Still Lives
Performance Installation Series
Artists: Luke George and Daniel Kok
With various collaborators and participants across the series and locations
Recipient of two 2022 Green Room Awards (Melbourne) - Contemporary & Experimental Performance: Outstanding Achievement + Design & Technical Achievement
Still Lives is a performance-installation series that captures (with ropes) significant moments or movement in relation to specific cultural contexts. Each edition of Still Lives is a durational, site-responsive and context-specific process of binding cultural objects in their place. This allows new conversations to emerge and unveils narratives about local history, political tensions, social connections and personal attachments. So far, the series has included:
Still Lives: Melbourne
Presented at National Gallery of Victoria for Rising Festival 2022
Five Australian Rules players transformed into living sculptures, in which a spectacular mark by footy legend and proud Noongar man Andrew Krakouer was recreated as a suspended tableau. As spectators gathered in the National Gallery of Victoria for the Rising Festival 2022, the powerful influence of football in the cultural life of Melbourne became an object of interrogation.
Still Lives: Auckland
Presented by the F.O.L.A. - [AKL], 2024
In Town Hall of Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland, eight female rugby players were bound together to re-create one half of an interlocking scrum. Urgent issues, such as sexism, racism, homophobia and transphobia within sporting culture are also revealed through the knotty negotiation between bodies.
Still Lives: Fremantle
Presented by the Fremantle Biennale 2023 SIGNALS
Looking to maritime past and histories of imprisonment of a key naval port in Australia, whilst out at sea, sailing towards Walyalup / Fremantle from the direction of Wadjemup / Rottnest Island, a bugle player was suspended between the masts of a 130 year old pearl lugger. As the ship entered the Fremantle Fishing Boat Harbour at sunset, the bugler performed The Last Post, an international anthem for remembering and rest.
Still Lives: Venice
Presented by La Biennale di Venezia, Biennale Danza, 2019
For the 2019 Venice Biennale, a gondola and gondolier were tied together using 1km of locally made jute rope. With its relationship to water and boats, rope is an ever-present material in Venice. Before it became a central venue for the Biennale, the Arsenale also housed the making of rope for its naval fleet. This durational performance-installation took place in a public square on Via Garibaldi, in front of the Giuseppe Garibaldi Monument.
Photography:
Still Lives: Melbourne
images: Tim Carrafa, Michelle Li, and Gregory Lorenzutti
Still Lives: Auckland
Images by Jo Caird
Still Lives: Fremantle
Video stills Kitecast Media
Still Lives: Venice
Images Lucio Fiorentino
"A near spiritual experience today watching the kind of art that moves you in ways you can’t quite find the words to express. In a city where football is a religion it was fitting that art should intersect so powerfully with sport in the Still Lives installation as part of RISING.
Only in Melbourne could you bind five footy players with rope and suspend them in mid-air in the NGV’s Great Hall to recreate a famous mark of the year – Andrew Krakouer’s 2011 hanger in a game between Collingwood and Adelaide.
The players re-enacting it, represented a range of diverse groups the AFL hasn’t historically treated well – women, Indigenous players, and trans and gay footballers. The living sculpture they created over three hours was a breathtaking representation of the complex power dynamics at play in Australia’s national sport and the work it still has to do to tackle sexism, racism, transphobia and homophobia.
It was an intensely emotional experience and it reminded me of how important art is in challenging and changing cultures, making us feel and making us think, and being the spiritual balm for the soul we have all sorely missed these past few years.”
Jill Stark, author and journalist