Durational Performance/Installation
Sat 9 Jun
Arnolfini

“…a seductive exploration into the personal language of desire and the subconscious landscape of the skin. By gilding her own body, Veenus gradually covers the eroticised and private self…taking on an emblematic presence that draws on mythological representations…” (Arnolfini)

A woman lies on a bed of coal in the darkened studio; an ebb and flow of sound and longing, slow, harsh, distorted. A wall papered with torn fragments of verse singing poetic physicality, tailing away into an expression of alarm repeated. Written fragments such as “….what concerns me is that I am not worried by this…”

Burnt ships wash against her shores and are stranded. Dereliction.

Ebb, flow. A silent attendant. A satyr/a hoofed creature/a man with big boots on and a funny looking safety-wear jock strap/ huh. He breaks eggs on her body and strokes her thigh sticky with yolk, eggshells, ash, hard rocky coals. Pools of yellow mess. One sheet at a time he lays wafers of gold on her body, attempting to burnish them. The material is recalcitrant, it crinkles, it doesn’t lay as planned. Ebb, flow, harsh sound. The room is full of it. Discomfort.

Electric fans disturb the air

A half-gilded woman on dead embers, too bloody untidy with all that haphazard leaf stuck to her. Harsh, crunchy, dead ash. Painful to navigate. A golden woman on a bed of coal, an ebb and flow of sound, harsh, slow, distorted

A bank of woman washed up on the beach. Flotsam surrounds her.

There sits the fellow watching from a distance. (Has he hurt himself?) A sticky pool of raw egg seeping, a mess of broken shells. A golden woman spooning some shape there in the coal

Torn fragments, words, phrases. What concerns me is that I am not

A golden woman flung adrift against a black hoofed being emerging

subsiding

dormant

…shining…

Written by Osunwunmi

For more information on the artist Venuus Vortex see http://profile.myspace.com/...

This performance was part of the ‘Encounters’ symposium and exhibition at the Arnolfini, for more information see http://www.arnolfini.org.uk/...