VIDEO PERFORMANCE FESTIVAL OPYUMFESTIVAL.COM
EMPATHY FOR
THE PAIN ON OUR SKIN
BY
OPYUM 022
) 019
)020
) 021
7
open-call selected
We feature emerging artists who work with video, performance, digital arts and other forms not recognized in the conventional gallery system. We conduct interviews with artists, organize online and offline exhibitions and organize monthly virtual residencies. The performance is in a way a means of communication and metamorphosis.
EMPATHY by OPYUM 022 declares the common need to be attuned to a practical, theoretical and sensitive ecology of performance art. Opyum is the first international art festival dedicated to contemporary creation on video performance taking place each year in Paris. An alternative medium that remained confined to a few rare galleries and museums around the world is taking on a new dimension by reinventing its mode of distribution through video. This physical platform appears with the aim of supporting contemporary art media in highlighting film performance.
Being a practice, attesting to a way of conceiving of oneself as an artist acting in the world, the performance transgresses categorizations by artistic disciplines.It readily manifests itself in a dazzling manner. Above all, she does not seek to constitute a work, or even sometimes to leave the slightest trace. The elusive would participate in its very definition. Faced with such embarrassment, one will often agree to conclude that the instability of its definition must be classed among its characteristic features.
To a certain extent, we expect through this project, delivered a manifesto of what is for us a performance in a personal definition transcribed through a selection of real examples. Our first Opyum edition in 2019 shed light on those artists around the world who have embraced performance as a way to articulate cultural or ethnic difference and to participate in the broader debate of international culture in the age of everything. media. The bringing into play of the artist him- self, the non-separation between art and life (or the blurring of this border) the primordial importance of the body, the uniqueness of the event, the role of the unforeseen, the uncontrollable, the improvised; in any case, the ephemeral nature of the thing. The sharing of an experience, the protest, the challenge (of academicism / political power) transgression, provocation, subversion, the feminist claim, the question posed to «gender» and sexual identity, marginality, always in tension with an effective recovery with the possible. Performing real action, without mimesis.
The anchoring of performance in societal and technological news gives it a disturbing truth. All mediums are useful in its creation, and the wish of the project and to link it all the more to this contemporary aspect. This excessive desire for information, this overdose of images is what our association offers and what Opyum will broadcast in its disposal. This art brut devoid of artifice is multidisciplinary, influencing all circles, from theater, cinema, photography or helping to revolutionize the art of architectural construction. There is a real need for the public and the art circles to offer better visibility to the performance. Attaching to a primary form creating a solid foundation of understanding and creation for artists and audiences.
participating in the open-call
artists screening
300
30
days of festival
100
OPYUM'S THEME 022
EMPATHY by OPYUM 022 declares the common need to be attuned to a practical, theoretical and sensitive ecology of performance art.
The pain remains pointless. Yet in her physical conformation she is absolute and total. When we suffer, it is impossible for us to ignore it: pain becomes the primordial feeling that supplants all other emotions. And at the same time, it is impossible for us to communicate this experience, but it is possible to show empathy.
The lack of empathy for the pain of other human beings has led to violence, abuse and the deterioration of interpersonal and intergroup relationships. Racism and sexism and all other forms of discrimination draw their strength from this lack of empathy, which is essential to community life.
Constructed by realizing an idea through a gesture performance has historically always aimed to stage a form of experimentation, to open up new fields of research and engagement, to transgress the norm, to question artistic production and to engage the viewer in the process.
The performance is in a way a means of communication and metamorphosis. Through the radical treatment of their bodies, the performers become transmitters. Through its bodily actions, protes- ting against a world where everything is anesthetized, the wound is the memory of the body, the memory of its fragility, its pain, and therefore the certainty of its existence.
Performance Art can, from this point of view, be of great help. Indeed, where information, analyses, scientific knowledge only reach us in an abstract, disembodied way, artists give shape to worlds and situations which, even if they are completely fanciful, are offered to our bodies and our minds as concrete spaces of investment.
The question is no longer how performers could give flesh to the textual and human “skeletons” they encounter, but how they could pull a bone from here and another from there to create their own figures.
Performance video art is a portrait, made with new technologies. Located between disfiguration and figuration, engraved in the skin, according to contemporary conjunctures.