Slipping Into Slipping Away

Nov 14 — 16, 2024
Field:

Performance

 Location:

Foyer, Western Front

 Time:

7:15 p.m.

Description:

Chipo Chipaziwa presented Slipping Into Slipping Away, a performance that explored memory, legibility, liminal encounters, and her experience with psychoanalysis.

The performance began as audience members arrived in the foyer. After having their tickets scanned, they were directed to the reception desk, where Chipaziwa was positioned to manage coat check. Gradually, she transformed everyday front-of-house actions—light cleaning, organizing print materials, and turning on gallery signage—into a performance. Over the course of thirty minutes, Chipaziwa performed ten sets of actions across Western Front's foyer and stairwell, to play with the power dynamics between artist and audience, and art worker and visiting public, to challenge traditional audience-performer relations.

The performance extended the research in Chipaziwa's artist book My Mother My Home (2024), in which she remediates her past performances and interrogates the ever-pervasive white gaze on Black life, art, and being by proposing alternative methodologies of archiving performance art without photographic depictions of the body. 

Slipping Into Slipping Away was presented over three nights.

Presented with support from the Canada Council for Arts, BC Arts Council, and the Government of Canada. With thanks to Justine A. Chambers and Autumn Knight for mentorship.

Video documentation is available upon request.

Captions:

Western Front is a non-profit artist-run centre in Vancouver.

We acknowledge the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish), and səl̓ílwətaʔɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations as traditional owners of the land upon which Western Front stands.

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