Oona Libens: Pallium

The work of artist and musician Oona Libens (Belgium/​Sweden, 1987) revolves around the history of the (moving) image. In her intimate performances – a hybrid between abstract object theatre and educational documentary – she develops a distinctly crafted universe consisting of fragile mechanisms and analogue techniques. With her performances, she wants to expand our experience of the image and the screen, to create an analogue virtual reality and to make an entertainment machine that is slow, hesitates, falters and fails. Oona Libens first stu­died music in Sweden befo­re gra­du­a­ting from KASK in Ghent in 2012. Since then, she has made a series of poe­tic-sci­en­ti­fic per­for­man­ces about the uni­ver­se, the sea, time and the body.

This year, Oona has been dealing with the topic of death and the afterlife, following the loss of her mother. In this ongoing project, she explores diverse cultural and spiritual traditions, including the Egyptian death cults, Buddhist perspectives and other more or less esoteric frameworks surrounding the afterlife. For her new performance Pallium, Oona has worked with animations and masks in both the filming and printing process and plays with the three-dimensional possibilities of the screen. Through 16mm film, slide sequences and light and shadow-based imagery, the work tries to echo the liminal and irreversible quality of death itself.

Pallium (Formler för att gå ut med dagen) was made during a residency at Filmverkstaden in Vaasa, Finland and is presented with double 16mm projection and three slide projectors. This is the first live performance of the new piece, following the premiere in Finland.