Dress posh for an evening of performance art Duckie. Performance & Cocktails, 25, 26th and 27th August. I’m just performing on 27th.

SPILL Festival of Performance: On AgencyEdited by Robert Pacitti and Shelia Ghelani.Published by Pacitti Company.available here.

photo credit, Briony Cambell, for Fierce, Birmingham.

Kira O’Reilly from this is tomorrow on Vimeo.

Patrick Duggan has very kindly sent me a copy of this article and interview with me which I have made available here: dugganthe-touch-and-the-cut.pdf

It was published in 2009 in Studies in Theatre and Performance, Volume 29, No 3 by Intellect.

The Adam Zaretsky conceived and realised Vivo Arts School for Transgenic Aesthetics Ltd. Stills taken during the series of actions made in the V.A.S.T.A.L. Glovebox, at Waag and  Stedelijk museum Bouwkeet on tour 2009

THE GLOVEBOX - BODY ART LAB from giuliana videopirate on Vimeo.

The VASTAL Virginarium is a six person Glove Box artistically designed by Adam Zaretsky and Mason Juday for Bioart Laboratories and public performances, which revolve around cultural interpretive issues of purity, sterility and cleanliness. Much like a sterile hood used in biology for pure culture technique, this glove box has Positive air pressure.

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The VASTAL Virginarium Is a Collaborative Cultural Containment Stage For:
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Sterile Field Inter-Public Body Art Performances

Various performance artists will be ritually cleansed and enter the Glove Box one or two at a time. Various performance artists take turns in the box interacting with the public or other actors reaching into them with the gloves. This is experimental Body Art with a Biological theme that references experiments, lab animals, the pure and the impure as well as the distance (or presumed distance) that objectivity implies. A glove box is a techno-purified place, but as an artistic/creative aseptic arena, the VASTAL Virginarium is purely for cultural production. It represents a return to ourselves as animals, experiments, faulty and in disarray but also as changeable and in process.
There is ultimately no absolute chastity or true cleanliness, passage is from one form to another into another again. But, through emulation of purification and altered versions of artistic isolation we will try to help garnish public acceptance of the imperfectability of living in this uterine world.

Design Credits:
Adam Zaretsky and Mason Juday

The artists brought together by Adam Zaretsky were:

Kira O’Reilly
WARBEAR
Jeanette Groenendaal
Zoot Derks
Boryana Rossa
Oleg Mavromatti
Sarah Hamilton
Jennifer Willet

See:
http://www.vastal.eu
http://waag.org/news/52789
http://vastal.waag.org/?page_id=357
http://waag.org/news/61188

Jennifer Willet and Kira O’Reilly (2009). Photographer: Bernd Bohm.

With special thanks to Adam Zaretsky who conceived and realised the glovebox and initiated the invitation and opportunity for us to use it.  Thanks also to WAAG Society who supported and facilitated the venure: http://www.waag.org/news/6019

My own very particular thanks to Jennifer who invited me to collaborate with her again on our second photographic series. She was also responsible for some of the fundraising that supported my visit to Amsterdam as was the case with our previous collaboration. Both situations emerged from a convergence of methods in our respective practices of similar visual and performative methodologies with respect to our presences and activities within the laboratory and the biosciences. But equally both methodologies have developed from somewhat different processes and discourses but with very similar sets of concerns. These lively convergences and divergences of thoughts, actions and language are largely what allow and create such a layered set of meanings in our brief encounters in the actual period of making. Several years of professional dialogue and friendship beginning whilst both artists in residence in SymbioticA and continuing despite very brief periods of actually seeing one another laid a foundation for these works. 

fertilised egg shell shattered and spilt the 3 day old embryo.

opened up egg showing a 5 day embryo in the top left hand corner

 DISSECTIONS: