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ON DURATION
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Details
Join us April 4-8 for the 2022 Mellon Symposium with Marilyn Arsem, Sarah Cameron Sunde, GOODW.Y.N, Natasha Jozi, Verónica Peña and Raegan Truax.
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2022 Mellon Symposium
April 4-8
Haverford College
One footstep. A tug of hair. Chains Rattling. Smoke. Water Body. A body of water.
At this critical moment of rediscovering the “live” ON DURATION brings together six durational performance artists for a week of creative research and public praxis.
Investigating process and the caesural possibilities opened by not knowing what will happen in advance of the event – the artists will time travel, bend time, critically waste time, forget time, suspend time, find time, make and unmake time.
The public is invited to witness the participants in process as they work collectively and individually throughout the symposium to explore different relationships to duration, live performance, site, environment, and the body — converging around tempos and rhythms, tidal times, questions about proximity, points of contact, and ways of responding and relating across multiple temporalities and embodied knowledges.
Curated by durational performance artist and scholar Raegan Truax, ON DURATION stalls between corporeal senses of time, environmental times, and the ways bodies perform time in everyday life. Placing value on performance as an evolving axis of political, aesthetic, and creative possibility, the symposium stages the precise skill sets of variegated durational practitioners in order to investigate how rearranging relationships to time, space, and body can unmake oppressive systems and structures.
Sponsored by the John B. Hurford ’60 Center for the Arts and Humanities and the Distinguished Visitors Program, Haverford College.
Schedule
Monday, April 4
Whitehead Campus Center 313
PRAXIS: Duration, Body, Space, Time
The artists introduce themselves with practice.
Tuesday, April 5
Whitehead Campus Center 313
PRAXIS Continued
Thursday, April 7
Location(s) TBA
Live Durational Event
The event occurs over 24-hours.
6:35 AM: SUNRISE: Marilyn Arsem (Start)
Location: College Lane Entrance
10:16 AM: MOONRISE: Raegan Truax (Start)
Location: Founders Green
11 AM: CLOCK TIME: GOODW.Y.N (Start)
Location: VCAM
Note: this performance contains nudity.
2:05 PM: LOW TIDE: Sarah Cameron Sunde (Start)
Primary Location: Penn Treaty Elm near Barclay Hall
5:00 PM: CLOCK TIME: Verónica Peña (Start)
Location: Skate House
Note: this performance contains nudity.
6:00 PM: CLOCK TIME: GOODW.Y.N performance concludes
Location: VCAM
7:31 PM: SUNSET: Marilyn Arsem performance concludes
Location unknown
12 AM: CLOCK TIME: Verónica Peña performance concludes
Location: Skate House
Note: this performance contains nudity.
1:58 AM: LOW TIDE: Sarah Cameron Sunde performance concludes
Location: Founders Green
2:05 AM: ALL ARTISTS IN REPOSE ROOM
6:32 AM: SUNRISE/END
6:32–6:35 AM: VCAM 202
REPOSE ROOM
Friday, April 8
VCAM Lounge
Reflective PRAXIS and Artist Roundtable
VCAM Veranda
Closing Reception
Participants
![](/sites/default/files/Center/HCAH/Marilyn-Arsem.jpg)
Marilyn Arsem in Holding Time with Bbeyond at the 2012 opening of Titanic Belfast, N. Ireland, UK
Photo: Jordan Hutchings
Marilyn Arsem
Marilyn Arsem has been creating and performing live events for more than forty years and has presented her work in thirty countries around the globe. Based in Boston, Massachusetts, USA, she also teaches performance art workshops internationally. Many of her works are durational in nature, minimal in actions and materials, and have been created in response to specific sites, engaging with the immediate landscape and materiality of the location, its history, use or politics. Sites have included a former Cold War missile base in the United States, a 15th century Turkish bath in Macedonia, an aluminum factory in Argentina, the grounds of an abandoned tuberculosis sanatorium in Poland, the site of the Spanish landing in the Philippines, and an abandoned Russian mining outpost in the Arctic Circle.
Arsem is a member of Mobius Artists Group, an interdisciplinary collaborative of artists, which she founded in 1975. Arsem taught at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston for 27 years, establishing one of the most extensive programs internationally in visually-based performance art.
She has been the recipient of numerous fellowships, awards and grants since the 1980s. In 2015 she was awarded the 2015 Maud Morgan Prize from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, for which she created 100 Ways to Consider Time. The work consisted of 100 different six-hour performances by Arsem on the nature of time, performed in 100 consecutive days.
A book on her work, Responding to Site: The Performance Work of Marilyn Arsem, edited by Jennie Klein and Natalie Loveless, was published in 2020 by Intellect Books of the UK.
![](/sites/default/files/Center/HCAH/Nicole-Goodwin.jpg)
GOODW.Y.N.
Nicole Goodwin aka GOODW.Y.N. is the author of Warcries, and the poetic sequel Warcrimes. They are a finalist for the CUE Foundation’s 2022 Public Programs Fellowship, as well as the 2020 Pushcart Nominee, 2018-2019 Franklin Furnace Fund Recipient, the 2018 Ragdale Alice Judson Hayes Fellowship Recipient, 2017 EMERGENYC Hemispheric Institute Fellow and the 2013- 2014 Queer Art Mentorship Queer Art Literary Fellow. They published the articles “Talking with My Daughter…” and “Why is this Happening in Your Life…” in the New York Times’ parentblog Motherlode. Additionally, their work “Ain’t I a Woman (?/!): Poems,” is longlisted for The Black Spring Press Group’s The Christopher Smart-Joan Alice Prize for 2020, and their work "Desert Flowers" was shortlisted and selected for performance by the Women's Playwriting International Conference in Cape Town, South Africa in 2015.
![](/sites/default/files/Center/HCAH/Natasha-Jozi.jpg)
Natasha Jozi
Natasha Jozi is a visual thinker, performance artist, curator and writer, interested in the performative self and the collective experience, South Asian rituals and the intersection of science and the spiritual body.
She has participated in various exhibitions nationally and internationally. Her most recent exhibitions include, Open Encounters Thx Berlin - /berlin (2022), Peepal & Banyan, Haus der Statistik - Berlin (2021) Room of Thought (2020), Karachi Biennale (2019), Loudspeaker, Vasl Pakistan (2019), Beneath the Surface, Canada (2019).
She has widely performed and exhibited her work in Germany, New York, Chicago, Delaware, Winnipeg - Canada, Tetley - UK, Fribourg – Switzerland Korea, Sri Lanka, and Venice.
She has participated in international art residencies namely Mentoring Artists for Women's Art – MAWA Canada (2019), Performance Art Intensive- The Tetley, UK (2017), Belluard Bollwerk International, Switzerland (2015), and Rapid Pulse Performance Art Festival - Chicago USA (2015). She is also a recipient of the Prince Claus Mobility Grant 2019.
In 2017 Jozi founded House Ltd. an independent initiative that explores the notion of ‘City as a performing organism’ and works towards generating a discourse around performance art in Pakistan. Her curatorial projects include Room of Thought an online performance exhibition in collaboration with In_Process, India, We’ve Been waiting for you a collaboration with Justice Project Pakistan, Body Becoming a performance art exhibition at Olomopolo Media Lahore and We Are All Mad Here at National Art Gallery, Pakistan.
Jozi recently published an essay titled “I am, A Spectacle: Reclaiming Female Consciousness through Performance Art in Pakistan” in an academic journal, Research in Arts and Education. Jozi teaches a course Identity, Ritual, Resistance: Performing the body in Southeast Asia with ECC-Performance Art.
She is a Fulbright Scholar, with a Masters in Studio Arts majoring in Performance art from Montclair School or Arts, USA and Bachelors in Fine Arts from Fatima Jinnah Women University, Pakistan. Jozi resides and works between Germany and Pakistan.
![](/sites/default/files/Center/HCAH/Veronica-Pena-bioshot-2021.jpg)
Verónica Peña
Verónica Peña (Spain/USA) is an interdisciplinary performance artist, curator, and international-community advocate. Her work explores absence, separation, and the search for harmony through Performance Art. Her performance installations combine underwater submersion, body confinement, visual metamorphosis, and audience participation to address global issues of migration, cross-cultural dialogue, peaceful resistance, empathy, public liberation, fluidity, and women’s empowerment. Recent works include participatory performances that create shared moments amongst strangers. Peña has exhibited and performed primarily in Europe and America. In America: Museo Ex Teresa Arte Actual (Mexico, 2022), NARS Foundation (NYC, 2021), Grace Exhibition Space (NYC, 2021), Coaxial Arts Foundation (LA, 2021), Pioneer Works (canceled due to COVID-19), Smack Mellon, Triskelion Arts, BAAD!, Queens Museum, Hemispheric Institute, School of the Art Institute of Chicago (Visiting Artist), Purdue University, Times Square Alliance, Armory Show, Defibrillator Art Gallery, Gabarron Foundation, Dumbo Arts Festival, and Consulate of Spain in NY, among others. In Europe: Museo La Neomudejar (Madrid), Fundacion BilbaoArte (Bilbao), Friche La Belle De Mai (Marseille), Festival Intramurs (Valencia), La Tabacalera (Madrid), among others. She was an artist-in-residence at NARS Foundation 2021, was selected for Creative Capital NYC Taller 19-20, received a Franklin Furnace Fund 17-18, and a Universidad Complutense de Madrid Fellowship (Juan Genovés Taller). She published “The Presence Of The Absent”, was reviewed by Donald Kuspit, and published on Hyperallergic. She curates “Collective Becoming”, and leads Performance Art Open Call, a +22,000 members FB Community. She holds an M.F.A. from Stony Brook University, NY. @veronica.pena.live.art
![](/sites/default/files/Center/HCAH/Sarah-Cameron-Sunde.jpg)
Photo: © Matt Greenslade/photo-nyc.com
Sarah Cameron Sunde
Sarah Cameron Sunde (b. 1977) is an interdisciplinary artist, working at the intersection of performance, video, and public art. She pushes boundaries with scale and duration in order to investigate deep time and our human relationship to the environments we live in. Sunde’s series of nine site-specific performances and video artworks, 36.5 / A Durational Performance with the Sea (2013 – present), has been created with communities around the world including the Netherlands, Bangladesh, Brazil, Kenya, and Aotearoa-New Zealand. 36.5 was recently the subject of a major section curated by Una Chandhuri in Resilience: A Journal of the Environmental Humanities.
Her performance and video works exhibit nationally and internationally with solo exhibitions at the Georgia Museum of Art, GA (2020), Gallatin Galleries, NY (2020), Te Uru Waitākere Contemporary Gallery, Aotearoa-New Zealand (2020), Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, AZ (2019), Fort Jesus Museum, Kenya (2019), Museu de Arte Moderna, Brazil (2019), Britto Arts Trust, Bangladesh (2017), de Appel and Oude Kerk, Netherlands (2015).
Awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship (2021), NYSCA (2022), MAP Fund Grants (2021, 2019), LMCC/UMEZ Arts Engagement Grants (2020, 2018), Invoking the Pause (2022, 2019, 2017), Princess Grace Foundation Awards (2018, 2005), Creative Climate Award 1st prize (2016), and Amsterdam Vonds voor de Kunst with TAAK (2015). Residencies include Baryshnikov Art Center (2018), LMCC Workspace (2016-17), Hermitage Foundation (2006), and Watermill Center (2014).
Sunde’s current practice is informed by 18 years of making theater, and now part of an emerging field of art that is made on, in, and with bodies of water in response to ecological change. In 2016, she instigated and co-founded Works on Water. She was Deputy Artistic Director of New Georges from 2001-2017, and is known internationally as Jon Fosse's American director and translator. She holds a a B.A. in Theater from UCLA (1999) and an M.F.A. in Digital and Interdisciplinary Art Practice from The City College of New York (2016).
Curating Artist
![](/sites/default/files/Center/HCAH/HCAH-MS-Raegan-Truax.jpg)
Photo: Jeremiah Barber
Raegan Truax
Raegan Truax is a performance artist and scholar working broadly across the disciplines of performance studies, gender and sexuality studies, disability studies, dance, and visual culture. Her research explores questions about time, memory, territory, affective exchange, and labor—particularly in regard to queer feminist histories of subversive art and protest.
In her forthcoming book Durational Performance: Temporalities of the Untimely Body, Truax focuses on global women and queer artists who bend, suspend, and manipulate time as a political material. Arguing that the durational throws us into a gap between a corporeal sense of time and the way the body is conditioned to perform time in everyday life, Truax suggests that lingering in the durational — even when it can feel disorienting, or boring, or difficult — we begin to make sense differently and sense begins to structure our temporal experiences or the ways in which we inhabit, perceive, and structure our time. A discomfiting and precarious position to sustain – Truax argues the political potency of the durational hinges on this ability to orient the body to and sustain a different sense of time.
An accomplished durational performance artist with an international profile, Truax’s work has been included within The Marina Abramović Institute’s Immaterial archive and presented at Zentrum für Kunst und Urbanistik (ZK/U) in Berlin and Cité internationale des Arts in Paris. She has also performed at Centro Negra with AADK in Blanca Spain, SOMArts in San Francisco, grüntaler9 in Berlin, Dance Theatre Workshop in New York City, the Performance Arts Institute in San Francisco, and The New Museum in New York City. Her recent performances include Citation, which was performed for 37 consecutive hours at CounterPulse in San Francisco, Sloughing, which included 35 performers and occurred across 19 different locations in the Bay Area over 28-days, and a 76-day piece, Stay in Place, that was performed in her living room at the onset of COVID-19.
In 2019, Truax began working on a series of 12+ hour performances conceptualized around public mourning and collective grief. The first performance in this series, all the nothing, took place at Artists’s Television Access in San Francisco in 2019. The second performance in this series, Recitation was performed at Haverford College for 13 hours in 2021.
Truax is currently a Mellon Post-Doctoral Fellow in the John B. Hurford ‘60 Center for the Arts and Humanities and Visiting Assistant Professor of Visual Studies at Haverford College. She holds a PhD in Performance Studies (Stanford University), an MA in Performance Studies (NYU) and an MA in Gender Politics (NYU). She teaches courses in Performance Art, Performance Theory and Practice, and The Art of Duration. She is currently teaching a new course developed for Haverford, “Untimely Art and Performance.” Her article “Durational Performance and Queer Refrain” is forthcoming in the Spring 2022 Issue of Platform: Journal of Theatre and Performing Arts.