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Dionysus Lives

Dionysus Lives was performed in the National Gallery of Scotland as a part of the 119th Annual SSA exhibition.

A 10-person performance that took form in a parade from the forested outskirts of Edinburgh to the National Gallery at its center, Dionysus Lives combined dance, music, pilgrimage and poetry in an artistic happening in which artists and audience alike were transformed.

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The Voyage of Persephone was performed within the context of Anya Gleizer's first solo exhibition in Paris, Dionysus : Tristeria at Tricaud & Pigasse, 4 Place Denfert Rochereau.

The performance brought together dance and live-painting in front of the audience, to create a new form of multimedia storytelling with which to rediscover old myths, even as it questioned their heritage and implication within contemporary culture. Unearthing the too-often-cached process of art-making, The Voyage of Persephone spoke to the silencing of victims of assault and the perpetuatual veneration of 'result,' the unblemished picturing of a classical myth, violently ripped asunder.

The Voyage of Persephone

Déjeuner sur l'Herbe

Déjeuner sur l'Herbe was performed as part of Anya Gleizer's final degree show installation.

It is a participatory performance, incorporating dance, chorus, music, poetry and drawing in a celebration of the moment, with no regard for future or past.

An active enquiry in the nature of human animality, and the ephemera of human life, Déjeuner sur l'Herbe opened a space of interraction, shared-food and laughter to its audience, a forest clearing in the midst of the white-cube.

Gleizer was awarded the SSA Student Graduate Award for Déjeuner sur l'Herbe

Performed for the Glasgow International Festival as part of the Circus Between Worlds, Dionysus : Rites to Rave is a 10-person performance which combines dance, tribal music, poetry and audience-interaction and ends in a rave party that lasts all night.

Devised by Anya Gleizer in collaboration with her artist's collective, La Malle des Indes, Dionyus: Rites to Rave exposes the danger of relying solely on rational faculties and categorization, of denying an element of our identity that is fundamentally fluid, non-binary, wild.

Dionysus : Rites to Rave

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Black River

Black River is a crowdsourced, digital, place-based installation, created by Anya Gleizer in collaboration with Pablo Valcarce. It was awarded the Innovative Learning Week Award by the University of Edinburgh and shortlisted for most creative project.

Anyone, from anywhere in the world can upload image and video that speak to their connection to place. The images will then simultaneously appear on the website and be projected within 1 of 7 Japanese scrolls in the exhibition space in algorithmic sequence. Speaking of the impermanence and connectivity of our collective experience, Black River gives a unique glimpse to each visitor - the ephemora that flit in and out of the scrolls are never the same, sourced from a global and invisible audience.

Leaf Storm

Exhibited in Whitespace Gallery, Edinburgh, in the En Dehors Arts Festival, Paris 3 La Sorbonne, Paris, and in Coburg House Gallery during the Edinburgh Fringe Festival 2015

Leaf Storm is an installation-performance about human closeness and communication.

A different space is delineated by a whimsical, rotating, curtain of leaves. Audience members are invited to come sit with the artist and share a single cup of water, brought from a local, fresh water-source. Inspired by Japanese tea ceremony, the communication that takes place within the Leaf Storm is entirely silent and goes straight to the root of human interaction, creating intimacy with a single concentrated gesture of hospitality.

Oku no Kuro Gawa is an artist's novel, co-authored with the writer, Pablo Valcarce, after a 2,000km on-foot journey around the coast of Japan in the footsteps of the 17th century haiku poet Matsuo Basho. It is currently awaiting publishing.

Initiated as the broader project In Basho's Footsteps, Oku no Kuro Gawa came as an effluence of the combined experience of both artitsts, their interaction with locals, their cultural distance from Basho's Zen philosophy, and their observation of self and wilderness. Seemlessly combining poetry, visual art and prose, this artist's novel continuously questions its own medium. Themes of temporality, journey and impermanence, are explored through the broader lens of walking and creating, which here become a metaphor of the transient nature of our lives.

Oku no Kuro Gawa

Limbo

Sculpture

exhibited at Dartmouth College

steel, plaster, tubing, water

Limbo serves as a quiet commentary on the tentative balance of the contemporary world and impending environmental crisis. A tree is suspended over a void which fills slowly with water from below. The tree is rootless, supported only by its smallest branches, in a delicate but complete balance.

Your Horizons is a traveling performance, appearing spontaneously on undisclosed sites in both rural and urban areas.

Anya Gleizer and her company traveled around Europe, setting up performances without any arranged audience. All sightings of the “magic tent” by others were accidental. Your Horizons is an on-going project.

This performance is inspired by and dedicated to a friend of the artist who passed away in 2015. Its ambiguous existence calls into question the very nature of performance: the eeriness of its intangibility is more of a testament to absence than to presence.

Your Horizons

Daphanae

Sculpture

exhibited at Tricaud & Pigasse

plaster, wood, leather, soil, seeds, laurel

Daphanae is a living sculpture, simultaneously created and destroyed by its own material: the laurel tree growing from inside it. Its classical exterior serves as a carapace for a viscera of soil planted with multiple bulbs and seeds. As the plants grow, their expanding root-systems break down the sculpture even as they create a new form which is more raw, organic and ever-evolving. As the sculpture changes, it strips the artist of her agency. The art-piece and the nature it embodies become its own maker, the author surrendering authority and authorship. Daphanae reclaims her agency.

Archipel is a play produced by La Malle des Indes in which Anya Gleizer acted as artistic director and costume and set designer.

It was performed in 2015 in the Théâtre de la Bastille, in Paris, France.

What connects an island to the mainland? What links a fantasy to its reality, and are these linkages grounding, or eternal fetters that hinder the artist? What are the boundaries between performance and theatre, storytelling and visual art? These were the questions and challenges that Gleizer faced in her work on Archipel, a play about political and spatial estrangement. Tipping the visual aspects of the play from simple representation into enactment, weaving her art into the very narrative of the play by uniting set and costume, Gleizer created a set that literally incorporated the actors into itself. Anya Gleizer's search for connection became one with that of the actors, whose drama unfolded within and through her sets.

Archipel

About

A b o u t

Anya Gleizer’s practice, led at an interface between art and biology, explores the relationship between human culture and the natural world. However the more closely it is examined, the more the boundary that allows this binary to persist, blurs and starts to slip. Gleizer explores themes of interior and exterior wilderness through performance and installation. Her art involves the participation of multiple performers and audience-members, calling for a full involvement with the work.

Born in Russia, and brought up in New York City, Gleizer has travelled extensively for her research, from Alaska, to Japan, to the heart of Siberia. She has worked with indigenous communities across Russia, circumnavigated Lake Baikal by kayak, worked with wolves and moose on Lake Superior, and monitored arctic shorebirds in Chukotka.

Faced with the dwindling of wilderness and wildness in watersheds, collapsing ecosystems or in our own human minds, Gleizer works towards a radical reframing of our relationship to the natural world with her art as her compass. Her performances search for traces of wilderness in the actualization of ancient mythologies, in the lived tradition of indigenous peoples and also in the ethos of roadside BurgerKings, the trappings and tatters of the cities - centers of our chaotic civilizations.

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Black River is a crowdsourced, digital, place-based installation, created by Anya Gleizer in collaboration with Pablo Valcarce. It was awarded the Innovative Learning Week Award by the University of Edinburgh and shortlisted for most creative project.

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C o n t a c t

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A n y a G l e i z e r