SUITE
M:ST * Mountain Standard Time Perfromative Art Festival
October 9th, 2014
TRUCK - Contemporary Art in Calgary, Alberta

"Building upon a recent series of private, or semi-private performances begun in 2013, this performance continues the artist’s investigations into the role of documentation and technology in mediating access to the performing (female) body. While Grebmeier Forget is not the only artist to experiment with the idea of controlling or limiting the audience for her performances, SUITE is notable for the way that she uses this form to address issues related to performance art and its documentation, as well as her use of oral accounts. [...] In describing the challenges of writing about performances “in absentia,” Amelia Jones has argued that, “the problems raised by my absence… are largely logistical rather than ethical or hermeneutic. That is, while the experience of viewing a photograph and reading a text is clearly different from that of sitting in a small room watching an artist perform, neither has a privileged relationship to the historical ‘truth’ of the performance.”[1] Building upon this claim, I am interested in thinking through what it means to work with/within the logistical problems of absence. This text uses multiple and multiplying forms of documentation to negotiate my distance from the performance, less with the goal of providing a conclusive account of the event, but in a way that might hold a space for all the conflicting, affective, awkward, messy, unofficial, intimate, embodied, compromised, personal, and subjective versions of the performance."

A response to this performance by Nicole Burisch :

Never Enough / Jamais Assez: on documentation, proximity, and Nadège Grebmeier Forget’s SUITE from the series One on one’s for so-called fans published by the Glassell School of Art and the Museum of Fine Arts – Houston in occasion of the Core Residency Program and exhibition, 2015, p. 11-21.

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[1] Amelia Jones, “‘Presence’ in absentia: Experiencing Performance as Documentation,” Art Journal 56, no. 4, (Winter, 1997): 1

*
One on one for so-called fans consists of a series of performances for 1 to 4 preselected witnesses. Just meters away from the actions, in a lair invested by the artist, those that attended these earlier private meetings then reveal publicly the performative narrative of the past encounter. Simultaneously shimmering the limits of their own intimacy, storytelling and appropriation of one’s body and gestures becomes the only possible way of retracing its original author.

Privileged guests and storytellers for this performance : Paul Zits, Jenna Swift and sophia bartholomew.
Images of public recalling : Monika Sobczak