunisian artist, born in France in 1986, who has lived and worked in Berlin since 2007 in the field of visual arts and performance. Graduated from the Berlin School of Fine Arts – KHB in 2012. By means of Performance and Instant Composition, Elma Riza explores the relationship between body and space, focusing in particular on the tension between the visible and the invisible, the real and the imaginary.

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