SOME KIND OF GAME
Facebook Live, March 25, 2020
Montréal, QC.

Duration : 1 h 59 min 48 sec

« Live on Facebook from the artist’s home-studio on a March afternoon, Nadège Grebmeier Forget disgorged an urgent, spontaneous, and cathectic release of maximalist body art, evoking femininity, isolation, and the mediating screens between us. She performed a kind of tarantella, a dance-and-shake for indefinite time, meant to prevent death by infamous disease.

Grebmeier Forget’s sonic backdrop comprises a repeating 127 bpm house track – “Some Kind of Game” by Against All Logic – her own typing and screenshot clicks, her breath, Spotify bumps, and ads, one of which features Justin Trudeau reminding us of our shared context – the pandemic and its accompanying attenuations to daily motion.

Like her magnetizing and frantic movements, the track doesn’t actually loop. We always hear the start of the next song on the album, before she restarts the track. She reveals: “I manually fetched Some Kind of Game and re-clicked it for some reason. It was all a little frantic.” The time passing under our quelled movements, too, has become nearly indistinguishable, while simultaneously harried under duress. She rubs foundation across her face, tries unsuccessfully to affix pieces of paper to her cheeks, slathers lipstick until her mirror no longer serves its intended purpose, then carefully attaches a magazine page, ripping out the sockets to fit her eyes.

Objects enter the frame, leave, and return, serving different roles each time, like the baby’s-breath flower she stuffs into her underwear, shakes, and retrieves to loop through her nose ring. The judder of gathering force feels exponential before her movements suddenly stop on a close-up of her torso: it’s the same view that began the performance, but her breathing has intensified. She accidentally turns off the computer, and the video ends. We’re left responding to our collective stasis: considering our bodily constraint, and all these displaced energies that we were, just a moment ago, sharing. »

– Magdalena Olszanowski, Artist in Isolation: Nadège Grebmeier Forget "Some King of Game", May 5, 2020, Feature - momus.ca

Exhibition history :
Bradley Ertaskiran, Montréal, July 11 - August 22, 2020 [+]

View this performance in its original Facebook Live context
Chosen stills :