Saturday, October 23rd at 1 p.m., artist Michelle Sáenz Burrola will talk about her work in the exhibition Community of Sentient Beings. The artist talk will be in English. At 2 p.m. the artist Rúnar Örn Jóhönnu Marinósson will then present his weekly performance in connection with his work Suck & Blow Live and Work.
Looking at our connection to the world as a community of sentient beings will allow us to open various paths of investigation, whether it be the relationship between human and nature, human and culture, or human and human. The term sentient being allows us to abandon historically charged definitions, to think of personhood and humans more broadly. At the core of the concept, is an interrogation of the historical and social usage of a category of human, which concerns whom and what we consider part of a community.
Michelle Sáenz Burrola (México-USA, 1992) is an artist who uses media such as video, photography, text, dance, drawing in installations, performances, and editorial publications, exploring a common platform between the performing and the visual arts. In her work, she deals with questions concerning the construction and representation of the female body and its relation to its context where no place circumstance or situation is isolated from each other. Michelle has a BA in Visual Arts from La ENPEG La Esmeralda and an MFA in Performing Arts from The Iceland University of the Arts. Since 2012, she started collaborating in different geographical points such as México, Colombia, Belgium, Iceland, United States, and Austria participating in art exhibitions, artistic researches, documentary theater projects, and educational mediation for contemporary art. In the last years she has been developing different cultural platforms in collaboration with cultural agents in México City looking for a union between exhibitions and the production of different cultural processes beyond the results as mere objects.
My name is Rúnar Örn Jóhönnu Marinósson, I was born in 1989. I am both a visual artist and a musical performer. I am also a youth worker. I’m interested in play, work, pleasure, family, history, labor, leisure, control, compassion, freedom, privilige, expression, identity and being as a sculptural process and a lot of other things as well. In my practice I utilize several mediums to explore these diverse efforts of human beings to understand, comprehend and control the internal and external realities of themselves and others.