For Jonas, every performance is reloaded with new meaning in accordance with the spatial situation and context of the exhibition. Crossed Waves: After a Long Train Ride will begin with the artist’s departure from New York and continue throughout the train ride that will take her to Miami with Kirsten Weiner, who is her assistant and will be performing with her.

Crossed Waves: After a Long Train Ride is Jonas’s second performance organized by TRANS>, following the performance Montage Verite in collaboration with Jeff Preiss, organized by Karin Schneider at TRANS>area in New York, 2002.

about the artist’s practice>
Joan Jonas’s work led the way in the 1960’s with the first appearances of performance and video art. She has since come to represent the feminine side of her generation. Deeply imbued in the spirit of post-minimalism, her practice mixes different media (dance, drawings, projections and theater) to create a total environment where her action takes place. Her performances investigate the interaction between the body, illusionary spaces, constructed personas and recording technologies.

The complex spatial articulation in her work resonates with a carefully considered mix of elements. Mirrors, closed circuit cameras and recently, new digital media have been for Jonas means to explore not only outer and inner space, but to link the performer with her audience.

In her early performance Organic Honey’s Visual Telepathy (1972) for instance, Jonas, as her TV persona Organic Honey, entered masked and costumed into a room filled with clothes, mirrors, a slide projection, monitors and drawings. A camera on a tripod was connected to a TV monitor showing in real time the action of the performer’s multiplying in the illusionary spaces.

In more recent works, her gestures are charged with symbolic intensity and references coming from ancient rituals and fairy tales. The use of objects alongside the re-enactment of stories and narratives conjure a psychologically charged environment wherein a dramatic action unravels. The gesture of Jonas’s performances describes and delimits a physical and mental space into which the spectator is invited to maneuver.