WHERE NO WALL REMAINS – an international festival about borders
A blog following the creation of the 2019 Live Arts Bard Biennial
Edited by Curatorial Fellows Sukanya Baskar Bard CCS ’20, Thea Spittle Bard CCS ’19, and Triston Tolentino ’18
Introducing Where No Wall Remains
Welcome to Where No Wall Remains, an international festival about borders, and the third edition of the Live Arts Bard Biennial.
We launched the LAB Biennial in 2014 with The House is Open, a performance exhibition at the Fisher Center that explored the dynamic relationship between the worlds of the performing and visual arts. Frank Gehry’s magnificent building usually functions as a classical performance venue with designated areas for spectators and performers, but The House is Open offered a very different relational structure, transforming the theatre into a temporary museum. The public was invited to roam through spaces in the building that are usually off limits, and to engage with art projects installed in temporary “galleries” made from backstage areas, wings, storage rooms, hidden corridors, and lobbies, as well as more conventional performance venues. The constant flow of spectators and site-specific projects created new public spaces in unexpected corners, and the whole Fisher Center became a welcoming and inclusive site for art.
Each edition of the LAB Biennial is conceived around a major question or challenge for the twenty-first century. We’re Watching (2017), the second edition, focused on the subject of surveillance. Now in Where No Wall Remains, the third edition, we invite you to join us in a conversation about borders – surely the most potent, defining, and divisive icon of our times.
Where No Wall Remains is the first edition with a guest curator, the brilliant live artist Tania El Khoury, whose performances and interventions themselves encourage us to think deeply about many kinds of borders and how we might transcend them. The public festival that will take place in November is the culmination of a two-year cycle of research and development led by Tania and many colleagues at Bard, which has also included academic courses, conferences and colloquia, and artist residencies.
Over the next two months this blog will chart the final stages of the festival’s development, and introduce you to the nine newly commissioned projects of this edition and the incredible artists who are creating them. The blog will be hosted and edited by three curatorial fellows, Sukanya Baskar Bard CCS ’20, Thea Spittle Bard CCS ’19, and Triston Tolentino ’18. Sukanya, Thea, and Triston will also be organizing a weekly reading room on campus, where some of the festival’s themes and ideas can be explored in greater detail.
We look forward to welcoming you to this rich conversation.
– Gideon Lester, Artistic Director for Theater & Dance, Fisher Center