Overview

senVoodoo's Font was a tableau vivant presenting the primal substance of blood as a carrier of sustenance and contagion. Two figures bled into a vessel of water, staining it red. The audience surrounding them, fully implicated in the experience of pain, risk and transcendence. Pain and the breaching of skin, central features in the work of senVoodoo, are vehicles to a realm of intense focus. The body under duress engages viewers on a profoundly visceral level, requiring a negotiation of notions of mortality, contagion, sacrament and the body's fluidity, within the immediacy of the act of bleeding and the blending of blood and water as a symbol of alchemical union and transformation.

Acknowledgments: George Poonkhin Khut (sound and live video feed); Gary Nicholls & Rita Almohty (medical).

Aftermath provided a critical and public focus to the complex relationship of performance and installation art, sharing a genealogy, as they do, in early conceptual and post-object art. Aftermath centred on the ‘aftermath' of performance, or conversely, performance as a strategy for creation of material environments - the bleeding back and forth of active models of performance and its post-life.

Over six weeks one of six artists participating from Australia and abroad undertook a performance work in one of the Artspace galleries resulting in the installation Aftermath and collectively creating a dynamic, rolling set of relationships between changing spaces. This program was completed by two discrete performance works by local artists. The project was also accompanied by a set of screenings of international performance documentation in the Artspace Reading Room and a Symposium held at CarriageWorks on Saturday 18 August, 2007.