ACE HOTEL ARTISTS IN RESIDENCE//SHOWCASE
Artists Uta Bekaia and azumi O E collaborate on a day-long performance art piece inspired by Japanese Butoh and European baroque. The piece combines abstract and surreal visual illusions, created with stimulating colors, movements and sounds, in an ongoing dialogue with the overall surrounding environment. Draped in extravagant clothing, the two dancers will take over the Lobby space, moving like living sculptures as they create a bold human installation.
Duration 1h30m
Curated by MARIE VAN EERSEL
The Artists In Residence program invites an artist each month to spend Sunday nights at the Ace hotel. Ace AIR is a retreat from the world of domestic habits. It is an immersion in our ecosystem to focus on developing a piece, any piece, presented at the end of the month in our public spaces.
COLLABORATOR
Uta Bekaia is a Georgian born (1974) multimedia artist currently residing and working in New York and Tbilisi. He had studied Industrial Design at Tbilisi Mtsire Academy. He debuted as an artist at AMA (Avant-Guard Fashion Assembly) with a sculptural performance. He creates performances and installations inhabited with wearable sculptures, exploring his historical cultural background, genetical codes and cycles of the universe. Currently he is a resident artist at ART OMI, New York, and in partnership with ERTI Gallery , Tbilisi.
Uta Bekaia engages multiple artistic mediums, creating wearable sculptures, performances, and videos, where the borders between the disciplines are blurred, and the cultural references are synthesized in his own, personalized vision. With the background in fashion and costume making in the beginning of his career, Bekaia transformed these mediums into the main means, to approach human body and fully emerge into performances. Inspired by ancient mythology, fairy tales, Italian Baroque, and Georgian Dada, Bekaia with his exuberant, sculptural costumes, reinvents and re-stages long lost, never-before-documented rituals. Believing in genetical transferability of communal memory, Bekaia attempts to re-connect with the ancient knowledge and impregnate it with his own experiences and new meaning.
FEAUTURED BUTOH PERFORMERS
Will Atkins
Maki Shinagawa
Maki Kitahara
PRODUCTION TEAM
Still Photography by DATO KORIDZE
Short Documentary by Nicholas Motyca
Costume/Body modification Assistant by Nozomi Yasuda
Lighting Design by Azumi Oe
