• Joan Jonas, Reading Dante, 2008, performance for the 16th Biennale of Sydney 2008 at the Cell Block Theatre. Courtesy the artist; Yvon Lambert, Paris and New York; and Wilkinson Gallery, London.
  Photograph: Greg Weight.
  

A founder of video and performance art, Joan Jonas was originally a sculptor who began to participate in experimental dance workshops and in 1968 held her first performance. Since then, her work has explored the transformation of the performing body through perception, space and media. Her use of masks and mirrors, as well as her adoption of different mythological and contemporary personas, point to her exploration of identity as fragmentary and contingent. Reading Dante (2008) is inspired by Dante’s early-fourteenth century Divine Comedy, incorporating elements from ‘Inferno’ and ‘Paradiso’. In this work, Jonas combines scenes from the woods of northern Canada, a performance in Italy, a modernist ruin built in a lava field in Mexico City and 1970s footage of deserted New York City streets. Unlike in Dante’s medieval universe, here we experience a world full of connections, and no person or place alone can represent heaven and hell; this is Jonas’s infernal paradise.

Performance at the National Art School:
Joan Jonas, Reading Dante
Sunday, 22 June 2008, 11:00am, Free
Sunday, 22 June 2008, 6:00pm, Free

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