OPENING 12.12 @ 20:00 -22:00
13.12 @ 12:00 - 22:00
14.12 @ 18:00 - 22:00
15.12 @ 16:00 - 22:00

ALISON LAPPER (UK)
Alison and Parys, 1999

Since her pregnancy and the birth of her son Parys, she has produced a body of work, using photography and digital imaging, which aims to challenge society's preconceptions about motherhood and disability. Her work and life story have attracted considerable media attention. She has been featured on many national and international television and radio programmes, and has been documented in many newspaper and magazine articles. The documentary Alison’s Baby, about her life since Parys was born, has been shown worldwide and won the Prix Italia and Prix Leonardo. "When you see him playing up at that playschool, people tut or give me dirty looks. But I'm thinking: what do you want me to do? I can't go and pick him up. He's had to learn that if I say no I mean it. That was all part of my voice control training with Parys. It was really hard, but I had to stick with it and it was a battle of wills. He's really stubborn - like his mother!"

Biography

Alison Lapper, British artist, was born in 1965 without arms and shortened legs, the result of a medical condition called phocomelia. The first 19 years of her life were spent in residential institutions for people with impairments. She studied first at the Heatherley School of Fine Art and then at the University of Brighton, where she graduated with a First Class Honours degree in 1994. She has since exhibited work in group shows and solo exhibitions, which have been well documented by the media.Her work uses a variety of media including painting, photography, digital imaging and installation to explore her subject, which is often herself and the ways in which she is viewed by others. Her work questions notions of physical normality and beauty, in a society that considers her to be deformed because she was born without arms.

Artur Żmijewski (PL)
Karolina, 2002, 8min
U šetnji / Out for a Walk, 2001, 9min
Rendez-vous, 2004, 8min
Sat pjevanja 1 / Singing Lesson 1, 2001, 14min
Sat pjevanja 2 / Singing Lesson 2, 2003, 16’30min

In his films, Żmijewski is at the same time in the position of an observer, documenting people and situations, but also the immediate catalyst of those situations, a shaman-like artist who, ignoring the rules of political correctness and social norms, achieves such radical interventions in the space between himself and his protagonists, as, for example, in 80064 (2004), where he manages to convince a former Auschwitz prisoner to allow his faded tattoo with the prisoner number be renewed. In many of his works, Żmijewski deals obsessively with the issues of the human body, subject to disease and decay, and the relations of physicality and the sphere of mind and spirituality. He is also involved in exploring taboos, the hypocritical relation of society towards disabled individuals, the sensitive borders between himself as artist, and his protagonists, i.e. subjects, where his role constantnly varies between its emancipatory and exploitative potentials.

Biography

Artur Żmijewski (born 1966 in Warsaw) is counted as one of Poland’s most renowned contemporary artists. In the beginning of the early Nineties Artur Żmijewski visited (with Pawel Althamer and Katazyna Kozyra) the master studio of the artist and professor Grzegorz Kowalski at the sculptor faculty of the Warsaw academy of arts. He began to work as a sculptor, but after his diploma, he changed the medium to photography and film. Żmijewski was also active as a free curator and critic in Poland until the late 1990s. has had a number of solo and group exhibitions, e.g. Artur Żmijewski, Kunsthal-le Basel, Switzerland (2005); Das unmögliche Theater, Kunsthalle Wien, Austria (2005); Irreducible: Contemporary Short Form Video 1995–2005, CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, San Francisco, USA (2005); Artur Żmijewski. Selected Works, 1998 – 2003, MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge, SAD (2004), Under the red and white flag. New art from Poland, Zacheta National Gallery of Art, Warsaw, Poljska, (2004); Manifesta 4, Frankfurt on the Main, Germany (2002); in freiheit / endlich – Polnische Kunst nach 1989, Kunsthalle Baden-Baden, Germany (2000). In 2005, the artist represented the Polish Pavilion at the Venice Biennale and most recently he participated at the Documenta 12. The Video-Forum of the NBK in Berlin honoured his work with a comprehensive solo exhibition in Berlin (2007).

Ivana Jovanović (SRB)
Luko, 2004 - 2007

The suit was designed for a young man with a knee impairment and a missing arm. As a rule, the fashion industry is not willing to deal with the issue of clothing for people with disabilities. People with disabilities tend to be positioned at the very margin of fashion events and trends. My goal is to stop the problem of clothing for marginalized groups being exclusively their own problem. Fashion is not about people, it is about their looks. This model, however, was made specially for Luko, and was inspired by his characteristic personality traits. This is necessary because my aim is to deal with the problems of the individuals that form the group, and not the group itself as a general point of reference. It is also about the lack of attention given to them in the frame of fashion events.

Biography

Ivana Jovanović was born in Belgrade in 1982. She graduated painting at the Painting Department of the School for Visual Arts in Belgrade in 2006, in the class of Dragan Jovanović and Zoran Todorović. Since 2003 she has participated at group exhibitions and fashion shows in Belgrade, Vršac, Zemun, Solun. In 2003, she won the Best Young Designer Prize at the D_Days Showroom show, Underground Club, Belgrade.

Nikica Klobučar (HR)
I Orient Myself by Sound, 2006
Feature – Documentary radio drama, 35'20''

A feature or documentary radio drama of a specific radio format, using and documenting sound as a universal material, intended to 'tell the story'. I Orient Myself by Sound was made for public broadcasting on Croatian Radio, the Third Programme. Structurally, the piece is characterized by its use of real 'sound images' or environments, without additional sound mixing, following one another. The story behind the structure follows the relation between Marija Grbešić, a blind person, and the author Nikica Klobučar, as they walk the streets of Zagreb, visit the Vinko Bek Center for the Blind and Visually Impaired, and other places. Marija Grbešić began learning the Braille alphabet at the age of 41. Gradual loss of eyesight developed as a consequence of a brain tumor that Marija was diagnosed with when she was a 23-year old medical student in Sarajevo and due to which she has endured severe health problems for over 19 years. Moving between different environments and spaces, this sound piece reflects the relation between the author and a blind person whose problems were to become the material for his story. It follows the tasks Marija had to fulfil at the Vinko Bek Center, her trying to handle the sound recorder, at the same time touching upon the author's personal tragedy.

Biography

Nikica Klobučar (29 September, 1977, Zagreb). Graduated philosophy and art history at the Faculty of Philosophy in Zagreb. He has contributed to Croatian Radio regularly since 2003, producing radio dramas and publishing texts about visual art. In 2007 he received the EBU's (European Broadcasting Union) Ake Blomstrom Award for the feature I'll Have the Blueberry Drink. He has exhibited in Zagreb, Rijeka, Novo Mesto, Momjan and Belgrade. He has been making features since 2004 - a selection: Pilgrimage, Silent Little Echo, Will You Forget Me?, I Orient Myself by Sound, At the End of the Journey, Ivan Kožarić: I am Slow but I am Beyond Reach, I'll Have the Blueberry Drink, When Fathers Were Away on Business, LEON, Not Guilty

Encarna (SP)
Breaking Barriers, 2006

Encarna does not fit the profile of your average silicone enhanced, pouting porn star. At 45, she is a late entry to that group of women who seek fame or fortune by performing sexual acrobatics and faking orgasms for the camera. Her first film, Breaking Barriers, is, however, already the subject of debate on internet chatboards and has even had entire pages dedicated to it in the Spanish press. The reason for the fuss is that Encarna is a wheelchair user who has a musclecontrol disorder called ataxia. . [...] Her decision to appear on screen with professional porn actors came after she wrote to Spain's biggest porn producer to complain that disabled people never featured in his films. [...] “It was very pleasant, though I was somewhat cowardly,” says Encarna. Unusually for a porn film, however, Breaking Barriers ends with a serious conversation between Encarna and her producer. “Disabled women have to take steps forward and one should always be happy if one breaks a barrier,” she says. [...] “We demand the right to decide on our own lives, without depending on other people who, simply because we have functional problems, take power over our lives, desires and future,” her website says.

"Porn star in a wheelchair breaks barriers," Giles Tremlett, Guardian Unlimited, 25.06.2006.

Biography

Encarna was born in Puerto real, Cádiz, Spain to a family of six brothers. She, a sister and her older brother were diagnosed with ataxia, a neurodegenerative hereditary affection that causes loss of coordination of movement and is a disabling disease. In disagreement and rebellion, upon seeing other ataxia afflicted marginalized and often isolated from social life, in 1989 Enconda decided to create the Association of Ataxia Affected in Andalusia, Spain (Federación Andaluza de Asociaciones de Ataxia). Since then she has assembled a group that is today one of most outstanding, organized and active associative movements of Andalusia.

Petra Kuppers (USA) & Sadie Wilcox (USA)
Tiresias. By The Olimpias, 2007, 7:30min
poetry: Jim Ferris

The figure of Tiresias penetrates Greek drama - the hermaphroditic shape shifter who has lived both as a man, as Zeus's priest, and as a woman, as a prostitute of great renown. Tiresias was blinded for knowing the secrets of man and woman, but was given second sight. Since then, Tiresias wields his and her staff throughout Antigone, Oedipus Rex, The Bacchae and Ovid's Metamorphoses where his blindness, her cripdom, offers special status as advisor to the mighty. What is seen, what is known, what is spoken: these are the questions around photography and performance that fuel our exploration. Tiresias is a disability culture event - and much more than that. In our workshop/performances, we take Tiresias out of the background fabric of history. Now Tiresias and his disability, her undecidable bodily status, the malleability of his body, the shimmer of hir gender, her tri-pedal step and his blind/seeing eyes become the focal point of disability cultural work. This is an erotic show: bodies and desire intermingle, and we open ourselves up to an exploration of boundaries, try to reclaim seduction for disability: not as a freak parade, but as sensuous bodies engaged sensuously with the world. At the heart of our show are images of seduction, an erotics of encounter with disability’s non-binary difference which problematises conventional notions of disabled people as tragic, sexless or deficient. Through photographs, poetic memory and dance, we remember our future. In the Tiresias video, bodies touch and transform. Language becomes message and shape, and audio description and captioning become aesthetic elements of the film’s whole.

Biograpies:

Petra Kuppers is a disability culture activist, a community artist and she teaches in performance studies and disability studies at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. She is the Artistic Director of The Olimpias Performance Research Series, and Olimpias workshops, installations, performances and exhibitions have been created and shown in Europe, the US, New Zealand and Australia. All Olimpias work are community-based, and deal with disability culture issues, with the opportunities of collaborative practice, and with the celebration of difference.

Kuppers has written a number of books, including Disability and Contemporary Performance: Bodies on Edge (Routledge, 2003), The Scar of Visibility: Medical Performances and Contemporary Art (Minnesota University Press, 2007) and Community Performance: An Introduction (Routledge, 2007). She has also co-edited with Gwen Robertson the companion text, Community Performance Reader (Routledge, 2007). Her current work addresses disability history, and includes a reassessment of the ancients myth that shape our thoughts about bodily, sensorily and mental difference. Tiresias is the latest Olimpias show.

Sadie Wilcox is an MFA candidate at the University of Michigan School of Art & Design. Her work in video was exhibited in a group show at the Cothenius Gallery in Berlin, Germany. Sadie has received visual arts funding from various sources, including the Center for International and Comparative Studies, the Center for European Studies, the Center for the Education of Women, and the Center for Research on Women and Gender at the University of Michigan. 
Sadie’s interest in disability stems from her own experience as a burn survivor. Her work in disability studies seeks to highlight the continual and changing nature of chronic injury and the role of hidden burns.