• Wednesday, February 7, 8 PM •
Juliett 484: An International Cultural Exchange of Artists from Poland and the US; performance art screening
 
Join Studio Soto for the public premiere screening of a new dvd document which captures the range and breadth of performance art among artists from Poland, Boston, and Providence working at 4 sites, two in Poland and two in the US. Juliett 484 is a decommissioned Russian submarine docked in Providence that became the theme and a site for the works of this international cultural exchange, organized and produced by Mobius in August and September of 2003. This comprehensive document contains 27 performances and is 2 hours and 15 minutes long. The participating artists in the project were Marilyn Arsem, Marek Choloniewski, Vanessa Gilbert, Arti Grabowski, Wladyslaw Kazmierczak, Grzegorz Klaman, Milan Kohout, Aleksandra Kubiak, Pawel Kwasniewski, Mari Novotny-Jones, Yin Peet, Bob Rizzo, Ewa Rybska, Jed Speare, and Antoni Szoska.

Juliett 484, the decommissioned Russian submarine, was built around 1965, toured in the Baltic Sea during the Cold War, and would have likely docked in Ustka and Gdansk in Poland during that era, two of the sites on this DVD. As a unifying theme and site-specific location, it became a compelling conduit for works exploring the evidence, effects, vestiges, byproducts, and hybridizations of the pre- and post-Communist existence between our two cultures.

With Juliett’s name and origin as the point of departure, the project began in Ustka in August of 2003 for two days as a part of the 11th Castle of Imagination International Festival of Performance, then continued in Gdansk at Modelarnia, the former model-making building of the historic Gdansk shipyard. Two weeks later, the Polish artists arrived in Boston and work commenced in Providence on the submarine, in Boston at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, and at Chashama in New York.

In this cultural exchange, Mobius’ fifth with Central and Eastern European partners over the past 12 years, the artists created works that illuminated, repossessed, and transformed the political and social import of the submarine, ports, and harbors. Their up-to-date expressions of the past and present, in a variety of embodiments and locations, is captured in this document.