Media Commons, Mackay Over six days Exist In 08 offered challenging, diverse and breathtaking live art performances, questioning notions of identity, sexuality, pain and time. All events, including the daily forums, panels and discussions, were linked via Skype, with viewing hubs at Pinnacles Gallery in Townsville and Media Commons in Mackay. Live art has lacked a dedicated focus, leading many of its core ideas to be diffused through other disciplines. Curated by Zane Trow and Rebecca Cunningham, Exist In 08 sought to refocus and reconnect those core ideas. Audiences were immediately confronted with a fragmentation of experience as performances occurred simultaneously, allowing us to move between them and observe their temporal transformation. The use of space was also very uncharacteristic, with many artists sharing the space with the audience, even to the point of having to get out of the way or watch where you stepped.
In Bodytime-Timebody Helge Meyer (Germany) spelled out ‘TIME’ with what initially appeared like slender brown leaves. On noticing their quivering dispersal and movement, however, I realised he had released thousands of worms onto the floor. Seated at a desk he attached wooden cloths pegs to his face, which, as he twitched his brow, cleverly amplified his gestures. He then sticky taped large boulders onto his torso and dunked his head into a metal bucket filled with water. The following night Meyer gave a lecture expounding the ways pain is transformed into the visual as a means to make it ‘real’ to our senses. It is paradoxical that pain, the most intense emotion, evades tangible communication—the only medium of pain is the body itself.
On the second night Jürgen Fritz (Germany) performed a minimalist but