Berlin performance artist creates new work in Edmonton
Co-presented with the Goethe-Institut Toronto
Felix Roadkill is a guest of the Goethe-Institut
"Zero Gravity" is the starting point for new international performance work to be presented at Edmonton’s International Performance Art SUMMIT. Berlin artist Felix Roadkill will create a new work drawing from emotions of loss, making it a collective experience.
Felix Roadkill is a performance artist and art organizer working at the interface of performance art, curation, and cultural education. His main interest lies in physical cross-border performances. In his curatorial work, Roadkill focuses on political art forms that contemplate intersectionality through race, class, and gender and generate innovative, audience-oriented formats of cultural education. Roadkill's approaches, which ignore the limits of physical resilience, place physical vulnerability in the foreground of perception. From the interplay of his body with natural, yet industrially manufactured materials such as wood, or glass, Roadkill develops urgent images of collectivity and exceedance of limits, raising the question of the difference between externally inflicted violence and self-determined injury. The audience is addressed as witnesses and occasionally involved as collaborators to complete the desired image.
He worked for art and culture institutions such as Schwules Museum, and Maxim Gorki Theater in Berlin, Bürgerbühne in Dresden and Shotgun Players in Berkeley. Since 2018, he has been a board member of the Association for Performance Art in Berlin. Felix Roadkill exhibits his works worldwide in galleries and at festivals such as RiAP Québec, LAPSody Helsinki, ArTrend Taiwan, among others.
Roadkill’s new work will respond to the Performance Art SUMMIT’s festival motto “Zero Gravity”. The artist embarks on a search for a sensitive approach to the dialectics of falling-down and pulling-up. Roadkill is interested in the moment between fall and impact when anything would be possible, time and gravity could be released from their fatal connection.
“My concern is to, with the help of performative properties, generate a shared experience that enables us to endure and process images of pain.” –
Felix Roadkill
The Zero Gravity International Performance Art SUMMIT is a 10-day visual art event in Edmonton, which presents an array of international visual performance artists. The SUMMIT exists in two parts, a workshop (May 10-17) and a festival (May 16-19) and thereby offers a multi-venue and participatory experience.
“The primary purpose of the SUMMIT is to create an artistic dialogue between Canadian – national and local – and international performance artists. “ –
Beau Coleman, curator of the SUMMIT
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