Sonya Russell-Saunders
Art Curator and Creative Producer
VALIDATION RESPONSE residency at Grasslands 10 & 11
October 2015
I consider my curatorial work to be both audience centred and site specific whether that is in a white cube or a traditional or non-traditional performance site. I work with notions of theatricality working with live art performers, dancers, film makers and sound artists to examine sociological theory. I create immersive environments where concepts are fully embedded within a curatorially staged set, creating a situation designed to work with audience psychology, creating moments where understanding shifts, of heightening awareness in the audience of the site and situation they encounter and a space for reflection on themselves.
For Grasslands I want to look at the space as a curated site, examining how a body or bodies could move through the site, denoting certain sections where particular rules or particular actions would happen, this can be theoretically or physically using temporary materials such as chalk, paint or sandpaper.
I will like to work with Sarah Fortes-Meyer and invite performance artist Vicky Roden and performance maker Martin Prosser to activate those areas observing their conversation, gestures and movements, both scripted moments and natural or naturalised situations. There will be an element of fiction and reality that merges into one.
Within those spaces I want to examine one single aspect of sociological theory, working on multiple ways of examining that, repeating, re-staging layering, using film, still photography, sound recordings, scripts or other methods or just observation.
