The sixth Yellow Fish Festival, To Stay Alive /| You Must be Live, used the specific field of Durational Performance as a means to support methods of staying alive in the present times.
Yellow Fish Durational Performance Art Festival welcomed artists of all mediums to use time as concept and material in actions and ideas.
Selected artists comprised of a cohort, participating in a collective experience emphasizing and expanding upon Care Methodologies in respect of the times and in response to the festival theme: To Stay Alive /| You Must be Live. Artists collaborated with curators (Rana San, Eleanor Kipping, and Babette Pendleton) to design a long-form engagement with the festival in consideration of their durational practice.
Yellow Fish worked with an expanded season over the course of a year to initiate digital experiments, gather & process through a residency period, and present in site-specific live forms. The festival development and programming coexisted across three seasonal phases outlined below.
The vision as a curatorial team inside YF VI was to reinvision the traditional definition of Care by providing the impetus for action and growth; an aliveness of sorts. To initiate the conversation, YF curators constructed a list of action driven ideas that supported their notions of Care and provided a framework for artists to expand and build upon while responding to the theme: To Stay Alive /| You Must be Live.
Generate sustainable protest
Emphasize awareness of self & others
Dismantle colonized instincts and legacies
Transcend boundaries of discipline and medium
Awaken erotic understanding
Protect our environment
Strengthen empathetic interdependence
Invoke play with risk
ARTISTS
Phyllis Akinyi
Amalya Megerman
Dylan Languell
Annabel Turrado
Jocelyn Beausire
Alex Mari
CURATORS
Pedro Mesa
Saira Barbaric
Eleanor Kipping
Rana San
Babette Pendleton
FESTIVAL COORDINATION
Fenja Frances
Livia Xie
DESIGN
FESTIVAL PRODUCTION
Dan Friday
Katie Jacobson
Stephanie Beattie
Alex Nystrom
Brynn Mellon
Julia Sloane
VIDEO
Sierra Hendrix
Rosemary McGeady
PHOTO
Olga Rabetskaya
PHASE ONE // URL
Throughout November, the YFVI cohort used the digital (or analog) world to engage with the theme: To Stay Alive /| You Must be Live.
The cohort started meeting digitally-- sparking conversations over connections in each others' work, their relationships with the digital world, and built ideas for experiments during each of the phases.
For the duration of Phase I, we decided to provide weekly updates on the fluid engagements happening. The work of Phase One was documented within newsletters sent out weekly.
PHASE THREE // IRL
Phase 3 of our nine month festival provided artists with the opportunity to workshop their process in live form through installations and performances hosted by 153 COFFEY, a multidisciplinary, artist-led studio located in Red Hook, New York.
The nine artists used time as concept and material in actions and ideas emphasizing and expanding upon Care Methodologies in respect of the times and in response to our festival theme: To Stay Alive /| You Must be Live.
