Spartacus Chetwynd (UK)

Friday 30th October, 22.00- 00.00, Performance party @ House of Ideas

Saturday 31st October, 15.00 @ House of Ideas

Saturday 7th November, 21.00, Closing party @ the Nordic House

Monday 2nd November, 15.00, artist talk with Spartacus Chetwynd @ the Nordic House

The Spartacus Chetwynd Mime Troupe will present a series of narratives based on the lives of feminists. The mime performance will involve puppet shows, dance and pure expression. The subject matter is the Enlightened Life of Mary Wollstonecraft. Her turbulent romantic life,The Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792) through to her daughter Mary Shelly’s inspiration for Frankenstein. The work also refers to the Suffragettes and history of the more radical and militant members of the late 19th and 20th century movement for women’s suffrage in the United Kingdom. Also interlaced – sections of the everyday lives of contemporary women living today, for example a story of a female friend nearly killing her flatmates by cooking chick peas late at night, the girl fell asleep and the chick peas burnt to make huge black smoke clouds and fire that catch alight the entire house and engulfed the neigbourhood in a blackened soot metaphor of misery and ineptitude. These lesser sagas are based on (the presentation of contemporary existance) Raymond Carver’s Short Cuts and Patricia Highsmith’s Little Tales of Misogyny.

The Spartacus Chetwynd Mime Troupe includes Spartacus Chetwynd, Brian Moran, Joe Scotland, Urara Tsuchiya and Tjalling Visser.

Spartacus Chetwynd has become known for her baroque and surreal performances, which are charged with humorous image quotations from art history, melded with pop culture references. Chetwynd creates both paintings and large-scale collaborative performances that explore notions of the grotesque using humor and references to various cultural icons. Recreating seminal moments in cinema, art, literature, and performance, the presentations are deliberately amateurish in tone and style, and combine elements of fantasy, props, and found objects.

Selected exhibitions include Tate Triennial, Tate Modern, London, England, 2009; Video Cocktail,Tate Modern, London, England, 2006; Metropolis Rise: New Art from London, temporarycontemporary, London, England, 2006; Tate Triennial New British Art, London, England, 2006; London in Zurich, Galerie Hauser & Wirth, Zurich, 2005; Beck’s Futures 2005, CCA – Centre for Contemporary Art, Glasgow, Scotland, 2005; Think & Wonder, Victoria and Albert Museum; London, England, 2005 and more. The artist was also nominated for the 2005 Times/South Bank Show breakthrough award.