Joan Jonas, Mirror Piece I & II, 1969/2025 Performance by 15 HEAD students and screening of the video Mirror Check, 1970

JOAN JONAS, MIRROR PIECE I & II, 1969/2025 (30')

Movement director: Nefeli Skarmea

Performance by 15 students from HEAD

As a preamble, screening of Joan Jonas' video Mirror Check, 1970 (9')

HEAD – Geneva, Le Cube, Building H Avenue de Châtelaine 7, Geneva

This event is co-produced by Arta Sperto and HEAD – Geneva, and is part of the 3rd edition of Dance First Think Later.

In Mirror Piece I & II, fifteen performers face the audience while wearing mirrors and Plexiglas plates in synchronized and choreographed movements.
The audience, the performers and the environment are reflected and fragmented in the moving mirrors, blurring the distinction between spectators and performers.
Mirror Piece I & II, created in 1969-1970, were not filmed at the time. For Joan Jonas's exhibition at Tate Modern in London in 2018, the performance was updated and reconstructed from notes and photographs by Joan Jonas and Nefeli Skarmea as movement director. Since then, Mirror Piece I & II has been presented at prestigious institutions, including the Serralves Foundation in Porto (2019), Haus der Kunst in Munich (2022), the Perth Festival (2024), MoMA in New York (2024), the Getty Center in Los Angeles (2024), and the Middelheim Museum in Antwerp (2024).
Nefeli Skarmea lives in Geneva and collaborated on the first edition of Dance First Think Later in 2020. Her role in the current life of this historic performance motivated and made possible the Geneva version of Mirror Piece I & II, which will be performed by HEAD students at the end of a five-day workshop organized as part of HEAD's “Semaine de tousles possibles” (Week of All Possible Things).
Joan Jonas (US, born in 1936, lives in New York) is a world-renowned artist whose work encompasses a wide range of media, including video, performance, installation, sound, text and sculpture. Her experiments and productions in the late 1960s and early 1970s remain crucial to the development of many contemporary art genres, from performance and video to conceptual art and theater. Since 1968, her practice has explored ways of seeing, the rhythms of rituals, and the authority of objects and gestures.
More info on the website of arta sperto and on the website of HEAD – Geneva