ANIMATE ENTITIES: OBJECTS IN PERFORMANCE

What is the thing about objects these days? In a time of evanescence, excess, and waste, numerous artists and thinkers are in a tizzy about “materiality,” questioning what matter is and why it matters. Yet beneath the buzzwords (“object-oriented ontology,” “new materialisms”) and new technologies (3D printing, virtual reality), older forms of material performance continue to mutate, pulse, and fascinate. From carnival masks to rag dolls, from Polaroids to puppet theatre, the everyday stuff of life continues to animate us and to become animated: to move, shift, and perform. With a little attention and care, even the humblest thing—a match, a bit of dust—is all you need for an extraordinary show.

Do recent trends in contemporary art and thought have anything to say to well-worn traditions of masquerade, puppetry, collecting, ceremony, and object-theatre? Animate Entities wagers that these different worlds of theory and practice have a thing or two to learn from each other. In two days of interventions across a range of formats—a talk, an exhibition, a roundtable, a banquet, a screening, and many performances—we explore the liveliness and vibrancy of things, the way that human and non-human entities can move together in the company of a public (that’s you). Our guest speakers and artists will take you into object-worlds that are strange and familiar, absurd and evocative, full of “uncanny life.” They will try to convince you that performances get more interesting when you lose the idea that human life—especially a certain kind of human life—should be severed from all the other things that matter.

Animate Entities aims to show what things can do when you give them half a chance. The masks, costumes, and sculptural forms of a carnival band, transfigured and transplanted to the cavernous hall of an art museum. A collection of rag dolls, grotesque shapes that condense the pain of history into their twisted bodies. A homemade museum in which objects unworthy of serious consideration (matches, toothbrushes, dust) transform into magical displays. A set of objects liberated from a play that is not a play, ready to stage their own rehearsal on and off a table. And puppets, of course, in the shape of humans or bricks or paintings on sheets of cloth, eager to skewer us for our pretensions, prejudices, and frivolities. Whether you’re joining us for a single event or for the whole two days, prepare to be animated.

Gabriel Levine

SSHRC/CHCI Postdoctoral Fellow, Jackman Humanities Institute

Artistic Director & Producer, Animate Entities: Objects in Performance