Jiri SURUVKA, Czech Republic

Pekka KAINULAINEN, Finland

Loïc CONNANSKI, France

Joakim STAMPE, Sweden

Roi VAARA, Finland

Nigel ROLFE, Ireland

Stein HENNINGSEN, Norway

Valentin TORRENS, Spain

Frantisek KOWOLOWSKI, Czech Republic

Wathiq AL-AMERI, Iraq/Switzerland

John COURT, UK/Finland

Dan FRÖBERG, Sweden

Mauritz TISTELÖ, Sweden

Chuyia CHIA, Sweden/Malaysia

Guadalupe NEVES, Argentina

Lilibeth CUENCA RASMUSSEN, Denmark

Monali MEHER, India

Tanya MARS, Canada

Anna KALWAJTYS, Poland

Maline CASTA, Sweden

Anne ROCHAT, Switzerland

Saskia EDENS, Switzerland

Raeda SAADEH, Palestine

Linda Mary MONTANO, USA

Jinling DONG, China

Arahmaiani FEISAL, Indonesia

Benedikte ESPERI, Sweden

Rong XIE, China/UK

Zhihang OU, China

Carlos MARTIEL, Cuba

15 YEARS OF LIVE ACTION

Live Action celebrates its fifteen years of existence with a new health-aware online format. It is today in many countries probably the only safe way to experience art. Live Action 15 is a celebration on many levels. These 15 years have been a wonderful journey of artistic diversity with astounding artworks performed live by more than 200 artists from over 50 countries. Our format has changed over the years, methodically exploring new ways to present performance art. However, we have always stayed faithful to our conviction of the importance of showing this avant-garde art in both an institutional environment, and in the culturally democratic context of public space. Our common ground as we call it is a powerful space, made for the mobility and human proximity inherent in performance art. This 15th anniversary embodies also our persistence, and attachment to this avant-garde art form as organisers. 15 years of annual event organising is demanding, yet we have never doubted its significance or asked for anything in return. Except to be in a place and at a moment where art meets people, that’s our reward. To live and be a part of that experience motivates us to persist and continue. In short it is a passion.

Art is, as we see it, an essential contributor to a civilized and democratic society. Without it we all risk to fall into its opposite. It stands in total opposition to hatespeech, racism, caricatures and all existing human phobies. It is a bridge which can make a difference for all of us because of its humanity. It has an outstanding quality as a trigger to make us think and feel in other and hopefully new ways. The notion of art as a trigger means basically that once you have experienced an artwork it is not over, it is not ended. When it is efficient, when it has depth, its emotional and intellectual meaning continues to work inside you, consciously and unconsciously, generating new inspiring thoughts and emotions in a continuum. 15 years of triggering that is clearly worth to celebrate, and it is an honour for us to be a part of it. This year the form of the trigger has changed completely.

When we in 2019 began to prepare the 15th edition with our annual project plan and funding applications, we could not imagine what would happen to the world in 2020. We were like most people shocked by the spread of the virus and its speed. However, we immediately understood that we needed not only postpone but change our plans for Live Action. It had to be safe, no matter what. It had to be health-aware in symbol and in practice, for the artists, for us as organisers and our volunteers, but also for the general public. We understood that to comply with our conditions, we had to organise it as an online event. The online experience is of course very different from the artist-viewer proximity that performance art embodies. But the extreme circumstances gave us no choice.

We never really considered live streaming, since the artist rarely have any control over the visual result on the viewers side of the screen. Which we believe is essential. Instead we researched the early beginnings of online art, or television art as it was called in the late 1960s and early 1970s. We studied in-depth the breakthroughs made by film directors and tv-producers like the German Gerry Schum with his groundbreaking Fernsehgalerie, or for that matter the productions of the Belgian Jef Cornelis. It made us understand the importance of limited duration for any screen-experience. Something which further corresponded with two other variables, the actual time most visitors to galleries and museums spend to look at an art work, and the time limitations of todays new social media. The utopian promise of television art as articulated by Gerry Schum to bring contemporary art into everyones living room is today possible with the internet and social media, but of course with other problematics than the media-political consideration of national broadcasters with their autocratic power to open and close visionary ideas like that of Schum. Live Action 15 enters as such a new territory, new in that it explores profoundly, through a broad artistic commission how to articulate an art of social media through classical contemporary art forms like performance and video. Of course this is not performance art, but as close to it as we can get in that it engages renown performance artists while being mediated in video. What is interesting in this showcase is the diversity, visually and conceptually. It shows 30 different ways of thinking and expressing, and it is this diversity, this flower, that should be considered the strength of our 15th anniversary.

For this event we have invited 15 female and 15 male artists. Each artist was asked to realize a 60 second performance-to-video work. The festival be go on for 15 days and will thus showcase two artists per day on our website liveaction.se, and thereafter on social media platforms like facebook, instagram and youtube. The festival opens on November 15 2020, at 15:00 pm. Welcome to the online experience of Live Action 15.

Jonas Stampe & Joakim Stampe

LIVE ACTION 15

NOVEMBER 15-29 2020

At 15:00

Location : www.liveaction.se

Curator : Jonas Stampe

ARTISTS :

Wathiq AL-AMERI, Switzerland