Performance: Beyond imagination, beyond boundaries

‘An artwork a day keeps the doctor away’ is becoming the new maxim because performing arts not only connects the artist with the space and time, but also let the artist break the boundaries that lies within the self: thereby the artist creates a context beyond imagination, beyond identity. There I offer Shakespearean verses: ‘Vini Vidi Vici’ (I came, I saw, I won) to Bangladeshi contemporary visual artist Nazia Andaleeb Preema who constantly challenges own limits while following her creative spontaneous instinct whether in solo or group live art performances.

In Preema’s words: “Every minute, I felt I was performing. I literally was in such moments where the role of spectators and performers were entwined: as if everything was nothing, on the other hand, nothing was everything.”

NEW LANGUAGE OF ART
Live art performance has bloomed as a new language of art where performers can communicate without language, even gestures and actions in group performances give birth to an abstract form of visual live art. Therefore, live art performance extends the stereotypical definition of art and pushes the boundaries of conventional media that project art.

Preema revealed, “Art makes us go beyond our imagination. It serves the possibility to perform what one cannot even imagine because of its instinctive spontaneous nature. It also explores new possibility to reach to the next level challenging own limits. When I got the invitation, it sounded to me as a new journey to explore my potentials in a new context that will engage my ability as a performer to a very new atmosphere. Moreover, I was over-enthusiastic to watch and perform with the other international artists.”

Art is such a storytelling tool that is believed to connect the audience with a context. And the traditional art form in Bangladesh, often, seems a one-way road of communication. In this regard, Preema’s outspoken hammer-like-words are worth sharing, “Since decades the connectivity in such aesthetical artworks is missing here. The tradition of ‘one person delivers and the other receives’ is the main reason of having a weak knot between art and life. Whereas, performance art stands as a new level of expression engaging new dimension of communication tying audience, context, space, time, and performers in one thread.”

Thereby, a new language has emerged in this century in the kingdom of art where performers and spectators grow all together being entwined like roots of a tree known as Live Art Performance!

INTERCULTURALISM
When artists are from Hong Kong, China, Taiwan, Mexico, Netherland, Slovakia, USA, Poland, Denmark, India, Finland, Hungary, Portugal, and Bangladesh, it can be said without a hitch that live art performance surely promotes interculturalism. Such events serve the artists to have various cultural interactions combining the methods of one culture with those of the others.

“I believe death is the last performance. Moreover, life itself is a constant performance. Therefore, live art performance involves everything: aestheticism, spiritualism, and worldliness. Knowing the self, thereby, an artist connects with the cosmic infinite growth as live art performance has intercultural and multi-dimensional quality. Many of us believe live art performance is the ultimate expression of art, and so the artist who is even sitting idle or taking a break or sleeping is also performing because that is his or her state of performance,” Preema smiled.

CROSS-DISCIPLINARY
While reminiscing those days of art-and-beyond, Preema geared up her wheel of artistic energy and jumped from her seat to share, “Sometimes even group performances start individually.-at-first, one sets sail and then the others join gradually with the wind. That is how artists engage within the act spontaneously by overlapping the actions. And such overlaps become the bridge that leads to a complete meaningful act out of innate aestheticism inside the artists.”

Objects play a huge role in making the bridge, I realized from Preema’s words. In visual media, we term it ‘props’. Shedding light Preema goes on, “A bunch of creative geniuses when were said to perform in a fabric store, certainly each picked up farfetched different fabrics and colours. Each reached to different fabrics in different ways. Now, the motion individuals created, if brought in one frame, it would look like an abstract painting. In addition, when visitors in the store were made a part of the performance that spread the artists’ experience beyond.”

Thus, art connects dots, incorporates props, motions, sounds, and sites. Thereby, it becomes cross disciplinary when it adds the flavor of sociology, anthropology, history, and aesthetics.

As such happens in a spontaneous overflow, Preema terms performance as “gamble with addiction where we, the artists, meet the inner selves digesting the pressure of uncertain challenges waiting for us. We discover: to what extent our body and mind excel, to which level it can even challenge its existing excellence.”

CHALLENGING IDEAS & IDENTITIES
Live art performance is going through a postmodern pastiche trend in this contemporary period which challenges binary ideas, hegemonized identities, and stereotypical notions that exist in society. Through its instinctive nature, it brings forth the uncooked inside of the human through multiple aesthetic insights. Every now and then, a performer is born while performing reaching beyond space and time, discovering a new self!

No bath better than art! And the way I perceive visual artist Preema, I would cite Emile Zola to give a glimpse of Preema’s performances: “If you ask me what I came to do in this world, I–an artist–will answer you: I am here to live out loud.”