Nude as the News
Curator, Organiser
Initiated by Sunshine Wong as a collaboration with artists Dave Ball (UK/DE), Oliver Walker (UK/DE), and Rachel Dobbs (IRL/UK) and Hannah Jones (UK) of Low Profile, Nude as the News is an art project that has evolved into a reclamation site for the mundane, whose content is dissected and anecdotalised for reconsumption. The result is a programme of 4 live events that investigate people, places, and objects at close range through performative gestures.
Using experience both as a topic and method of inquiry, the four artists set about achieving intimacy with their respective subjects, the process of which is shared with a live audience. The premises are mostly prosaic, ordinary occurrences that come with a hitch: watching back-to-back episodes of the '80s hit series "MacGyver", paying weekly visits to a specific painting in a gallery for a 6-month period, ruminations on the joys and anxieties of falling in love.
Through the intrusive act of "looking on" and being privy to an event as it unfolds, the viewers adopt a complicit role within the narrative. The staged situation thus collapses the distance between art, creator, and audience, exposing everything immediate, reflexive, or (un)intentional with minimal obstacles. It is this first hand basis that allows the public to not only vicariously (re-)live an experience, but become an integral part of it.
Events were held at 91mQ Art Project Space, Mindpirates Vereinsheim, and Kunstraum Richard Sorge.
Dave Ball's The Painting
Oliver Walker's A Performance Lecture about Falling in Love
Low Profile's MacGyverthon
(Both Dave Ball and Oliver Walker's pieces have been specially commissioned for Nude as the News)
