Freda Fiala
writer, researcher and curator focused on performance-based artistic practices
THE NON-FUNGIBLE BODY?
17-20 June 2022
With
Cibelle Cavalli Bastos, Alexandre Bouvier, Marita Bullmann, Yun-Chen Chang, Beatrice Didier, Jan Hakon Erichsen, Maria Kulikovska, David Henry Nobody Jr. in conversation with Anika Meier, Sara Lanner, Sajan Mani, Boris Nieslony, Yiannis Pappas, Jianan Qu, Xavier Le Roy, Sarah Trouche, Rong Xie (Echo Morgan)
Together with River Lin, I initiated and curated the first edition of The Non-fungible Body performance festival in Linz in June 2022. The festival gathered artists whose practice deal with the interface of body and archive, live performance and documentation, and with performance in relation to internet cultures.
“Die schrille, schräge, feinsinnige Welt der Performance zeigen – das war das Ziel des ersten Festivals dieser Art in Linz” – Herbert Schorn, OÖ Nachrichten
“With this new performance festival, OK Linz director Alfred Weidinger initiates a new chapter for Austrian performance art scene. Bringing together a diversity of artists (from performance pioneers in the 70s to the latest online ones) makes for a meaningful debut connecting to performance art history.” – Hang Huang, Springback Magazine
“We see performance as an expanded artistic form and medium ranging over visual art, theatre, dance and digital culture. The question of the uniqueness of the artist’s body, which the program brings up, first relates to the notion of documentation and what it means to categorise performances as artistic works.” –River Lin, Les Nouveaux Riches Magazine
“A Non-fungible Body? suggests a singular body—a body that through its singularity is irreducible, resilient, and complex. Similarly, the Non-fungible Body points to the coming together of artists and audiences as an essential aspect of performance; it focuses our thoughts upon the shared experience of meeting and experiencing; it implies the dazzling conditions of the ephemeral, and of the physicality and the affect that links performance to its subversive, assertively disturbing, and critical potential; it is seemingly an ideal term when it comes to capturing how performance art practices are commonly projected upon. Yet, what happens to those all too well known IRL assumptions in the age of AFK?” – Freda Fiala, curatorial essay
Graphic Design: studio yukiko
Photos: Robert Maybach, Nurith Wagner-Strauss