Einat Amir: "Ideal Viewer"

A Performa09 program

Exhibition Dates:   Saturday, November 7 and Sunday, November 8, 2009

                           12pm – 2pm and 4pm – 6pm.

Location:              Scaramouche, 53 Stanton St., NYC

www.flashartonline.com/interno.php?det=ok&id_art=599&pagina=articolo_det&title=EINAT-AMIR

Opening a voyeuristic lens onto conflicting authorship, “Ideal Viewer” is a two-phased series of performances, beginning with actors hired from Craigslist to improvise three biographical archetypes in Scaramouche’s gallery space—a Crying Woman (Melia Smith), an Ex-Boyfriend (Yoav Levin), and an Interpreter (Ryan Andes). After advertising the actors’ services in the gallery and online, the second phase on November 21 will effectively give the reins to Performa’s audience, enabling intimate, unmediated encounters between performer and spectator in the spectators’ own private spaces. Partly staged, partly improvised, partly real-time, partly pre-recorded, Ideal Viewer withholds any resolution as to what is authentic, fabricated, or otherwise manipulated. In the context of Performa’s centennial celebration of Futurism, Amir’s contemporary interrogation of authorship and gender roles deflates this historic movement’s patriarchy and technological lust. Provoking sexual sport, "author function" dysfunction, and technological disorientation, “Ideal Viewer” explores sexual and artistic identity, blurring the very notion of what is “real.”

Selected by Performa 09 as part of Lust Weekend. Curated by David Everitt Howe. More information on phase two can be obtained at the gallery; a second press release will announce the exact times and locations of this later installment.

Einat Amir (Jerusalem, 1979) lives and works in New York where she received her MFA in visual arts from Columbia University in 2009. Her video installations and live performances engage gender, sexuality, representation, communication, and other contemporary sociopolitical issues. Amir’s work has been exhibited at Herzliya Museum of Contemporary Art, Israel; Haifa Museum of Art, Israel; Scaramouche c/o Fruit and Flower Deli, New York; Rosenfeld Gallery, Tel Aviv; CareOf gallery, Milan; Städtische Galerie, Bremen; and Digital Art Center, Hulon, among other venues.