Zavé Martohardjono, Rubbertime, 2016. Still from video used in performance. Image taken at The Shandaken Project at Storm King, 2016.
Rubbertime, performance by Zavé Martohardjono & closing reception
Saturday, May 13, 4:00 - 6:00 PM
A queer and trans artist of color, Zavé Martohardjono incorporates mindfulness, Butoh, and releasing techniques into their choreographic practice. These approaches inform the artist’s performance Rubbertime, which will occur at EFA on May 13th to mark the closing of the show. Martohardjono’s related Liminal Bodies workshop shares these improvisational movement practices to help participants heal from socio-political crises. As part of the exhibition’s Warp and Weft of Care satellite programs, the workshop will be offered privately to groups at Project Row Houses and Angela House, and also publically in Houston.
Based on an Indonesian phrase that describes time as malleable, stretchable, and adaptable, Rubbertime is a performance that investigates assimilation, disorientation, and Martohardjono’s fractured relationship to Indonesia as a mixed-race person raised in the West. Martohardjono developed the workshop and performance in response to the dissonance they felt while at an artist residency in a peaceful pastoral setting (the Shandaken Project at Storm King), during the turbulent weeks following the murders of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile. Through improvised choreography that explores the disorientation and reorientation they experienced at that time and place, Martohardjono attempts slowness and investigates what has been erased by colonial frameworks of time within their own body. By exploring decolonization through movement, Rubbertime endeavors to slowly tap into buried and ancestral knowledge and to ultimately undo the damage of assimilation.
BIO
Zavé Martohardjono (Brooklyn, New York) works across disciplines, making performances, theater, videos, and audience-interactive installations. Their work takes interest in geopolitics, social justice, queer glam, embodied risk-taking, and healing. They often draw from their mixed-race Asian, multi-national, queer, and transgender perspective.
Martohardjono has shown at galleries and theater venues including Aljira Center for Contemporary Art, Bowery Poetry Club, Bronx Academy of Arts and Dance, Bronx River Art Center Gallery, Center for Contemporary Arts in Glasgow, Chashama 540, Dixon Place, La MaMa E.T.C., Grace Exhibition Space, Gibney Dance, Leonard and Bina Ellen Art Gallery, Mills Gallery at Boston Center for the Arts, Rats 9 Gallery, SOMArts, the Wild Project, and Winslow Garage. Their videos have screened at film festivals in New York, Boston, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Montréal, Berlin, London, Amsterdam, Zurich, and Jakarta. They’ve also collaborated with or performed for Mariangela Lopez/Accidental Movement, Ximena Garnica, Vanessa Anspaugh, Lawrence Weiner, devynn emory, J. Dellecave, as well as the collectives Theater Transgression and Into the Neon.
ABOUT THE WARP AND WEFT OF CARE PROGRAM
A satellite programming series, Warp and Weft of Care, takes place between New York and Houston, Texas during the course of the show. It includes public performances as well as closed-door collaborations between artists from the EFA show and groups focused on the health of communities disproportionately facing violence. This includes Angela House’s Whole and Healthy Program (transitional housing and support for women immediately following incarceration), Project Row Houses Young Mothers Residency Program (a residency for low-income single mothers in the historically black neighborhood of Houston’s Third Ward), and Project Row Houses Young Mothers Employment Placement Program (a job training program for low-income single mothers). The aim is to support creative exchange between communities of care in varying contexts, particularly those in red and purple states where poor institutional support has long synced with a prevailing “maverick” ideology of independence and entrepreneurship.
This event takes place in conjunction with Sick Time, Sleepy Time, Crip Time: Against Capitalism’s Temporal Bullying (March 31 – May 13, 2017) at EFA Project Space.