Pia Lindman

artist, fellow, MIT Center for Advanced Visual Studies (US)

Embodiment, Re-enactment and Affect

My approach to art making and my experience of the world is based on the idea of embodiment.   My early performances explored my physical and psychological experience of space.   The acts I performed sought ways to question architecture's imposed cultural and physical containment of that experience.   My later work continues to question architecture's rule and create possibilities for embodied experiences for the audience.   With my work on reenactments (such as The MIT Project, The New York Times Project, and Corpcomm), I have returned to using my own body as a tool.   This time I am attempting to transfer experiences from others to myself and back to the audience in the form of drawings and performances.

My work on grief started with a personal experience of a major public disaster, the attacks on the World Trade Center in the year 2001 in New York City. The spontaneous personal and collective processes of mourning were very visible, intense, and omnipresent in the city after the World Trade Center collapsed.

I collected images of mourners from the New York Times for one year. Eliciting the bodily gestures out of the news context I made diagrams of the mourners' gestures by tracing them with pencil on vellum. Using these drawings as my "instructions," I re-enacted the gestures in front of a video camera without revealing their original context.   I then printed out my poses of these gestures from stills of the video recordings and traced them by pencil on vellum. I did not invest the re-enactments with emotion, nor did I interpret the enactment as an actor would perhaps do. I simply wanted to repeat the physical gesture with my own body as accurately as I could.

After re-enacting in front of a video camera in my studio, I moved into the public space to perform the re-enactments live. The locations of my performances have varied, from shopwindows in New York to monuments in Vienna and Helsinki.

In my talk I will also discuss the method of re-enactment in the project CORPCOMM - Enactments and Improvisations in Corporate Communities, and   in the current work with the MIT Humanoid Robotics Group at the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, CSAIL.

Pia Lindman is a visual and performance artist, and research fellow at MIT Centre for Advanced Visual Studies. Her artistic work, of which the Public Sauna project at PS1 is most famous, includes interventions that probe the edges of private and public space and question ideas of monumentality and affect in urban space. Her recent work has involved a research on economies of gesture in news photography and corporate settings. Currently she extends this approach towards robotics research, as an artist in residence at The MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab.

Born in Espoo, Finland, Pia Lindman received her MFA from the Academy of Fine Arts in Finland, and then as a Fulbright scholar received a Master of Science in Visual Studies from MIT. She has exhibited and performed internationally, among others in New York: at the Museum of Modern Art; Luxe Gallery, the lab gallery; in residency with Lower Manhattan Cultural Council; and at P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center. Her video series Thisplace is in the MoMA collections. She has lectured and taught, among others, at Columbia University, Yale, NYU, RISD, and Institut Française d'Architecture in Paris, France. In the year 2004-2005, she was Lecturer at the Visual Studies Program at MIT.

' http://web.mit.edu/pialindman/