Tuesday, 25 October 2016

Vivian Ezhugha

RESEARCH/RESPONSE TO VIVIAN EZHUGHA, GUEST SPEAKER


Extract From Reflective Journal;
"Later in the week we had our first guest speaker, a performance artist, Vivian Ezugha, who employs costume and enviroment to challenge stereotypes associated with her Nigerian background. She was keen to emphasise the distinction between performance art as an art form and as 'entertainment' by encouraging her audience to either commit to the entire performance or not attend at all. She also emphasised the importance of collaboration, an essential skill no matter the media, and spoke about the struggles of bringing conceptually challenging art to an unwilling community and the struggles she faced to be respected and heard, something I have had to deal with on a lesser scale previously in my own practice.

Although performance art isn't something I would typically be interested in, I found a lot of her ideas and responses as an artist very relatable and interesting. A quote which stuck with me in particular was "We are all performance artists in our own right, whether we call it performance art, or just living." which definitely prompted me to feel differently, and respond more receptively, to the concept of performance art whereas previously I might have more readily brushed it off as irrespective to my own practice."

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