Sonia Kazovsky and Amir Avraham, P.31 Power Play Fighting for Dead and Non-Existent Spirits, 2019.

ACT V - REPRODUCTION

Performance

Saturday, July 17, 2021, 11:00 EDT / 18:00 MSK

In conjunction with Voicing the Silence

ACT V- REPRODUCTION is the fourth iteration of the script Fighting For Dead and Non-Existent Spirits, written by Kazovsky and published in 2019. The backbone of the play contemplates the life and work of Ana Mendieta, a Cuban artist in New York throughout the 1970s-80s. It is widely believed that Mendieta’s husband, Carl Andre, was responsible for her death. Andre, a celebrated artist and “golden boy” of minimalist art was acquitted at trial. His defense claimed Mendieta was unstable, using her artwork to claim that she had willingly jumped on her volition. Mendieta’s representation is commonly tied to her death, and the play conceptualizes her life in relation to other women artists and existing art works. The narration is performed through a web of characters: Ana Mendieta, the artist Lee Lozano, and a contemporary female body. The play is an active reconsideration of existing artistic positions, some which have been overshadowed or instrumentalized.


Sonia Kazovsky is an artist based in Amsterdam. Sonia’s research driven work speculates possibilities for other worlds and social configurations with a commitment to create space for marginalized historical and contemporary voices. Through fragments of archival material, factual and fictional storytelling, Sonia expands on her reading of accepted Historical narratives as expressions of an hegemonic narrator. By bringing material and immaterial elements together, Sonia’s work examines the way in which contemporary lives and realities can be affected by the act of rewriting as re-configuration of relations inherited from historical developments. The theatrical act, the script and its dissemination function as propositions for ways of rearranging social relations. Sonia’s work has been exhibited in institutional and self organised frameworks among which is the Van AbbeMuseum, Eindhoven (NL); State of Concept, Athens (GR); Perdu Poetry foundation, Amsterdam (NL); Kunstraum Düsseldorf (DE). In 2019 she was nominated for the Artist revelation prize by MAD, Paris and most recently awarded the Young Talent stipend from the Mondriaan Fund for the year 2020-2021.