Swiss performance artist woos audience
ISTANBUL - Hürriyet Daily News
Clarina Bezzola, a New York artist of Swiss origin, has performed ‘Inside-Out,’ at Gallery Zilberman in Istanbul. Photographs of the show will also be displayed.
Performance artist Clarina Bezzola amazed the audience with a spectacular show held for a limited number of select viewers at gallery Zilberman on April 11.Photographs of the show will be displayed at the gallery in an exhibition that opened yesterday and is set to run through May 10.
The New York artist of Swiss origin has performed the piece, titled “Inside-Out,” at many accomplished venues, such as Kunsthalle Vienna and the UBS Art Forum in Switzerland. Bringing together a multitude of art disciplines with ingenuity, Bezzola shares with the audience, beyond the magnificent fiction of this performance, the uncanny adventure of her inner journey toward self discovery with an unprecedentedly rich visuality. In addition to being an accomplished painter and a sculptor, with her vocal training Bezzola is also a professional musician, and she is also the creator of the poems and the numerous fabric sculptures accompanying her in this performance. In the performance the artist shares the story of a period of two and a half years she spent totally introverted and alone, and the self-discovery and more importantly the self-acceptance processes she went through.
The performance is based on the idea of the body being a vessel housing our true emotions and spontaneous expressions, our true self. In a society she sees as very rationally driven, Bezzola feels compelled to illustrate the despair of an individual whose connection with the true self has been cut. Any uncensored and spontaneous expressions might seem inappropriate in modern society. The character, while singing her sad and desperate requiem, drops her protecting walls; withheld expressions, formerly experienced as heavy burdens, blossom into colorful sculptures like beautiful flowers and spill out of her plump and bulging body all around to the feet of the audience. After a complete liberation of censorship and full self acknowledgement, there is nothing left to hide.
Emotions peculiar as they are can appear threatening to the structure of society. In this performance we can witness a mirroring of our own experience of being human. With the bold staging of her own liberation story, lyrically and theatrically, Bezzola, in addition to creating a beautiful work of sculpture and performance, skillfully draws an independent and individual artist’s portrait.
