"Joan Jonas: Performance - Video - Installations"
2001-03-31 until 2001-05-06
Neue Gesellschaft fur Bildende Kunst, NGBK
Berlin, , DE

Joan Jonas, born 1936 in New York, is a pioneer of performance and video art. Since end of the sixties she has been analysing the interaction of the performing body with its transformation by media, reception and space. She is designing complex spaces of reception to test the different status and the process character of drawings, photography, slide projections, sound, music, dance and found objects. Joan Jonas is completing the installations with performances and videos.

The exhibition Joan Jonas - Performance - Video - Installations, organized by NGBK in cooperation with the Galerie der Stadt Stuttgart (Gallery of the City of Stuttgart), contains five main works representing various periods of Jonas' œuvre.

The 16 mm film Song Delay (1972) deals with unison of social bodies, while the installation Organic Honey (1972/2000) introduces video as reflexive medium and theatre of self-awareness as part of the female identity construction reflecting the she herself. The video story Volcano Saga (1987) as well as the monitor installation My New Theatre (1998) refer to rituals of everyday life linked with myths having survived in sagas and fairy tales. Joan Jonas, revealing the manipulative potential of film techniques with live-projections, one channel - video tapes and asynchronous picture and sound sequences is going this way against the claimed permanent innovation of new media. With narrative elements she is reacting to the growing yearning for familiar patterns of narration.

Along with the exhibition a catalog was published (Hatje Cantz Verlag) in German and English, containing texts by Ralf Christofori, Chrissie Iles, Andrea Jahn, Johann-Karl Schmidt, Joan Simon, Annette Tietenberg and Anja Zimmermann. The price for the catalog at the exhibition is DM 60,- , for members of NGBK DM 45,- (at the book stores DM 78,-).

Performance
Joan Jonas will give a performance On April 4, 2001, 7 pm. at the Studio I of the Künstlerhaus Bethanien Mariannenplatz 2, 10997 Berlin

Lecture
Dr. Andrea Jahn, Galerie der Stadt Stuttgart, will give a lecture on: Joan Jonas' new theater. Remarks about new works of the New York artist of performance. On Thursday, April 26, 2001 at 8 pm. at the Hochschule der Künste (Academy of Fine Arts), Hauptgebäude, Hörsaal 110, Hardenbergstraße 22, 10623 Berlin

IMAGE:
Joan Jonas,
Organic Honey's Visual Telepathy,
NYC 1972

Related Links:

Indepth Arts Resources for Germany

Other Important Exhibitions in Berlin