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Melanie Jame Wolf
Melanie Jame Wolf is a self taught artist living and working in Berlin since 2011. She works solo and with friends, making interdisciplinary pieces about power, flows of capital, and the phenomenon of 'show business': the liminal, the persuasive, the deceptive, the staged, the performed. Moving across choreography, performance, text, moving image, sculpture and installation, she makes work for theater, gallery and screen spaces. Her work is concerned with the problems and poetics of class, sensuality, gender, narratology, the radical vulnerability of the live moment, and the body as an unruly political riddle. These investigations are often expressed through a hyper-stylised pop aesthetic and play with language in subliminal and surprising ways. Her work explores the proposal that: all labour is performed - all work is repetition, all subjectivities are rehearsed, all power is enacted. This core conceptual pre-occupation intersects with her investment in humour as a strategy for deepening the critical potential of works of art. Melanie Jame's ongoing interest is in analyzing the idea of performance-as-labor in artistic, popular entertainment, and everyday contexts. This often manifests as an atomization of specific performance techniques – impersonation, rehearsal, slippery scenographies. This strategy is employed as a tool to critically analyze broader political and cultural currents. Performance here is understood as a technology of survival; as a strategy for fluidity of subjectivity.
Melanie Jame has shown at: KW Institute of Contemporary Art, Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Institute of Modern Art Brisbane, Kunstmuseum Basel, HAU - Hebbel am Ufer; Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art, nGbK, The National 2019: New Australian Art Biennial, VAEFF Film Festival NYC, Kasseler Dokfest, Arts Santa Monica Barcelona, Schwules Museum, Sophiensaele, & Münchner Kammerspiele, Residencies have included Cite international des arts, Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Obsidian Coast, & Arts House. She was a nominee of the 2022 Berlin Art Prize.
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