The Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève has the honour of presenting the exhibition of Joan Jonas. This project takes place exactly thirty years after her first performance in Switzerland at the Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève in the context of the Festival Contrechamp (on the 3rd of February 1978).

An emblematic figure that came to the attention of the New York art scene in the late 1960s, Jonas has developed a constantly evolving multimedia approach to performance and installation, which has influenced subsequent generations of artists worldwide. She was among the first practitioners of performance and video, which investigated new formulations of female identity and offered an approach free from art history traditions as well as from male-dominated structures. Influenced by feminist movements, the artist said in 1995 in an interview with Joan Simon “there is always a woman in my work, and her role is questioned”. Jonas draws on the fields of history, biography, literature, myth and ritual to question identity, using signature elements such as the mirror (to distort as much as reveal) and the mask (to enable shifting personas). Also key to the artist’s interests is to reflect upon the experience of time, where ‘de-synchronization’ is, as Douglas Crimp (Professor of art history and art critic) has suggested, an essential experience of her work.

“The Shape, the Scent, the Feel of Things” (2004) is a work in progress consisting of an installation and a performance, initially presented in the Dia:Beacon, New York. Resulting from an ongoing concern with ritual and performance, the project highlights Jonas’ basic interest in the beginning of aesthetic expression in other cultures in relation to the Western world. Nowhere else in her oeuvre has Jonas awarded such a pivotal role to narrative and text as in this project. Despite the strong theatrical thrust of the work, it remains poised between theater and performance art. Furthermore, it ispartly inspired by a series of events and encounters in the artist’s life. Indeed it goes back to a journey made to the Southwest USA in the late 50s, where Jonas had the opportunity to see several Hopi (Native American Indians) rituals. Later in the mid 1980, Jonas came across a reference to these rites in an essay by German historian Aby Warburg, related to his own trip to the Southwest in the 19th century.In his investigations Warburg employed photographs of artworks from different cultures, recombined and cross referenced them to produce, among others, a display of particular gestures as portrayed by Greeks, Romans, Indians and so on. This methodology was particularly inspiring to Jonas.

It is the myth of Helen of Troy as viewed by the Imagist poet H.D. (Hilda Doolittle) which is revisited in “Lines of Sand” (2002) commissioned by Documenta 11, Jonas wanted to reveal the fact that for centuries the accepted myth – a war fought over a woman – was preferred to a more subtle truth. Whilst the original myth tells of the seduction and abduction of Helen, H.D quotes other classical sources, which suggest a different story (that she remained in Egypt, never setting foot in Troy). Jonas first made an installation and then a performance that draw these various threads together into an interlocking series of tableaux, stage sets consisting of video, photographs, drawings and objects. Finally, “Volcano Saga” (1985-1989) is an older work where Jonas began to distill her ideas around the female character, using the story as a mirror, and the volcanic landscape of an island as a representation of the narrative. “Volcanic Saga” takes place in Iceland, and is inspired by a 13th century story entitled “Laxdaela Saga”, narrating the tale of a woman who married four times.

Joan Jonas’ recent performances and installations have been presented to international acclaim in Documenta 11 (2003), Tate Modern (2004), Dia:Beacon (2004), Brooklyn Museum New York (2005) and MACBA Barcelona, amongst other venues.

The exhibition is co-produced with MACBA, Barcelona.

The exhibition is accompanied by a publication, co-produced with MACBA Barcelona, including texts by Katya Garcia-Anton, Bartomeu Mari and Gregory Volk, amongst others. This exhibition is a partnership with the Biennal of Moving Images, Geneva (Centre pour l’image contemporaine-Saint Gervais Genève) that presents a retrospective of Joan Jonas’s works.

Curated by Katya García-Antón

Cover image: Joan Jonas, The Shape, The Scent, The Feel of Things, Performance Dia:Beacon, New york, 2005, Photo: Paula Court