HK Zamani: “Performing”
Opening Reception: Saturday, March 23, 7:00 to 10:00pm
Performance: Saturday, March 23, 9:00 pm
Exhibition Dates: March 23 – April 13, 2013

Please join us at Groundspace Project for the opening reception of HK Zamani: “Performing” an exhibition of performance and performance-based videos.

There will be a live simulcast performance and collaboration with Tomas Ruller during the opening reception at 9pm at Groundspace to coincide with 6am in Prague.
Tomas Ruller will be performing with the support from Institute for Intermedia (www.iim.cz)
and here is the link to the streams:
http://www.post-la.com/stream/
There are two streams, one is the Tomas Ruller/Prague stream, and the other is the HK Zamani/ LA stream. It’s good to watch both simultaneously.

Performing at Groundspace Project by HK Zamani

In 6th grade while growing up in Iran I became a singer of the Koran. My assignment with regularity was to sing a few minutes of it for the early morning assembly. Ten years later while going to art school in LA I joined a band. My first art performance Laurence Knack #7 was in 1981 at the Only Open Sometimes Art Gallery in Manhattan Beach. In graduate school I did a few performance but was mainly a painter.

Being an occasional performer separates me from most of my fellow painters. But perhaps we are all performers. Perhaps all artworks are performed. My performances used to be emotionally motivated. Communication through performance is very different from painting.

I have described my work as being within the extended field of painting allowing me to do more than paint with traditional media. For thirteen years I made fabric and armature paintings. Most of my performances, such as EastWest, Blue, Dotman, White on White, face to face, Fashion of the Veil, Eros, Thanatos, all have direct or indirect associations with painting. In the last three collaborations with Tomas Ruller while at two separate and distant locations through the use of technology, space and time, physicality and virtuality, are questioned—a similar line of questioning is addressed in my fabric and armature paintings.

David Joselit in his essay Signal Processing (on abstraction then and now) argues that painting lends itself more and more to the temporal arts in the course of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. As I personally remember, it was always noted that Pollock performed a dance ritual while in the act of painting. Joselit examines Abstract Expressionism and its action painters’ work as containers of Convertible Signs, and having Passage and Transmission. He suggests that these paintings have multiple semiotic layers, that they have particular Formal Configurations and Time Signatures, as well as Movement. He differentiates Abstract Expressionism from today’s abstract painting and contends that now painting can be described as a broadcast medium, and that abstract gesture now marks the transfer of information.

“Painting as model” is how Yve-Alain Bois once put it. But Joselit elaborates that in the case of much recent abstraction, it is a model of how information travels and a method for measuring the distance – geographic, temporal, social, and psychic – between enunciations of the same picture. In painting, the space of transmission can itself be, as Rosenberg contended with regard to Abstract Expressionism, “an arena in which to act.”

I can imagine that as different as my performances are from my current paintings, the similar are my interests in appropriating the language of the past and present, addressing current concerns partially guided by the medium of each gesture.

There will be a live simulcast performance and collaboration with Tomas Ruller during the opening reception at 9pm at Groundspace Project to coincide with 6am in Prague.