Lecture: Theatre and Sculpture

Artist Grace Schwindt explores different media conventions, looking at the body within capitalist society, and strategies to interrupt, expose, protect and resist. She will discuss her live performances, sculptures and films and how they intersect. The selected works all relate to a conversation that Schwindt had with a birder during a research trip to Shetland Island in 2015. The birder has monitored the local seabird population for oil contamination since the oil industry descended on Shetland (UK) in the late 1970s. The moment he picks up a dead bird or a part of a bird that has been washed ashore and checks it for oil stains became a symbol of fragility and the relationship between care and destruction. In her talk Schwindt will address the use of sound in performances and films and the relationship to sculpture. Questioning whether a sculpture can be understood as a documentation of a sound or movement, she will talk about the sculpture Daphne and Apollo (1922 – 1925) by Gian Lorenzo Bernini. Like other Baroque sculptures it captures an individual moment of a narrative; it freezes a movement.In this case the very moment in which Daphne turns into a tree to escape rape. Daphne’s mouth stays open, letting us guess whether she is screaming for help or whether the sound she emits is an expression of this traumatic experience.

Bio – Grace Schwindt (Offenbach, 1979) is working with film, performance and sculpture. She is represented by Zeno X Gallery in Antwerp and her work is distributed by Argos inBrussels. In 2008 she completed her MA at the Slade School of FineArt and is a Senior Lecturer at GoldsmithsCollege in London. Schwindt has exhibited widely, including recent solo exhibitions at MARCO –Museum of Contemporary Art in Vigo( 2016), Institute of ContemporaryInterdisciplinary Arts in Bath (2016).She presented live performances at various venues and most recently, she presented the performance Opera andSteel at Performatik 2017 in Brussels.