The Collaborative Body

“Since 1983, we have worked in relation to each other: we collaborate as artists, as administrators, as organizers, and as teachers; and we work in relation to others – in artist run centres, festivals, publications, and public institutions – in the spirit of collectivity where we share experience and knowledge and accept the same from others while ideas, statements, and direct acts are developed together and put into action where they evolve over time, never static.

Each of the three parts of “…before I wake,” the work on display at Toronto Biennial of Art, is a contemplation on collaboration itself. We see the bodies of the artists in “We’re getting younger all the time” using the digital devices to mimic the quest for eternal youth; in “Practicing Death” the artists are displayed in a type of suspended sleep; and finally “Entranced” finds the artists under hypnosis, each walking through a door where the collaboration will cease to be.”

In the walkabout, the artists engage in questions of representation of collaboration and “the collective”— suggesting how collaboration itself contradicts or at least undermines the idea of the individual artist-as-creative-genius — and discuss the ways that artists have confronted death in their work, from Brueghel to Caravaggio to Warhol to Rebecca Belmore.

Image credit: Lisa Steele + Kim Tomczak, Practicing Death, 2003.