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 UK performance artist, Kimbal Bumstead’s performance work explores power relationships within intimate situations. He uses material processes, like drawing, to actively engage with spectators to create roles and divisions within a performance.
Kimbal’s interests are to create artwork as events, based on processes, reflecting on discourses and developing work in-transit. His research interests are into audience participation/ exclusion and into exploring human rights issues and power through ‘direct ambiguous experience’.
His performance at «Free Wi-Fi» will be part of a series of performances that are dictated by his physical transition across Russia to China. Each performance will respond to the previous one hereby creating a narrative in which the spectators become the characters. Participants will be asked to participate in the construction of a mini-installation, which will form the ’text’ of the narrative. They will participate by becoming a model, drawing pictures or wrapping someone up in tape. The structure of actions is not fixed allowing for spontaneity, and the influence from previous pages of the ’text’.
Kimbal Bumstead studied Fine Art at the University of Leeds, UK and the Academy of Fine Arts in Krakow, Poland. He has performed and exhibited across the UK, Germany, Poland and Denmark. Most of Kimbal’s work is solo performance but he also has worked in collaboration with other artists. Kimbal also works with video and photography, which he incorporates into performances both with the physical action of producing the photographs and video but also actively using them in multi-media installation work. One such project is a collaboration with artist Richard Taylor, called ‘Bring Your Own Pencil’ involving interaction with video screens and live video feed. Kimbal is currently in preparation for this performance project, based on his physical transition across Russia. And for a project in Copenhagen, Denmark called Transit Station at the Royal Danish Academy Of Fine Art, involving European Artists. It will an event including a 2 day performance by Kimbal inviting the audience to contribute to a sculpture session, he will follow this by leading a workshop which will be an opportunity to collect research for an MA at Queen Mary’s University of London.
Please Note
The «text» will literally be a collection of drawings, elements from previous performances, in this case- a performance in St Petersburg. These drawings from St Petersburg may be distributed to members of the audience in Moscow to re-use in a different way for example.
Because of the nature of this performance it’s impossible to say exactly what I will do and in what order but these are the basic fundamentals.
The creation of a mini-installation would mean making a temporary structure, for example a string held between two people on which to hang drawings, this would be dismantled as the performance ends and become the ’text’ of the narrative. The performance should take half an hour maximum and does not need a specific start time necessarily, it will be better if it just begins when there is a suitable crowd. In effect it will have the structure of a street performance with the difference that people will be aware that a performance is about to begin.
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