Primary Care @ Julius Caesar

Sunday, August 23, 2015 1-5 pm

Live performances and screenings by Murat Adash, Mark Barker, Levi Budd, Anna Bunting-Branch, Robert Crosse, Angharad Davies, Lila de Magalhaes, Peter Ferry, Stephen Kwok, Mitsu Salmon, Michal Samama and Keijaun Thomas.

Primary Care takes as its point of departure the gesture of caring and an exploration into the forms it may take. In 2015, Wikipedia stated that sometime in the late 1760’s Edward Jenner collected pus from the hand of a milk-maid and scratched it into the arm of a boy, an unprecedented act that resulted in the discovery of modern-day vaccines. Can art operate like a vaccine? As an altered form of an observed thing, introduced to stimulate an immediate response to aid a future condition? Can art provide preventative care? Looking to medicine as an authoritative cultural force, Julius Caesar’s summer performance and video festival takes the experience of getting better as its structure.

The performance program will be administered in two parts and accompanied by a video screening. The video works explore the most salient experience of care; waiting. In some cases they prioritize the internal audience’s perspective over that of the external viewer - what we do not see is described more vividly by another’s experience of looking. In others, the place-less spaces of the waiting room, hotel bedroom or garage, are transformed into sites of anticipation. We are not yet satisfied. We are kept at arm’s length. We w a i t ( f o r r e s u l t s ) .