A room of one's own: A private conversation on Art, Religion, Sex and Power. Event

A performance by Jillian Beemore and a Curator from Venice.

“I went on amateurishly to sketch a plan of the soul so that in each of us two powers preside, one male, one female; and in the man?s brain, the man predominates over the woman, and in the woman?s brain, the woman predominates over the man. The normal and comfortable state of being is that when the two live in harmony together, spiritually co-operating.[1]”
Virginia Woolf

A room of one’s own is a 2,600- page performative text drawn from a conversation between performance artist, Jillian Beemore and a Venetian curator. The discussion begins in January 2014 after a brief encounter at a gallery opening in Amsterdam. Within the following two years, their conversation continues online, as they travel individually, across several continents. Jillian becomes engulfed in their chat, struggling to distinguish fiction from fact as her dreams and fantasies spin a tight web in her mind. The boundaries of their relationship become unclear when their conversation expands beyond the virtual space of the Internet into a new physical dimension testing the limits of the body rigorously.

The text of A room of one’s own is a cultural discussion that explores archetypical concepts of gender, sex, religion and power through role-playing and self-reflection. The chat is a psychological game in which Jillian and her counterpart reflect on their personalities, exposing their deepest desire as they try to conceive a unified image of themselves by questioning their personal biases that inform their notions of sexuality and gender roles in the way they both establish intimate relationships. Virginia Woolf wrote in her eponymously named essay, to write fiction; a woman must claim a space for herself, she must free herself from any prejudices that may block her creativity. Her writing should demonstrate her thoughts and not her gender. The conversation between Jillian Beemore and her curator from Venice shows how violent and elusive the mind is. Eventually, they both establish ?that we all play different roles in life to hide or support our most valued beliefs.”

Written by Jaysha Obispo, 2016
Production: Angular Flux

20th - 23rd JAN | 19 - 22h

[1] Woolf, Virginia, A Room of One?s Own (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1998) 128