Download review of My Inner Sole The Performance from the Jewish Daily Forward.
MY INNER SOLE The Performance is the second part of a trilogy and follows MY INNER SOLE - The Art Installation, exhibited in 2009 in Healdsburg CA. 18 Skeletons are the backdrop to 18 seamless scenes shifting in a dream like sequence. A narrator (actor Cynthia Adler) unfolds graphic memories of a mother, a Holocaust survivor, she passes to her daughter as she grows up. Confronting mother and daughter, is Aunt Hinda, a survivor herself, (actor Kathryn Grody) who desperately clings to life with gusto and refuses to look back. A Japanese man clad in a kimono (Kenji Nakano) enters ceremonially adding and removing skeletons. A nude doll with a mask dances with a long train of sheer red fabric (choreographer Wendy Osserman) to the tunes of a Yiddish tango. A Puppeteer (dancer Pepper Fajans) appears in a tender dance with a life size skeleton. A musician (Mac Gollehon) crosses the stage into the audience playing the trumpet over Indian chants. A duet "The Blood Line", (Wendy Osserman and Pepper Fajans) closes this autobiographical piece as the voice of the narrator (Adler as Kurtz) reverberate over the lounge music: "Narrative has a very slow metabolism, if it is a bedtime story, it will be chewed from generation to generation, it will have many lives, it will affect our judgment, it will affect our life".... The performance was followed by a lively Q & A session with the audience.
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MY INNER SOLE - WORKSHOP RETREAT
HILLSDALE, NY August 2010
photography Michael Hnatov www.mhnatov.com
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SLAUGHTERHOUSESPACE
Healdsburg, Ca. 95448
www.slaughterhousespace.com
info@slaughterhousespace.com
Download exhibition brochure from "My Inner Sole" installation at Slaughterhouse Space, (PDF file).
from the brochure:
My Inner Sole
Zuzka Kurtz
multimedia installation
— 2009
photos by Steve Kimelman
An exploration of the artist’s familial memory that takes form through the interaction of sculpture, video and textual elements. My Inner Sole uses common objects, shoes and cloth, to unravel the stories that were passed down to Kurtz by her mother, a concentration camp survivor. Kurtz’s surreal tableau reimagines her inherited experience of loss.
The project was installed in its first incarnation at SlaughterhouseSpace in Healdsburg, California, from June 27 to August 17, 2009. It included an original score by Kristin Norderval and videos made in collaboration with Steve Kimelman and Liz Magic Laser. A live performance is also in the works. The project is intended to extend and reconfigure these components with new ones depending on its spatial and cultural site.
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Threading
Zuzka Kurtz in collaboration with Liz Magic Laser
Single channel video
17 minutes
2009
Shifting between hands sewing with a needle and then with a machine, the artist’s voice recounts her family’s narrative. Her stories oscillate from porous to particular. The hands seem to emerge from the viewer’s point of view, implicating the onlooker in the narrative’s subjectivity.
VIEW VIDEO EXCERPT
VIEW VIDEO
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Shoes on the Danube
Zuzka Kurtz in collaboration with Steve Kimelman
created by Gyula Pauer and Can Togay
Single channel video
7 minutes
2009
The camera pans along the Danube’s bank, gliding along the lines of
bronze shoes that memorialize the 1944 massacre of Hungarian Jews.
PREVIEW BOOK
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My Inner Sole
Written by Zuzka Kurtz
Foreward by Mary Lanier
Design by Oriana Reich
First edition book, forty pages, ISBN 978-0-615-29026-3
2009
The book chronicles the cast of eighteen skeletal characters that
participate in the sculptural installation.
book is available for purchase for $35
please inquire at zk@zuzkakurtz.com
To purchase - $35 plus $5 shipping for the US
photography
by Steve Kimelman
website and all content © 2009-2011 Zuzka Kurtz zk@zuzkakurtz.com website by canopy studios, inc.