Alumni show focuses on the place of the body in the physical world

Barbara Black

Acting Between – Body, Space, Time is a meditation on the incontrovertible fact that “the human body is the prime agent of the physical world, through its physical placement, absence, limitations, relations or actions,” according to FOFA Gallery director Lynn Beavis, who curated the show.

All six artists, who are recent graduates of the Faculty of Fine Arts, impose themselves in highly original ways on other people to make us more aware of how we interact with one another.

Prominent in the gallery is an inflated tube with a sleeping bag inside. The gallery visitor is invited to enter and watch videos projected on the inside wall. Ana Rewakowicz has taken her SleepingBagDress to a number of cities in Mexico, France, Belgium and Estonia to interact with ordinary citizens. There she makes videos and adds them to the project.

Beavis explained that as a person who has lived in a number of countries, Rewakowicz is sensitive to the idea of home and global uncertainties. Some of the people in her videos share her concerns and talk about them with feeling.

Thomas Kneubühler feels that our sense of private property is more acute in Canada than it is in Europe, where he is from. He goes to places like shopping malls and office buildings after they are closed to the public, and takes photos until he’s ejected by security. Looking at his photos and knowing how he took them is unsettling.

Diane Borsato is known for small gestures that are often tinged with mischief. For example, she once slept all night with a bunch of cakes because they’re comfort food, and she felt in need of comfort. She has walked through New York with heavy suitcases and got hotel doormen to carry them for her because she found her life burdensome. For this show, she tortured her father, or at least stretched the limits of his fatherly indulgence.

“I came across a soccer ball designed to look like a globe. My father is an avid soccer player and fan. I asked him to perform for a video — to see how long he could keep the ball up in the air by juggling it with knees, feet and head.” The result, called Wondering How Long He Can Keep Up the World, is 45 minutes of a mustachioed man in a blue tracksuit, trying repeatedly to keep the ball up for 20 bounces.

Andrea Vander Kooij’s posed photographs are an exercise in forced intimacy. A man and a woman wear garments — gloves and balaclavas — that are made for two people to wear simultaneously.