Biography:
Manuel Vason (b.1974) is a transdisciplinary artist interested to question the presence and influence of photography in our image-driven contemporary society. By exploring photography through the prism of performance art, Vason is perpetually re-framing his vision, while shaping a hybrid art form and a fertile space of critique and creative engagement.
During the last twenty years he has collaborated with more than two hundred and fifty international performance artists, produced six publications and exhibited internationally.
In 2019, Vason completed a PhD by Publication at the University for the Creative Arts (UK).
Manuel Vason’s notable projects
The PhotoPerformer (2014 – on going): is the name of Vason’s alter-ego. The aim of this project is to merge photography and performance into an hybrid cross-practice through which to further expose, deconstruct and transform his predominant, white, male, privileged perspective.
Double Exposures (2012 – 2015): is a new collaborative venture between Manuel Vason and forty-five of the most visually arresting artists working with performance in the UK. For Double Exposures, Vason has worked with two groups of artists, using two distinct types of collaboration, to produce a series of diptychs.
Becoming an Image (2013 – on going): Becoming an Image is Vason’s first body of work, which rather than emerging from a series of collaborations with individual artists, develops out of a group environment, in which Vason leads collaborative actions. The point of departure is the concept of the ‘Art of Exchange’. The images produced become a skin with which to cover surfaces and three-dimensional objects.
I Believe in (2010 – on going): I believe in is an ongoing project exploring faith as an agent for artistic creation. The project focuses on the liminal space between the fictional and the real, the virtual and the performed fantasy.
STILL_MOVIL (2008 – 2011): STILL_MOVIL is Manuel Vason’s first collection of co-creations with 45 choreographers, dancers and movement practitioners. Working with artists across South America the project explores stillness as a durational space in which choreographed movements translate into poses. Each image was conceived as a new contemporary dance piece.
Encounters (2002 – 2007): Encounters is Manuel Vason’s second extensive collection of photographic collaborations with artists working in Performance. Through extensive dialogue-based modes of collaboration, beautifully stylized and vividly constructed images question relations and boundaries between the documentation and artwork, body and space, time and memory.
Exposures (2000 – 2002): Exposures is Manuel Vason’s first collection of collaborative photographs with nineteen of the most acclaimed and controversial practitioners in Britain in the early 2000s: artists who were disrupting the norm, breaking the rules and provoking debate by exposing the body in all its diversities, difficulties and desires.
Live Gallery (1999 – 2003): is Manuel Vason’s first project which led him to transform a photographic session into a public performance. A site-specific project, which took place within different communities and locations and provoked members of the public to perform an action in front a 10 x 8 inches Polaroid camera. The resultant images where immediately displayed as a temporary exhibition.