Culture

Performance art meets Iraq protest in Prague

by Kaitlin | June 19, 2007 at 12:32 pm

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Prague residents and tourists expecting a normal Tuesday were sorely mistaken as a performance art piece/protest took over the streets on the eve of the city's Quadrennial celebrations. Anyone needing a lesson in contemporary globalization better take heed: it's protest art created in Prague by a Brit living in Paris based on a play which debuted in London (just last month!) about a war currently being staged in Iraq and Afghanistan by US, Canadian, British...well, you get the idea. Confused? Read on, and check out the artists' website.

Famous British artist and long-term resident in Paris Lucy Orta creates socially attuned projects that merge costume design and fashion with architecture, poetry and theatre. The project made especially for the Praque Quadrennial was inspired by the allied intervention in Iraq – some fifty artists in costumes designed by Lucy Orta will perform on the streets of Prague.

Since 1991 (when the first Gulf War broke out), artists Lucy & Jorge Orta have been conducting research, giving rise to the Performance for Peace at the Victoria and Albert Museum in June 2004 (just before Iraqi sovereignty was returned). The production of Fallujah - Casey’s Pawns draws on this.

The work was created for the play Fallujah, written and directed by Jonathan Holmes and staged in London at the ICA in May 2007. The piece is a graphic reaction to the current situation in Iraq and reflects the consequences of war: what will happen to the quarter of a million people whose livelihoods, homes and daily lives have been marked by the acts of war? How can one apprehend the experiences people, when the urban environment and its hinterland have been so altered? This ‘intervention’ in Prague is driven by the desire to share these problems with a wider audience.