A Thin Red Line
Friday, April 3, 2020 at 5 PM – 6.30 PM
A (video) performance by Katia Shklyar and Maria Bayat.
The live streaming of the performance will be aired on YouTube and Instagram.
Intimate dialogue with and about mother in a form of performative presence – offline and online. When you come to see your mother – you kind of know what to expect, you are using the same rails you’ve been riding for many years. Would you dare to have a bike ride instead of taking the train? Or to walk instead of driving? To slow down and meet your mother without knowing her?
An interactive being in Myymälä2 gallery is inspired by the exhibition “MOTHER – a thin red line” by Edwina Goldstone.
After the performance, there will be a conversation with artist Edwina Goldstone and performer Katia Shklyar: “Mothership and daughtership: some tales on autonomy and/or nourishment.
The conversation will be led by Ramiro Camelo, curator in residence at Myymälä2. They will discuss topics and themes posed by the exhibition and Shklyar’s performance through references and intersecting readings of relationship mother-daughter as a recurring topic on fiction, chronicles and artworks. It will explore stories of loss of motherhood and maternal/filial transformation that are found throughout the arts, taking cues from different sources, for example, from mythology, Demeter and Persephone, which the main theme is the strength of love between a mother and her child.
In literature, the novel ‘Swan’s Way’, the author Marcel Proust recalls his endless yearning for his mother good night kiss that will prove to him being the primary object of his mother affection and ‘Under My Skin’, the first volume of Doris Lessing’s autobiography in which Lessing reject any identification with her mother and analyzes thoughtfully on the recurrent bitterness in the mother-daughter bond. From cinema in the films by Pedro Almodovar such as ‘Volver’, (2006) and ‘All about my mother'(1999) – dedicated “…to all actresses who have played actresses, to all women who act, to men who act and become women, to all people who want to become mothers.”.. on Almodovar films the spiritual, often erotic attachment between mothers and children tends to end on tear-eyed multilayered tragedies and finally, from the visual arts, seminal artworks such as Mary Kelly’s “Post-Partum Document” (1973-79) is a six-year exploration of the mother-child relationship and Judy Chicago’s “Birth Project” (1985) a massive collaborative tapestry series featuring birthing imagery.
The conversation will pretend to convey one unifying, incontrovertible truth that unifies our existence of all women and men in the universe- that truth is that the primal long formative period we spent unfolding ourselves inside a woman’s body and perhaps later in life we primarily learn of love, endearment, frustration or wrath will be embodied in the person of “that woman”.
Post-partum document, interview with Mary Kelly:
https://www.bl.uk/collection-items/post-partum-document-1973-79
Meet the Artists | Judy Chicago | The Birth Project
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O8ouH6zhI_8
Streaming will be organised with two cameras so you can get a different experience depending on what channel you decide to follow.
Join us live on
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RsGab7QN9PE
NOTICE: OUR LIVE STREAM HAS BEEN REVOKED, WE ARE WORKING TO FIX THE PROBLEM.
and/or
Instagram: www.instagram.com/myymala2.
The music played during the performance has been influenced by Sevdaliza’s song lyric titled Human and Bic Runga’s song Sorry.
Edwina Goldstone (b. 1962. England) is a visual artist working across multiple disciplines, based in Finland since 1994. Exploring the relationships between identity, memory and the geographical imagination, her works involve layering of alternate realities, made up from ‘the imagined’ (the handmade), ‘the real’, and ‘the historical’, often starting with archetypal images or objects that are imbued with personal histories and cultural significance. Goldstone gained a Master’s degree in Fine Art from Norwich University College of the Arts, UK in 2008.
More info: https://www.edwinagoldst.one/
Katia Shklyar is an actor, a butoh-dancer, and a performance artist. She had studied dance, acting and stage art in Russia, Finland, and Spain. As a co-founder of UtoUto theatre, she devised and performed in the independent theatre performances, directed audience-driven pieces, and lead creative movement and poetry workshops. Her deep interest lies in exploring the connection between the body and the mind, between movement, self-being, and creativity, which makes bodily movement to be the core language of her stage work.
More info: www.UtoUto.fi
Maria Bayat runs a video production company in Helsinki and sings always when she can.