Nao Bustamante: Silver and Gold

In partnership with the Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland, experience an incredible one-night-only performance by CIA Bickford Visiting Artist Nao Bustamante. Known for dramatic identity-based interventions, artist Nao Bustamante presents Silver & Gold, a sexually-loaded performance drawing from avant-garde filmmaker Jack Smith and his muse, 1940s Dominican starlet Maria Montez. Also this night, artist Alexis Gideon (2015 SIE juror) will live score his latest stop-motion animation video The Crumbling, a video opera that explores the importance of words and symbols in a decaying culture.

Silver & Gold combines film, live performance, and original costumes into a self-proclaimed "filmformance" in which Bustamante evokes the muse of legendary filmmaker Jack Smith and his tribute to 1940s Dominican movie starlet Maria Montez in a magical and joyfully twisted exploration of race, glamour, sexuality, and the silver screen.

In this performance event she alternates between action and live narration of an eight-minute film projection. Honing-in on Smith's interest in Hollywood's obsession with filmic reproduction of the exotic, Bustamante embodies Miss Montez. Using video, live voiceover, audience interaction, and the body as a source of backdrop, narrative, and emotion, she takes the spectator on a bizarre and radical journey as she discovers a new bejeweled body part, which is at once her curse and oracle. This new performance is the fruit of a commission by the LIVE FILM/Jack Smith festival, co-organized by Arsenal Institute for Film and Video Art and Hebbel-am-Ufer Theater (HAU) in Berlin.

This event is free and open to the public.

Image Credit: Eleanor Goldsmith

Website: http://mocacleveland.org/programs/performance-art-nao-bustamante-alexis-gideon#