First Public Reading: ‘In the dark, dark room’, Institute for Cultural Inquiry, Berlin, Oct. 23, 2013
Here are some images taken by Claudia Peppel from the first public reading on Wednesday October 23 from my new work ‘In the dark, dark, room’. Also performing on the evening were Michaela Davies and Clayton Thomas, with an electro-convulsive musical work titled ‘Involuntary Duet.’ The projected image is by Riitta Päiväläinen.
(images: Claudia Peppel)
As I cycled, my mind turned to wondering, morbidly, which street in Melbourne John had his accident on. Wanting to picture it. Wanting to visit the corner or the tram tracks or the intersection or wherever it was. He’d tell me I was being backward, but if I knew the spot, I’d leave a letter for him there. In the letter I’d say that he’d made an impact on me like no one else. That he’d made me sad and angry and lonely but that I’d understood. He moved on. He was proof of the unreality of things in nature, when he was liable to change and to change himself. We all have our properties but they are not inalienable. We think they are, but we’re wrong. Like how the sun appears to have solar properties but it is always in the process of becoming a non-sun. A dying star. He proved this to me. The natural end to things.
First Public Reading: ‘In the dark, dark room’, Institute for Cultural Inquiry, Berlin, Oct. 23, 2013
On Wednesday October 23, 6pm, I will be performing the first public reading from my new work ‘In the dark, dark, room’. Also performing on the evening are Michaela Davies and Clayton Thomas, with an electro-convulsive musical work titled ‘Involuntary Duet.’ The evening will also feature the haunting photography of Riitta Päiväläinen.
This programme will take place at the ICI’s first apérici of the new academic year. The apérici is an informal gathering with the aim of fostering dialogue among people at the ICI Berlin & other academics, artists, colleagues, & friends currently in Berlin.
(image: Riita Päiväläinen)
Writing Residency: Mustarinda, Finland, Sept. – Oct. 2013
From Friday September 13, I will be undertaking a writing residency at Mustarinda, Finland for a period of intense work on my new project ‘In the dark, dark, room.’
“In landscape as well as etymology, Mustarinda is related to the numerous Black Mountains of the Anglo-Saxon world and the German Schwarzwald. A model of sorts for the Mustarinda Association has been the Black Mountain College artist community that was active in North Carolina in the United States in the 1940’s and 1950’s. In Schwarzwald, Martin Heidegger wrote a large part of his philosophical works…In the cases of Black Mountain College and Heidegger, such hermitage has lead to significant advances in arts and philosophy.”
The Mustarinda House is situated on the second highest summit in the dark hills of Kainuu, near the Paljakka nature reserve. The surrounding area contains some completely untouched old-growth forests. Paljakka and Mustarinda are also some of Finland’s snowiest areas. Mustarinda is the only inhabited house on the summit.
Associate Fellowship with the ICI, Berlin, 2013
‘In the dark, dark room’: a new research, writing, installation and film project to be initiated as an Associate Fellow with the Berlin Institute for Cultural Inquiry.
Each year, the ICI Berlin invites an international and multidisciplinary group of fellows to link their individual projects to the ICI Core Project and to engage in a joint exploration with other fellows at the institute. As a former fellow, Siouxzi L Mernagh has this year been honoured with the opportunity to return to the ICI as an Affiliated Fellow, to further engage with the ICI and develop the creative career trajectory she initiated with the ICI in 2008.
‘In the dark, dark room’ is an ambitious cross-media experiment involving academic research methods; a performative installation; preparation for an experimental narrative film; and preparation for a resulting novel. Each of these works hinges on the exploration of the proverbial space of a cabin in a forest. The project, an intersection between art and scholarship, marks a significant amalgamation of Siouxzi’s key thematic and stylistic concerns since the beginning of her practice. It is at once a dynamic shift from her work created within the ICI Berlin’s core project on tension in addition to being in close alignment with the Institute’s current focus – ‘Wholes Which Are Not One’. The three characters within the project, Red, Black and White, are indeed representations of both parts and wholes of a conceptual narrative space: they exist, simultaneously as defined parts and as a collective whole within the cabin in the forest, resistant to traditional notions of binary oppositions. Their existences are at once reliant on each other for survival and the very thing that threatens each of their individual existences.
The 9th Berlin international director’s lounge, February 7-17, 2013
[DL 9 Contemporary Media and Film Festival]
Exit: screening with the 2013 Director’s Lounge at the Naherholung Sternchen, Kino International.
“This is not a place where projects end, but where they begin.
[DL9] will not be a walk down well-trodden ground, but rather a unique safari into the terrain of cinematic and media-art wildlife. Vogue and other reporting press from last year grappled for words to praise the goings-on. Better you come yourself and put your own stamp on it.”
For the full programme, please visit here.
Exit the Peep Show: upcoming solo show
November 18, 18m Galerie Berlin.
(image by Melissa Ramos).
18m galerie | 18th november | 18uhr
Coming up at 18m Galerie is another screening of our 13min experimental road film ‘Exit’ with performances from my book ‘The Peep Show’.
“Featuring performed, recorded and visualised extracts from a new novel by Siouxzi Mernagh, ‘The Peep Show’, followed by a screening of her experimental road film ‘Exit’.
‘Exit the peep show’ synthesises the latest film and literary work of Siouxzi Mernagh, an Australian writer/ artist based in Berlin. Her work concerns the tensions between desire and jouissance; female sexual identity; and moments of the synchronicity of memory with the present (especially within spaces filled with mystery such as hotel rooms and isolated roads).
Siouxzi will present live and recorded extracts from her latest novel, accompanied by video projections inspired by the visual symbolism within Georges Bataille’s ‘Story of the Eye’. Following this, her 13 minute film ‘Exit’ will screen. The film, shown in a quadrant split screen, was shot in far western NSW, Australia, on remote roads and in a crumbling outback hotel. Through stills and video, a cyclical love story of two female hitchhikers and a mysterious driver is told. Far from home and knowing nothing of each other’s lives, the hitchhikers find a connection with each other through inexplicably shared memories.”
Akazienstraße 30, Schoneberg-Berlin um 18uhr
http://www.18m-salon.de
Cabinet of Peep: new solo show
September 21 – 23, EXPO, Berlin.
“For the first installment of the “Voyeurs” series, EXPO is welcoming Australian award-winning writer and moving-images maker Siouxzi Mernagh.
For the occasion, Siouxzi Mernagh is presenting her “Cabinet of Peep”, a possibly indiscrete performance initiated on the base of her recently finished second novel, “The Peep Show”.
In “Voyeurs”, performers don’t act directly in front of the public. They are entrapped within the exhibiting apparatus, a closed white cube of 8m3 from which spectators are excluded. “Voyeurs” revolves around a voyeuristic contraption.
If the performance takes place inside a closed space, the spectators peek only what peers through the fabric of the cube. If they are not in it, they are forced outside of it. They can surround it, move around it, sit next to it, stand far from it, look at it, come closer and peep in it or do none of the above. The choice is theirs.
In “Voyeurs”, the viewer is put in the position to think about his place in the viewing process. He can interact (peep) with the structure separating him from the performer or he can decide not to and surrender is ability to see, possibly letting his other senses take over his experience of the performance.
With “Voyeurs”, artists are invited to take advantage of this peculiar and perverted scenography which either deals with subjects already present in their work or explores new facets of it.”
Down Under Berlin – Australian Film Festival
September 16 – 18: Screening and filmmaker discussion with Down Under Berlin Film Festival. Both ‘Exit‘ and ‘The Dangers‘ were screened.
Press: Siegesäule; Australien Newsletter
Berlin: news from June – September
September 16 – 18: Screening and filmmaker discussion with Down Under Berlin Film Festival.
July: ‘Don’t touch that meteorite’: an article on dOCUMENTA-13 for Electric Sheep Magazine, UK. Also published: ‘Doccupy, Mother Courage and the Meteorite: the art of politics and the politics of art at dOCUMENTA(13)’, Metro Magazine, Australia.
June 21: screening of ‘Exit‘ and discussion at Berlin’s Shortcutz.
June 16: live poetry writing session with the Altes Finanzamt folk, as part of 48 Stunden Neukölln, Berlin.
siouxzi connor 
