Eyeblink: Fires
Performance by Myung-Sun Kim
Screening of the work of Julieta Maria

Co-presented by FADO Performance Art Centre, Gardiner Museum and Pleasure Dome

DATE & TIME
Thursday, March 15, 2018
7:00pm: Doors open
8:00pm: Event starts

VENUE
Gardiner Museum
111 Queen's Park, Toronto

INFO
Admission includes entry to YOKO ONO: THE RIVERBED. Students can use the coupon code “studenteyeblink” to receive a 20% discount on tickets. Student IDs will be checked at the door.

TICKETS
$10 regular / $8 students (online or at the door)
Purchase online at: www.gardinermuseum.on.ca/event/eyeblink-fires/

Facebook: www.facebook.com/events/316215422229975/

In support of the Gardiner Museum’s exhibition YOKO ONO: THE RIVERBED, Eyeblink is a three-part monthly screening and performance series that draws inspiration from Ono’s 1960s and 1970s filmmaking. 

In Yoko Ono’s early Fluxus films, Eyeblink and One (Match), the artist watches in steady, fixed-frame contemplation the simplest of gestures, managing to distill cinema to its essentials in a shot-countershot duet of light and vision. This screening and performance event, co-presented by FADO Performance Art Centre, the Gardiner Museum and Pleasure Dome, will explore the intertwined lineages of trauma and survival.

Myung-Sun Kim will present a new performance work. Kim’s work explores ideas around foodways, undocumented history, war, fiction, memory, trauma, resilience, and community care. She is interested in the sharing of lived experiences and methodologies that may evoke a collective sense of empathy and a deeper understanding and care for the differences that exist within our complex intercultural communities in ways that provides sustenance.

Julieta Maria’s elegant, performance-for-camera shorts concentrates lifetimes of study and digestion into exquisite frames. The artist uses the material of her body to reflect on the violence of her native Colombia, or the exile of her Palestinian father. Pleasure Dome curates a mini-retrospective featuring a program of seven shorts, as well as two smashed reconstruction loops installed in the Gardiner’s lobby.

About YOKO ONO: THE RIVERBED
February 22 to June 3, 2018

The Gardiner Museum is pleased to present a three-part installation by Yoko Ono entitled THE RIVERBED. Yoko Ono is a forerunner of Conceptual art who frequently involves collaboration, audience participation, and social activism in her artwork.

YOKO ONO: THE RIVERBED invites visitors to collaborate with the artist, the museum, and each other, participating in the artwork through everyday action and contemplation. YOKO ONO: THE RIVERBED, in a sense, becomes a temporary village—a repository of hopes and dreams for individuals and for the world.

Stone Piece features a pile of river stones that have been honed and shaped by water over time. Ono has inscribed some of the stones with words, such as dream, wish, and remember. Visitors are invited to pick up a stone and hold it, concentrating on the word, and then placing the stone upon the pile of other stones in the center of the room.

Line Piece is comprised of a series of low tables with notebooks in which visitors are encouraged by Ono to “draw a line to take me to the farthest place in our planet.” Visitors may also extend a string across the gallery space using hammers and nails to secure it from one point or another, creating a web that will grow and evolve over the course of the exhibition.

Mend Piece reinforces the idea of healing. Fragments of broken ceramic cups and saucers are placed on a table for visitors to reassemble using glue, string, and tape, before positioning them on shelves around the all-white room. In Ono’s words: “As you mend the cup, mending that is needed elsewhere in the Universe gets done as well. Be aware of it as you mend.” (November 19, 2015)

The space also features a small coffee bar where visitors are encouraged to enjoy a cup of coffee together, forming another kind of union.

YOKO ONO: THE RIVERBED was first mounted at Gallerie Lelong & Co. and Andrea Rosen Gallery in New York City, in 2015.

ABOUT YOKO ONO
Yoko Ono (born February 18, 1933) is an artist, musician, filmmaker, and peace activist.  In the last sixty years, Ono has continued to play a pioneering role in the international development of Conceptual art, experimental film, and performance art, and has been acknowledged progressively more for these roles. In 2015, the Museum of Modern Art in New York presented Yoko Ono: One Woman Show, 1961-71, which reinforced her influence as one of the most important agents of cultural change. She received a Golden Lion Award for lifetime achievement from the Venice Biennale in 2009, and the Oskar Kokoschka Prize in 2012, Austria’s highest award for applied contemporary art.

For more information about the exhibition and related programming series: www.gardinermuseum.on.ca/event/eyeblink-fires/