FELTDARK: MICHAEL SCHAEFER(SA) - PRIMARY

Screening from 8:00pm - Wednesday, 7th June

Running - 8th June - 24th June 2017

FELTdark is viewable: Wed - Thur: 6pm - 12am, Fri: 7pm - 12am, Sat: 6pm - 12am

My work involves the exploration of endurance and its wider themes through performance and the subsequent video documentation of a repeated inconsequential or everyday action. Its focus is on duration, repetition, my personal dimension or physicality, and ultimately the absurdity of the repeated task standing as metaphor for our own extant circumstance.

The work ‘Primary,’ in performing and its ambition in witnessing, becomes a meditation on our own existential temporality. It is a Sisyphean critique where we are asked to place or recognise the meaning in the banality of the everyday. In the existential tradition it reminds that, within the tightest of boundary circumstances, we all have choice and the ability to make change.

It brings into question the nature of authenticity. How does one live in true faith with the weight of external pressures from a trend or fashion culture bound society? The performance taps into this enquiring ‘what is the face you display to the world’?  What were the decisions made that have got you to this point?

If, as in Nietzsche's Eternal Recurrence, you were to repeat this moment this life for all of eternity, would you make a change.