[-empyre-] introducing Susan Mendes Silva on "What is Bare Life?"

[Christina McPhee <christina112@earthlink.net>]

dear -empyre-

Thanks to everyone for contributing so much already to the discussion  
on "Bare Life," in collaboration with the Documenta 12 Magazine  
Project http://www.documenta12.de/english/magazines.html.


Please welcome artist Susana Mendes Silva (PT).

Susana Mendes Silva lives and works in Lisboa, Portugal. She has been  
working in the interstices of intimacy and affection, but also with  
reflecting about the object of art. Some of her projects make a very  
visible bridge between these two universes, especially the site- 
specific or the performance works.

She has recently shown the installation Mind Walls in a group show at  
Museu da Cidade (Lisboa), and has developed the work Sheet for vector  
(the e-zine of virose http://www.virose.pt/) and for hidden agenda,  
contemporary art editions.

Susana has spoken, this March (2006), about her networked  
performances - artphone, 2002; art_room, 2005; and artphone, 2005 -  
at The Upgrade! Lisbon.
Her media art is found in festival venues and art databases  
internationally since 2002, including Free Manifesta, manifesta 4,  
Frankfurt, prog:me, Rio de Janeiro,  and the New Museum of   
Contemporary Art / Rhizome Artbase.

In 2005 she presented the solo exhibitions Words in my mind (where  
she presented a drawing installation at Casa d'Os Dias da Água,  
Lisboa) and Life-cage (where she shown video and photographs at  
Cristina Guerra Contemporary Art, Lisboa), and in 2006 Did I hurt  
you? (where she presented video and drawings at Zoom, Galeria Carlos  
Carvalho Arte Contemporânea, Lisboa). Her video work was shown in the  
group screenings Mar Atlantico- Portuguese Video Art, FVNM, The  
School of the Art Institut Chicago and Del Zero al 2005,  Fundação  
Marcelino Botín, Santander, Spain. This year it will be shown in  
Mostra de Vídeo Arte Portuguesa Contemporânea - Antologia, Luanda,  
Angola.

susana mendes silva
em | on
http://www.turbulence.org/blog/index.html

“spamming: from aesthetics to politics”
por | by
luís silva


links
http://www.virose.pt/vector/b_16/mendes_silva.html
http://www.susanamendessilva.com


-cm


background:
------------------------------------------------------------------------ 
--------------------------------------

What is bare life?


This question is one of three leitmotifs being talked about, and
written about all over the world during 2006, in collaboration  with
the  Documenta Magazine Project  ( http://www.documenta12.de/english/
leitmotifs.html )  -empyre- is honored to be invited into the
conversation, as an Australian based new media publication and
international collaborative list, founded by Melinda Rackham in
2002.  In  March 2006, we spent a lively multilingual month on 'Is
Modernity our Antiquity"  -- and the archives for this discussion are
online now at https://mail.cofa.unsw.edu.au/pipermail/empyre/2006-March/


The Documenta Magazine project editors describe it this way......



"What is bare life?


" This second question underscores the sheer vulnerability and
complete exposure of being. Bare life deals with that part of our
existence from which no measure of security will ever protect us. But
as in sexuality, absolute exposure is intricately connected with
infinite pleasure. There is an apocalyptic and obviously political
dimension to bare life (brought out by torture and the concentration
camp). There is, however, also a lyrical or even ecstatic dimension
to it – a freedom for new and unexpected possibilities (in human
relations as well as in our relationship to nature or, more
generally, the world in which we live). Here and there, art dissolves
the radical separation between painful subjection and joyous
liberation. But what does that mean for its audiences?"