Session 14
Jacob Wren

On March 22, 2017 at 7 pm

Limited seats, RSVP here.

In 2018, twenty years will have passed since the first PME-ART show, En français comme en anglais, it’s easy to criticize. To celebrate this anniversary, co-artistic director Jacob Wren is writing a book entitled Authenticity is a Feeling: My Life in PME-ART, a book described as “a compelling hybrid of history, memoir and performance theory.” For his lecture-performance at Dazibao, Jacob will focus specifically on the process of choosing images for this book, which involves pouring through twenty years of visual documentation. This documentation both represents and misrepresents the ephemeral nature of the collaborative performance work the PME-ART collective has made. Why choose some images over others? What memories and crises does examining these images provoke in Jacob and what can they tell us about the nature of making interdisciplinary performance today? Jacob Wren’s presentation is an artist’s talk turned inside out and a performance about documentation that undoes and undocuments itself as it goes along.

Jacob Wren makes literature, collaborative performances and exhibitions. His books include: Unrehearsed Beauty, Families Are Formed Through Copulation, Revenge Fantasies of the Politically Dispossessed, Polyamorous Love Song (a finalist for the 2013 Fence Modern Prize in Prose and one of The Globe and Mail’s 100 best books of 2014) and Rich and Poor (a finalist for the 2016 Quebec Writers’ Federation Paragraphe Huge MacLennan Prize for Fiction). Much of his performance work is made as Co-artistic Director of Montreal-based interdisciplinary group PME-ART, which he co-directs with Sylvie Lachance. PME-ART was nominated for the 27th Conseil des arts de Montréal’s Grand-Prix in 2012, and has presented in more than forty-eight cities in Quebec, Canada, Europe, Japan and the United States over the last twenty years.