Artist Joan Jonas

Joan Jonas (b. 1936, New York City, NY, USA) lives and works in New York. Her work encompasses video, performance, installation, sound, text, and drawing. Since 1968, her practice has explored ways of seeing, the rhythms of ritual, and the authority of objects and gestures.

A pioneer of video and performance art, Jonas belongs to a group of artists whose use of live action and video beginning in the late 1960s and early 1970s gave rise to contemporary genres of video and performance art, which are embraced by younger generations of artists. From her seminal performance-based excercises of the 1970s to her later televisual narratives, Jonas engages viewers in an elusive theatrical portrayal of female identity. Employing an idiosyncratic vocabulary of ritualized gesture and symbolic objects that include masks, mirrors, and costuming, she explores the self and the body through layers of meaning.

Commissioner and Curator Paul C. Ha

Director of the MIT List Visual Arts Center, Ha has more than 25 years of professional experience in art and museum administration, fundraising, curating, and teaching. He has curated and worked with more than 100 artists in solo and group exhibitions, and many artists received their first major museum exhibitions with his support at the List Center, Yale University Art Gallery, White Columns, and the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis.

Curator Ute Meta Bauer

Bauer is a veteran curator of exhibitions and presentations on contemporary art, film, video, and sound, with a focus on transdisciplinary formats. She is Founding Director of the Centre for Contemporary Art (CCA) at the Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Singapore, where she is also a professor in the School of Art, Media and Design. She recently curated Theatrical Fields, commissioned by Bildmuseet Umeå, Sweden (2013–14), which includes various works by Joan Jonas and will be shown at the CCA in Singapore in Summer/Fall 2014.

Photo: Joan Jonas. Mirror Check, 1970.