Charged Objects > Displaced/Display (No. 2)

Displaced/Display is a site-specific installation that contextualizes a collection of relics from performance art pieces created by Sandrine Schaefer between 2005-2019. Descriptions of how these objects were once used have been intentionally omitted. Do the objects hold sensorial traces from their original actions that can transcend this fragmentation and displacement? Do they gain or lose power depending on the space they occupy (or do not occupy) in a room? Some of the relics have passed through many hands (collaborators, witnesses to the performance pieces in which they were used, other artists, etc.) Some have been touched only by the artist. Nearly all of these relics have been recycled into multiple live works. One relic is a fake, the original lost during a move and replaced because the desire to remember was far too great. What all of these relics share is that they are extensions of the bodies that once activated them and expansions of time.


Contours of Meaning
Mills Gallery
Boston Center for the Arts
Boston, MA
August 2019-October 2019

Mills Gallery, Boston Center for the Arts, 2019; Photos: Melissa Blackall