Johanna Householder, Canada

Lives and works in Toronto.

Johanna Householder is Chair, Criticism and Curatorial Practice at the Ontario College of Art & Design. She has been making performances and other artwork in Canada since the late 70s. She was a member of the notorious satirical feminist performance ensemble The Clichettes, who performed across Canada and the US under variable circumstances throughout the 1980s. While The Clichettes practiced their own brand of pop culture detournment, Householder has maintained a unique performance practice, often collaborating with other artists.

Householder works at the intersection of popular and unpopular culture, shaping plundered source material in order to talk back to mass forms. She has been making performances, video and other artwork since the late 1970s. A founder of the 7a*11d International Festival of Performance Art, in Toronto, Canada, she seeks to create a forum for international exchange.

In "Performance Festival" which she will present at Guangzhou Live, she will remake in condensed form the performances from the last Performance Festival. It is performance as documentation of performance, subject to all of the risks and problems of documentation in terms of its referent live event. This work is not only a catalogue of a festival, like other forms of documentation it focuses on materials and images, and becomes performance in its own right. Made in miniature, like a book of photographs, or a cross between a wild west travelling medicine show and the Iron Chef.
For Guangzhoulive we will make the 8th Biennial 7a*11d Festival of Performance Art that takes place in Toronto from October 21 to 31, 2010. Previous versions of this work were executed in Toronto, 2006 (after 7a*11d Festival) and in Poland in 2009 (after the Interackje Festival).