Artist: Eve Tagny (in collaboration with Malaikah Rang’inya & Sappfyre Mcleod)
Exhibition title: As yet to be established
Venue: Blinkers, Manitoba, Canada
Date: June 10, 2023
Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and Blinkers, Manitoba
We welcome Montréal-based artist Eve Tagny to the gallery for a live, one-time performance. She will work in a trio with local collaborators–all no with no professional experience as performers–under the title ‘As yet to be established’. Bodily gestures and movements appear throughout Tagny’s work; be it brief snippets captured through photographs or ritualistic acts mediated through her video works.
All these non-verbal occurrences aggregate into an impressionistic ambiance that often escapes determinative and conclusive descriptions. Performing in front of a live audience is still new to Tagny’s practice — this will be her fourth — but it extends and transcends the mediums that serve as receptacles or representations of actions enacted. In a recent interview for BOMB Magazine, the artist expresses the welcomed challenge of performing live: ” I have to be more aware of whether an action will carry the intention or the weight and effect I want it to”. She continues, “I am realizing that I have become more constrained in my physical expressions, and it’s been really nice to bring forth this entire physical language that I wasn’t aware of or that I didn’t allow myself to engage with because the way we move gets codified and implicitly regimented, and deviation from that can raise suspicion or judgment.”
Among its manifold complexities, Tagny’s work engages with notions of private property and its relations to colonial ideas of property ownership, resource extraction, and environmental degradation.
Eschewing explicit narration or storytelling through this performance, Tagny interplays a shared introspective outlook with her collaborators, reflecting on “how borders, enclosures, demarcations, and delineations structure, control or even coerce our ability to navigate public and private spaces.” These bigger and more complex concerns are given a public stage through this performance, foregrounding the body’s own absorbed experiences as a starting point. The performance will closely rely on the collective intuition of the trio, chance, and a loose score the artist uses as a point of departure.
The performance is in partnership with Platform Centre where Tagny will be presenting a solo exhibition, ‘landless heirloom’, opening at 7 PM after the performance. We invite audience members to visit the opening after the performance.
Tagny has a BFA in Film Production from Concordia University and a Certificate in Journalism from University of Montreal. Recent exhibitions include Henry Art, Seattle; Musée de Joliette, Momenta Biennale, Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal and Centre Clark, Montreal; VAC, Cooper Cole, Gallery 44, and Franz Kaka, Toronto. She is the recipient of the Mfon grant (2018), the Plein Sud Bursary (2020), has been shortlisted for the Prix en art actuels MNBAQ (2023), Gala Dynastie (2023), CAP Prize (2018), the Burtynsky Photobook Grant (2018), the OAAG Award (2020) and longlisted for the New Generation Photography Award (2022).
