CtC’s Artist of the Month for December is Turner Prize nominate Tris Vonna-Michell (Southend, 1982). Vonna-Michell has been selected for his solo exhibition Postscript (Berlin) at Jan Mot, Brussels. His practice involves installations and live performances; the latter mainly based on fast-paced spoken word and audio recordings. His installations derive from a combination of happenings and props, intermingling with images, texts, videos, projections and other ephemera. Vonna-Michell is a storyteller with a passion for fiction and reality’s mystification. Like an unreliable narrator he engages the audience with narratives that find their starting point in history as well as in personal stories, to finally being misrepresented or, better, reinterpreted in a series of endless and convoluted layers. In the occasion of a solo exhibition in May 2007 at Witte de With, Rotterdam, for instance, Vonna-Michell performed a fragmented and twisting narrative in three stages: hahn/huhn (2004), Finding Chopin: In Search of the Holy Quail (2006) and Down the Rabbit Hole (2006–7). The events of these incongruous tales may never have occurred, however, they are reported with such a desire and persuasion to appear almost real. His presentations are challenging and Machiavellian, stretching and extending both meaning and function of collection, documentation and archive. Nonetheless, his role as an artist, in the staging of a work, is closer to that of a director rather than a sole archivist.
Vonna-Michell lives between Southend, UK, and Stockholm, Sweden. He graduated from the Glasgow School of Art in 2005 and continued his studies at the Städelschule, Frankfurt am Main. Prior to his nomination for the Turner Prize, he won, in 2008, the Statements Art 39 Basel (with T293, Naples), Bâloise Art Prize, and Ars Viva Prize.
Over the month of December, CtC will present a selection of four pictures from Vonna-Michell’s installations and performances, which will be used as cover pictures of our Facebook and Twitter pages, each for the duration of a week.
Check CtC pages regularly to not miss the new one!
Miriam La Rosa
Link to Tate Video: TateShots: Turner Prize 2014, Tris Vonna-Michell.
CuratingtheContemporary (CtC) 