Description: As part of the symposium "Manoeuvre" organized by research group "Pôle de recherche / Le corps de l'artiste" alongside performance art festival "Excentricités X: Insurrections", participating artist PASHIAS presented the lecture "Atlas & Caryatids: The embodiment of structural support in performance art", attempting to investigate his own practice through the merging of architectural support and human bodies. The artwork’s central point, initially in the form of the artist’s body, shifts and expands to include a multitude of bodies, transforming artistic gesture into communal effort and mutual support. In these terms, performance art reveals itself as an architectural structure, a number of pillars, a ceiling, amalgamations of matter and weight, in correlation to human figures, attempting to establish, disrupt and reconceive their relations or dynamics of function. PASHIAS visits past artworks from his working practice, in order to reveal a field of dualities, particularly through the examples provided by the male figure of Atlas and the female figure of a Caryatid found in ancient Greek mythology, offering a valuable representation for the corporeal entity observed in relation to an ‘object’ or ‘subject’ of value, attached to the figure itself or a social ensemble to which it belongs. The lecture evolves into a written text to be published by Institut Supérieur des Beaux Arts de Besançon in a catalogue on the occasion of the performance festival’s tenth edition.

Atlas & Caryatids: The embodiment of structural support in performance art

Lecture for the symposium "Manoeuvre" curated by Michel Collet + Valentine Verhaeghe / Institut Supérieur des Beaux Arts de Besançon / Besançon - FR / April - 2019

Organization: Pôle de recherche / Le corps de l'artiste

Photo: PASHIAS