AUTHORIZE EXTREMIST

2008.2.28

Ioana Gergescu (Quebec,Canada)
"METAL HEART"

Ioana Georgescu
"METAL HEART"
performance/installation
metal dress : designed and constructed by Jose Tence Ruiz
photo : Mark Salvatus and Pearl Perlada

METAL HEART *

Performance–installation (video projection, nails, and action with metal dress). Part of Brides, a specific segment of Foreign Bodies. Since 2003, this series sets in motion a ‘body with an accent’, a displaced body, lost in translation. Marked by visible and sometimes controversial signs, the fb circulates between image, action, text, spaces, mediums, supports and geographies.

The emblematic Nail Bride (a harsher version of Mail Bride) travels in her nail wedding dress as a product of body traffic, sacrificed love and violence. She rolls in Manila or Montreal’s nails, floats on river Nile like a revisited Ophelia, ready to explode on a museum wall or on a festival site… The Manila Tutok Nail-fire-bomb bride evolves in a Chinese box. Fire Bride is sacrificed under Cairo’s iron workers fire beams and Bomb Bride is writing with her body the ultimate kamikaze love letter in nails, metal and fire. Each  bride represents a different degree of escalating violence as a result of  forced displacement.

 * The title of the performance is inspired by the heart shaped chain ornament on the bridal metal dress designed and constructed by artist and friend Jose Tence Ruiz a.k.a. Bogie. This collaboration is a concrete sign of a longterm artistic dialogue and solidarity.

Ioana Georgescu
was born in Bucharest and lives in Montreal. She is an active international artist and writer, in North America, Asia, the Middle East and Europe.
Often process-based and interventionist, her work engages sites, situations and accidents and is influenced by a constant interest in the memory and identity of the displaced body. Her performances, video-installations and novels are often interrelated and are presented worldwide, in museums, galleries festivals, city streets, ruins and…on water.  Recent venues include the Townhouse Gallery in Cairo and the River Nile, Museum of Contemporary Art in Novi Sad, Museum of Civilization in Quebec City, Viva! Action Art festival in Montreal, Montreal-Munich Event. During her 2008 Asian tour, she was artist in residency at the Jogja National Museum at the invitation of the Performance Klub of Jogjakarta, Indonesia. Ioana’s participation in Manila’s Tutok 2talk: creative convergence marks her third appearence in the Philippines.