Authors
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Maria Kulikovska
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Dominika Laster
University of New Mexico
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Rima Najdi
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Xena Ni and Mollie Ruskin
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Ariel Smith
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Aniko Szucs
Queens College
Abstract
In July 2022, the Performance in Historical Paradigms Working Group brought together five artists whose creative work engages with issues related to food, hunger, and insatiability. Taking up the provocation of the PSi #27 conference theme “Hunger,” we explored the matrices of the material practices, embodied experiences, socio-economic conditions, as well as the psychosomatic and affective modalities of hunger.
The formally diverse works that comprised the online exhibition–and which are now included here–approach these issues from a distinctly feminist perspective: they problematize the fetishization of the deprived female body, the oppressive powers that generate inequities of food distribution, and the heteronormative gender norms that perpetuate women’s responsibilities as nurturers, providers, and caretakers. Further, they examine the ways in which these processes are socially structured and transmitted intergenerationally. The pieces demonstrate how instances of contemporary crises are rooted in enduring historical legacies and entrenched in systemic inequities.
Author Biographies
Maria Kulikovska
Maria Kulikovska is a multimedia/hybrid artist, architect, actionist-performer, researcher, and lecturer. She was born in 1988 in Kerch, Crimea Peninsula, Ukraine. After the annexation of Crimea by the Russian Federation, she lived and worked in Kyiv and around the EU as a nomad and forcibly displaced person. After the occupation of the Crimean Peninsula in the spring of 2014, the artist never went back to her hometown. From 2018 to 2022, Maria and her partner and co-author Oleh Vinnichenko were permanently based in Kyiv, and they founded the international art group and open feminist art platform "Flowers of Democracy" in 2015, and the "School of Political Performance" – a cultural platform for independent art in 2017. Nearly one month after 24 February 2022, Maria–together with their newborn baby–was forced to flee from Kyiv to Uzhorod (the western part of Ukraine), and later to Linz, Austria. From 16 March 16, 2022, Maria, with her baby, has been an artist-in-residence at the OÖ Landes-Kultur GmbH in Linz, Austria. From September 2022 till September 2023 at the Helsinki International Artist Program (HIAP), granted by the Ukraine Solidarity Residencies Program in Helsinki, Finland. In September, Maria will start the prestigious doctorate program of De Montfort University in Leicester on a fellowship.
Dominika Laster, University of New Mexico
Dominika Laster is a transdisciplinary artist, performance maker, theatre director, writer, and researcher with a with a vigorous creative and curatorial practice advancing interdisciplinary research-driven creative work that is deeply committed to issues related to precarity, inclusivity, practices of care, decoloniality, and critical utopias.
Rima Najdi
Rima Najdi, a performance artist, explores the construction and perception of identity through the embodied experience, focusing on the body's vulnerability within politicized contexts of gender, safety, mobility, and representation. She employs diverse strategies—including live actions, participatory performances, and multimedia installations—to challenge social and aesthetic norms. Najdi is the artistic employee at the The MA Solo/Dance/Authorship (SODA) program at HZT –Inter-University Centre for Dance Berlin, Universität Der Künste Berlin. Her work has been showcased in numerous international festivals and venues. Najdi has also participated in prestigious residency programs and received several notable awards and research stipends, highlighting her significant contributions to the field of performance art.
Xena Ni and Mollie Ruskin
Xena Ni and Mollie Ruskin are an art, design, and community organizing duo. We create multimedia interactive experiences for the public good. We believe in dignity and democracy at scale. And we believe that public institutions should work with and for the people they serve, so we work with government partners, community organizations, and art collectives to help our local communities become more representative, equitable, and just.
Ariel Smith
Ariel Smith is a white settler, nêhiyaw, and Jewish filmmaker, video artist, writer, and cultural worker based in the unceded territories of the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh peoples in Vancouver B.C. Canada. Ariel has been creating independent media art since 2001 and has shown in festivals and galleries across Canada and internationally. In her work, she focuses on and explores trauma as it presents in the internal, emotional, and domestic lives of women and girls. Her lived experience with difference and marginalization, and her life-long dedication and appreciation of artist-run culture has informed much of her practice and methodology. Ariel has curated programs and/or written texts for the National Gallery of Canada, the Ottawa Art Gallery, The Ottawa International Animation Festival, imagineNative Film and Media Arts Festival, Native Women in the Arts, East End Arts, Reel Canada, and the National Film Board of Canada. She is currently working towards completing her thesis for an MFA in film production from York University.
Aniko Szucs, Queens College
Aniko Szucs is a theater and performance studies scholar, dramaturg, and curator. She is an Assistant professor in the Department of Drama, Theater, and Dance at Queens College. Dr. Szucs completed her Ph.D. in Performance Studies at New York University and earned a master's in Dramaturgy from the University of Theater and Film Arts in Budapest. She has worked as a resident and a production dramaturg in theaters across the US and Hungary. Dr. Szucs’s research interests include Central and East European political theater, feminist protest movements and performances, politics of memory, and the genealogy and critique of state surveillance.
Section
Creative Interventions
