John A. Douglas: Body Fluid II (redux)
Performance Space kick off their season of electronic-laced works with art based on kidney dialysis.
Overview
Carriageworks will again open its arms for performance and video artist John A. Douglas and his ongoing meditation on the illness that shapes his life and art with Body Fluid II (redux). With Douglas occupying the stage attached to a dialysis machine, the show is set to offer an insight into our powers of transformation and mortality.
Dialysis, we often forget, requires its patients to be stationary for hours at a time, so this will necessarily be a contemplative, still work that the audience can engage with for as long as they choose. Throughout the ten-hour sittings, Douglas's accompanying video installation will provide a figurative landscape that hops from space to surreal forest to the surface of a cell, using bewitching macro photography from the Museum of Human Disease UNSW. Douglas's signature golden figure is present throughout the imagery, an homage to Nicolas Roeg's The Man Who Fell to Earth — also Bowie's screen debut— the story of a humanoid alien subjected to invasive medical testing and imprisonment.
The artist will remain dependent on daily dialysis until he secures a kidney transplant, so this is one exhibition where it does not take too much mind-stretching to draw the link between the life and art.
Body Fluid II (redux) is part of the Switched On season at Performance Space, which is part of ISEA (itself under the umbrella of Vivid this year). The works featured each take something from the electronic world and combine it with other practices such as theatre, dance and sound. You'll be able to play mini games throughout the Darlinghurst streets with Perth's pvi collective, watch as experimental dance meets motion-sensing technology in Breathing Monster by French choreographer Myriam Gourfink and consider what human society should put down for posterity with the launch of the Forever Now project, to be concluded at MONAFOMA 2014.
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