Nigel Rolfe's performance Dissonance

From February 1 to February 25, 2018, Red Brick Art Museum hosted the solo exhibition “The Time is Now” for legendary performance artist Nigel Rolfe (b. 1950, Isle of Wight, UK). The exhibition, curated by Red Brick Art Museum senior curator Jonas Stampe, opened on January 31. Over a career that began in 1969, spanning five decades, Nigel Rolfe has been one of the most active and prominent practitioners of performance art. This exhibition reviews Rolfe’s artistic practice through his past work, site-specific photographs, and more recent pieces. In addition, the exhibition presents important video works by the artist.

Despite his age, Nigel Rolfe presented three live performances during his stay in Beijing. In addition to the performance during the exhibition opening, the artist also presented site-specific performances at the Great Wall and in the garden of Red Brick Art Museum. As an ancient military fortification and a grand landmark in human civilization, the Great Wall has been a creative element in artists’ work and and a source of inspiration for performance art. Through his customary methods of analysis, Rolfe engaged in a dialogue with an array of cultural implications and symbolic meanings that the Great Wall has borne throughout history, but he also addressed and questioned the way in which these cultural and symbolic elements have been used in the context of contemporary art. As a contemporary reflection of traditional garden design, the Red Brick Art Museum gardens reflect the spatial aesthetics of the East, providing the artist with a multi-layered cultural context. Switching between ancient and contemporary times and spaces, these three performances, gave Chinese audiences a unique experience through the inclusion of sites with a specific Chinese cultural meaning.

Видео Nigel Rolfe's performance Dissonance канала Red Brick Art Museum