Women Artists of Kochi-Muziris Biennale 2016

Aki Sasamoto
Born in 1980 in Kanagawa, Japan
Lives and works in New York, USA

random memo random
Installation with performance and video documentation

Aki Sasamoto’s work is a mediation of the body and its movement through space, and explores the nuances and peculiarities of everyday life by embracing gestures that are simultaneously subtle and powerful.

'random memo random' is a performance that highlights the implicit, tenuous, unwritten social contract entered into by an artist and audience in the context of performance, while also playing with the authority and privileged position of the archive in society.

In the absence of the performer, these objects become traces of events that have taken place.

random memo random is an installation with a series of performances that involve a performer jumping out of a hole toward a suspended filing cabinet, and accompanying video documentation.

Aleksandra Ska
Born in 1975 in Lodz, Poland
Lives and works in Poznan, Poland

Pandemic
Installation with galvanised steel, digital print, plexi plastic

Aleksandra Ska creates a fiction eerily close to reality, a skewed truth presented to us through narratives and layers of understood authoritative social structures and voices.

'Pandemic' is an imagined view of humanity’s alarming reality, and its relationship with disease. It is a re-imagining of the present as slightly altered; a fictional view of the world suffering viral outbreak, not too dissimilar to disastrous pandemics through history.

Aleksandra Ska displays her fabricated disease and our susceptibility to these dangers before the audience in a cold and clinical fashion. She treats the rhetoric and imagery of laboratory science and medicine as her source material, presenting her ‘collected’ evidence and examples in glass vitrines and describing them with a dispassionate, analytic remove.

Alicja Kwade
Born in 1979 in Katowice, Poland
Lives and works in Berlin, Germany

Out of Ousia
Glass, mirror, steel, concrete, stone, bronze, aluminium, wood, polyurethane

Alicja Kwade's work makes it easy to not notice what is true and what is a lie, twisting perceptions and experiences of how a body inhabits a place and moment.

Anamika Haksar
Born in 1959 in New Delhi, India
Lives and works in New Delhi and Mumbai, India

Composition on Water
Theatre performance and installation

Theatre-maker Anamika Haksar’s work is socially and politically engaged, and speaks to the injustices and inequalities of the Indian subcontinent.

'Composition on Water' is an improvisational theatre and installation work that engages with memories of oppression. Using texts by Dalit writers, including Namdeo Dhasal’s Water as the foundation for the improvisation, actors experimented with audience interaction during each of their performances.

Through the subject of water, the work questions the complicity, acquiescence and indifference shown by various quarters of society against the marginalised. Here the set/installation is left within the exhibition space as a remnant and reminder of the performance.

Camille Norment
Born in 1970 in Silver Spring, USA
Lives and works in Oslo, Norway

Prime
Sound installation composed for wooden benches, exciters, and voice

Camille Norment is preoccupied with sonic and musical phenomena, often re-purposing sound to create an aesthetic experience of music through form and space.

'Prime' is an installation comprising a series of benches emanating looped recordings of deep, resonant voices murmuring and moaning pre-lingual compositions. The texture of the voices is akin to a humming, and originates from the African American church practice of moaning. The sound is at once gesturing to a kind of exalting orgasm, a painful groan, or a comforting meditation.

With these sound elements, Camille Norment composes a neutral experience that focuses on the physical properties of the sound. She is not interested in evoking any particular ‘feeling’ in the audience, rather this work speaks indirectly to a connectedness of dissonant sound, voice and body.

Caroline Duchatelet
Born in 1964 in Valenciennes, France
Lives and works in Paris and Marseille, France

Tuesday, November 3
Video

March, 25
Video

Caroline Duchatelet's work explores the relationship of light with landscape.

'Tuesday, November 3' is about the passing of time, light and landscape. It depicts moments of separation, as a storm shifts across a small frame of ocean. A moment when the atmosphere congeals, comes together with pieces of water and sky to manifest shapes and colours.

As the fleeting storm softens and liquefies across the screen, shapes separate and lines of light move. Silence envelopes the work.

'March, 25' is an immersive video installation that records the dawning of a new day— the passage of the sun as it emerges from the dark and disappears again. As the light lifts, and recognition of a painting becomes clearer and clearer, you will slowly see before your eyes a picture that was painted by Fra Angelico and viewed each and every day by the monks of San Marco in Florence.

It is said that on March 25, the Feast of the Annunciation, the sun and the convent align, and through an easterly facing window, the sun’s rays shine through in such as way as to draw itself across and into the surface of the painting. The sun envelopes Mary bringing her into view, completing the task of the painting and realising her role as the Annunciated.

Dana Awartani
Born in 1987 in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia
Lives and works in Saudi Arabia and UK

Love is my Law, Love is my Faith
Hand embroidery on silk

Dana Awartani’s intricate, meticulously patterned art is steeped in the study of mathematics and geometry. In philosophical tandem with traditional Islamic arts, Awartani finds a universal language of beauty and harmony within the geometric structure of natural and man-made forms.

Dana Awartani’s eight hanging embroideries, 'Love is my Law, Love is my Faith', are inspired by eight love poems by Ibn Arabi that describe an experience he had at the Ka’aba in Mecca.

Using the practice of traditional textiles, Awartani creates genealogies of meaning that act as a form of meditation, praying, contemplation and search for the inner spirit rather than outer. Her works are a visual representation of a culturally specific time and space.

Dia Mehta Bhupal
Born in 1984 in Mumbai, India
Lives and works in Hyderabad, India

Bathroom Set
Paper and glue

Airplane
Diasec print

Bookstore
Diasec print

Supermarket
Diasec print

Waiting Room
Diasec print

Dia Bhupal builds and photographs life-size sets of everyday spaces- lifeless scenes which are containers and boundaries, as well as attempts to understand the world.

Dia Mehta Bhupal’s series of photographs are an example of how our eyes distort. Her works approximate reality without being the real itself.

Upon first appearance, Bhupal’s photographs of a bookshop, a supermarket, an airplane and a waiting room seem to be either the work of a painter or the effect of digital rendering, which gives an otherworldly and mysterious aura to their otherwise mundane realities.

However these works are photographs, not of those places, but rather of three dimensional built replicas of them.

Éva Magyarósi
Born in 1981 in Veszprem, Hungary
Lives and works in Budapest, Hungary

Lena
Video animation

Tough dreams born – the unalterable
consequence of existence
Video series and drawing performance
evolving duration of exhibition

Eva Magyarosi's art is not only a mixture of visual art and narration, but also a manifestation of poetic visualisation and visual poetry. Her works typically tell us about the mysteries of the female soul, the body and its emotions, displaying polyphonic stories of strange dreams and lived experiences.

Éva Magyarósi’s work is about what is visible and invisible, what happens in the transference of a thought into an artwork, what makes a thought seen and what keeps thoughts and ideas from remaining obscured.

In 'Lena', the words 'visions, sounds, inner tremblings' are repeated over and over again. The experiences of joy, love, and pain have a viscerality that enters the eye and sears an image into our minds before they recede into our forgotten world.

Over the duration of the Biennale, Magyarósi will create 'Tough dreams born – the unalterable consequence of existence', a series of weekly drawings, whereby a new evolving animation will develop, becoming a visible, collective exquisite corpse and unknown strange new narrative voice.

Eva Schlegel
Born in 1960 in Austria
Lives and works in Vienna, Austria

Palaces of Memory
Installation with video, maps, window text


Floating into the Night
Steel, printed canvas, wood

Eva Schlegel's multifaceted practice encompasses photography, paintings, installations, and public projects, and are focused on themes of materiality and the ephemeral, and how the interaction of the two influences the audience’s perception of space.

'Palaces of memory' focuses on alternative understandings of space both as an apprehension of what is outside and other to earth, as well as an ‘area’ or ‘expanse’ between objects.

'Palaces of memory' is about how we map out territory, how we create space within space, and how we quantify space.

The work includes a video that charts outer space and an installation of window text.

Created in collaboration by Eva Schlegel and architect Carl Pruscha, 'Floating into the night' inhabits the centre of Aspinwall’s internal garden. It is an architectural structure and an invitation to occupy, to dwell, to reflect and take breath.

The canopy of this architectural frame depicts the star system of the sky, exactly as it appears on 12 December 2016, the opening night of Kochi-Muziris Biennale 2016.

Gauri Gill
Born in 1970 in Chandigarh, India
Lives and works in New Delhi, India

Traces 2016
Series of archival pigment prints

Gauri Gill is a photographer whose complex practice has focused on several key themes including the marginalised communities of rural Rajasthan, human displacement and the Indian immigrant experience in America, and the manifestations of class, community, social mobility and behaviour throughout India.

'Traces' is a series of photographs that depict configurations of unpolished stones and old bricks piled by hands in the sand of the Barmer and Bikaner districts of Rajasthan.

The handmade graves belong to people with relatively few economic resources—peasants and other inhabitants of remote villages in the desert—existing lightly upon the earth. Within the mostly Muslim graves, there is also one Hindu one, gesturing toward a fallacy that the faiths are universally kept separate. This points to a more heterogeneous complexity underlying national thought and traditions.

Hanna Tuulikki
Born in 1982 in Brighton, England
Lives and works in Edinburgh, Scotland

Sourcemouth: Liquidbody 2016
Three-screen film and sound installation, vocal composition, choreography, visual score

Artist, composer and performer Hanna Tuulikki uses the voice to build worlds out of sound, immersive ethereal spaces that unearth primary relationships with the environment.

'Sourcemouth: Liquidbody' is an audiovisual installation that features a visual-score and a suite of films incorporating choreography, vocal composition, and costume.

Learning the nadi varnana (‘river description’) from practitioner Kapila Venu, Hanna Tuulikki has adapted the traditional sequence into a performance-for-camera with three interlinked films.

Her silver-painted figure traces a fluvial line that covers a river’s journey. 'Sourcemouth: Liquidbody' enacts a type of ‘water consciousness’ that is local and universal.

Katarina Zdjelar
Born in 1979 in Belgrade, Serbia
Lives and works in Rotterdam, Netherlands

The Perfect Sound
Single-channel video

Shoum
Single-channel video


Katarina Zdjelar’s films critique the ways that language pigeonholes us, or reveals our status or social access.

In 'The Perfect Sound' we see a grey-haired man chanting single syllables over and over while a young man simultaneously mimics him. This is an ‘accent removal class’ for new immigrants conducted by a speech therapist in the British city of Birmingham.

'The Perfect Sound' looks at the phenomenon of cultural assimilation through the erasure of difference in pronunciation and the production of ‘neutrality’, and points to the hegemonic capacity of language.

'Shoum' starts with the pop sound of Shout by eighties pop group Tears for Fears. Over the course of the next seven minutes we see how the two Serbian men who do not speak English attempt to transcribe the lyrics of Shout.

Through deciphering and decoding, the work shows creation of languages that are copies of an original— copies or translations of reality, which force us to question what the matter and mode of speech itself are.

Katrina Neiburga
Born in 1978 in Latvia
Lives and works in Latvia

Andris Eglitis
Born in 1981 in Latvia
Lives and works in Latvia

Mixed-media installation with video, audio, light, bamboo and thatch architectural structure

Katrina Neiburga is a video and installation artist who is interested in sociology, investigating preconceptions about the nature of things, emotion and the preservation of living memory. She works in collaboration with Andris Eglitis.

'Will-o’-the-Wisp' is a multimedia installation in dialogue with a wealth of new age spiritual practices and world religions.

Drawing on a global architectural vernacular that includes do-it-yourself cultures, the structure incorporates local building practices and construction items as well as organic material found from the territory where it is directly built.

'Will-o’-the-Wisp' not only reminds us of what we seek when we cannot name a presence, or attempt to catch the glimpses of light that symbolise absolute truth, but also what happens when our senses disappear and our barriers to ‘experience’ as a type of unmediated and undeniable thing allow us to go deeper into ourselves.

Latifa Echakhch
Born in 1974 in El Khnansa, Morocco
Lives and works in Fully, Switzerland

Kmiss
Polyester satin string attached on site architecture

Echakhch’s installation and sculptural works are characterised by simple and bold gestures and materials. She interrogates themes and issues ranging from individual and cultural identity, to personal and collective histories, and sociopolitical contexts such as current international migration and humanitarian conditions

While in Morocco, Latifa Echakhch noticed little coloured satin threads appearing around the streets.

In Kochi, Echakhch re-enacted this threading of the city for 'Kmiss', wishing to reproduce the colourful residues, tracing an amity between people in Kochi and Morocco, gesturing to questions of individual and cultural identity - personal and collective histories, and sociopolitical contexts and child labour found in materials.

Echakhch becomes the caretaker in the relationship between these spaces so far apart, a guide who weaves together disparate threads into a dialogic whole.

Lisa Reihana
Born in 1964 in Auckland, Aotearoa/New Zealand
Lives and works in Auckland, Aotearoa/New Zealand

Native Portraits n.19897
Digital video


Focused upon the practice of photographic representation, particularly tourist imagery, and stereotypes, Lisa Reihana’s Native Portraits n.19897 translates and re-contextualises history through the aesthetic of nineteenth-century ‘cartes de visite’ from the thriving colonial New Zealand postcard industry, where Maori were a popular subject. It questions assumed historical knowledge, and how we use photography in battles of legitimacy and entitlement of territory and race.

Native Portraits n.19897 is something of a counter balance because it empowers many of its subjects, capturing Maori culture as living, diverse, and resisting its traditional depiction in the museum as primitive and static.

Mansi Bhatt
Born in 1975 in Dhrangadhra, Gujarat
Lives and works in Mumbai

Kochi Suite
Photographic prints on pearl archival

Mansi Bhatt is a photographer and performance artist who in costume, performs an extraordinarily elaborate series of public performances or tableaus, creating scenes and vignettes for larger narratives, which are documented with photography

Mansi Bhatt uses prosthetics and theatrical makeup to recreate images of life. She documents her immediate surroundings, people and objects, then recreates these scenes within the studio, inhabiting various roles and personas along the way. Her images are always partly real and partly fictitious, inhabiting a hazy middle world.

Bhatt’s photographs and the performances they represent are also about photography itself, highlighting how the camera reveals the faces of individuals as social masks, as ideal types, as indicative of something collective rather than individual.

Martina Seitl: Born in 1979, Månsarp, Sweden
Lives and works in Stockholm and London

Christer Lundahl: Born in 1978, Ljungarum, Sweden
Lives and works in Stockholm and London

Symphony of a Missing Room -An Imagined Museum
Sightless goggles, wireless headphones with three-dimensional sound and
synchronised touch from unseen guides

'Symphony of a Missing Room - An Imagined Museum' is both a collective and personal journey through the Biennale. A guided performance tour of the Biennale, it moves from lasting to temporary, optic to haptic, static to fluid.Instead of looking at an individual work, you look at the whole, and become a participant in the configuration of the Biennale.

Naiza Khan
Born in 1968 in Pakistan
Lives and works in London and Karachi

The Journey We Never Made
Installation with model boats, drawings, mixed media

Objects from the Deep
Charcoal, conte and screen prints on paper

Naiza Khan captures the day to day experience of living and working in Karachi, where everyday life is affected by natural disaster, urban migration, displacement and political struggle.

'The Journey We Never Made' plays with an objective tourist vernacular through representing Khan's long-term engagement with the small island of Manora, which sits in Karachi harbour.

For this project, local artisans were given scale drawings of vessels sourced from Khan’s photographic archive, and images of historic vessels that have left their imprint on the Indian Ocean in their journeys of trade and conquest.

'Objects from the Deep' are conceptual drawings that reflect on the sedimented nature of objects — object, material and nature, fuse and erase the differences between place and identity, becoming a site of confluence and transformation.

Nicola Durvasula
Born in 1960 in Jersey, UK
Lives and works in Walmer, UK

John Tilbury
Born in 1936 in London, UK
Lives and works in Deal, UK

Practice Pieces
Mixed stone and earthenware installation with improvisational score

Nicola Durvasula's drawings, paintings and sculptures incorporate a number of influences including Japanese calligraphy and Indian miniature sculpture as well as the traditions of musical performance, including the graphic notations of experimental composers.

For Kochi-Muziris Biennale 2016, Nicola Durvasula creates sculptural objects in response to John Tilbury's music scores, and the Biennale itself.

Together their work asks us to consider: How is art made in response to different environments? What does sound teach us about matter? What is the nature of collaboration and dialogue across media, fields and practitioners?

Padmini Chettur
Born in 1970, in Mumbai
Lives and works in Chennai

Varnam
Performance; installation view of 3-channel video projection

Chettur’s work departs from the classical Bharatnatyam repertoire of gestures, postures and mythical tales, to shape an alternative, no less strict, but condensed and abstract style of performance.

'Varnam', a choreographic performance made especially for video, is reconfigured as several performances within David Hall, to then be displayed again in video format for the duration of the Biennale.

'Varnam' explores the nostalgic remains of eroticism and romantic love. In a critique of classical Indian dance, Padmini Chettur presents a new iteration of the heroine who is separated from her lover, abandoned and suffering.

Prabhavathi Meppayil
Born in 1965 in Bangalore
Lives and works in Bangalore

Seventeen sixteen
Copperwire embedded in gesso panel

Melting Pot
Found objects

Prabhavathi Meppayil's work is process-oriented and seeks the essence of materials and tools as well as simple forms, colours and shapes, and combines artisan practice and modernist concerns.

In 'Seventeen sixteen', notches of lines and found objects are embedded at intermissions that repeat and re-occur at close intervals on an immaculate gesso panel, following the shape of the support.

Lines are the motif of connection and correspond with historically minimalist principles.

With 'Melting Pot', we read into the language of the artist's past, which includes a long line of artisans and craftspeople, a combination of elements that cross boundaries and reflect the concerns of the city back to us. This is through the presence of fragments of useful craft
objects.

Rachel Maclean
Born in 1987, UK
Lives and works in Glasgow

Please, Sir...
Split-screen video, in loop

Rachel Maclean uses film and photography to create sickly, candy-coloured worlds filled with ghoulish characters, played by Maclean herself, offering a critique of our contemporary selfie-saturated culture.

'Please, Sir...' is a morbidly comic adaptation of Mark Twain’s historical fiction, The Prince and The Pauper.

Maclean uses the jargon of capitalism and mocks it through exaggerated performance. It explores themes of greed, class and dependence as well as the cultural rhetoric of austerity and aspiration.

Remen Chopra
Born in 1980 in New Delhi
Lives and works in Mumbai

I see a mountain from my window, standing like an ancient sage
Carving on waterproof recycled wood fibre

Chopra’s mixed media practice moves between the real and the make -believe. Influenced by the history of cinema and art, the artist creates images that are dramatisations of her own experiences.

Drawing on the rich symbolism of an heirloom of a Persian carpet that has been passed from mother to daughter for four generations in her family, Chopra has created an imaginary geometric topographic landscape for this work.

'I see a mountain from my window, standing like an ancient sage' begins from a material cultural history that presents questions of lineage, feminism, locatedness and time.

Sharmistha Mohanty
Born in 1969 in Kolkata
Lives and works in Mumbai

I make new the song born of old
Installation with poem and sound

'I make new the song born of old' is a poem written for and presented within this room at Aspinwall.

As you pass through this space you can use Mohanty’s work to anchor yourself. As you read the text, think about how you sink into the room and breathe in the atmosphere, the words become space; ask what language means to you.

Shumona Goel
Born in 1975, Ohio, US.
Lives and works in Mumbai

Shai Heredia
Born in 1974 in Bombay
Lives and works in Bangalore

I Am Micro
35 mm (original format), digital (exhibition format), black and white, Dolby SR

'I am Micro' is an experimental essayistic film miniature that pays tribute to the medium of film, while reflecting on the gradual disappearance of Indian independent cinema

It is a film that finds resistance amidst the debris and decay of cinema. Through the use of establishing tracking shots, which reference neo-realism in their length and framing, the film presents an idea and vision of an abandoned optics factory, unused machines, detritus and debris, left alone, trapped in a moment in time.

Valerie Mejer Caso
Born in 1966 in Mexico City, Mexico
Lives and works in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico

Untameable Light 2016
Multimedia installation

Painter and poet Valerie Mejer Caso’s work explores containment and fragility, layering loss and possibility over a once-familiar landscape.

'Untamable Light' is rich with intermedia gesture—painting, photography, collage, installation, poetry, books- all of which interact and collide here in a symphonic synthesis about imagination and territoriality.

Mejer Caso posits a new world outside concepts of the nation, through language. 'Untamable light' is the unfolding of a book in exhibition form.

'Untamable Light' helps us imagine what a new community might be, a poetic imaginary that crosses boundaries and refuses to accept the limits of what we take for granted. It is as much a new flag in the ground as it is a space to reflect on what we may yet become.

Wura-Natasha Ogunji
Born in 1970 in St.Louis, USA
Lives and Works in Lagos, Nigeria

Ballast
Graphite, ink, thread, coloured pencil on trace paper

Cheetah
Graphite, ink, thread, coloured pencil on trace paper

Ballast
Thread, ink, acrylic, graphite on trace paper

View from Atlantis
Thread, ink, graphite on trace paper

A performance and visual artist who works in a variety of mediums, Wura-Natasha Ogunji also creates videos, in which she uses her own body to explore movement and mark-making across water, land and air.

Wura-Natasha Ogunji’s various works for Kochi-Muziris Biennale 2016 have a rich complexity of visual references. At once they are domestic and worldly, fabular and factual, historical and futuristic.

Through the use of sewing, Ogunji presents the homely, craft skills of a feminine domain into a public that is Afropolitan, at once rooted in a local aesthetic that one may misascribe to ‘Nigeria’ yet which has a resonance with contemporary feminist practitioners the world over.

Yardena Kurulkar
Born in 1971 in Mumbai
Lives and works in Mumbai

Kenosis
Photographic series

Taphephobia
Mixed media with large wooden cupboard covered with fresh flowers filled with porcelain nails

Dance of Death
Mixed media with light bulbs

Yardena Kurulkar focuses on the thematic of death, and the connective, illusive, ephemeral nature of what lies between it, art, and life.

In 'Taphephobia', the artist uses the historic reference of the cupboard as an allegory for rebirth.

The open cupboard signifies a release from confines, from claustrophobia and expectation, and thereby a personal victory— the victory of fear and an overwhelming feeling of being alive in the face of death's certainty.

In 'Kenosis', Kurulkar uses 3D technology to create a terracotta replica of her own heart. After submerging it in water, she captured images at regular intervals of disintegration.

Water, often associated with religious rituals, becomes a medium of personal introspection for Kurulkar in this exploration.

'Dance of Death' creates a point of confrontation between life and death.

The bulbs mark the date the artists body came into being. Dance Macabre by Camille Saints Saens plays in the background. The lit up numbers flicker unseen, to celebrate this date and their passing time. The flickering light, which appears steady, is not visible to the human eye, due to its high ‘flicker fusion rate’, thereby making intermittent light appear constant.

As time passes, the bulbs die, the dance begins to fade away, and we are left in darkness.

Yuko Mohri
Born in 1980 in Kanagawa, Japan
Lives and works in Tokyo

Calls
Bells, fork, grass, horn, electric magnet, ribbon, cloth, coil

Oni-bi (fen fire)
Glockenspiel, solenoid, drumstick, net window, conductive strings

Yuko Mohri produces kinetic installations that attempt to convey intangible or invisible energies such as magnetism, gravity, light, and temperature, by creating assemblages of found and reconfigured everyday items, machine parts, or old tools.

Mohri is interested in random errors and bugs occurring unexpectedly in day-to-day lives that give us a glimpse of those significant phenomena that exist faintly, usually outside our minds eye.

These kinetic-sonic sculptures connect the seemingly random and draw on the Japanese belief in the return of the dead to ‘call’ on their descendants during mid-summer and New Year.

Placing each object carefully, Mohri considers the distinct features of an exhibition space, such as gravity, humidity, brightness and darkness, and breeze, arranging her items to find the hidden unique energy of a space, usually ignored.

In 'Calls' and 'Oni-bi (fen fire)', Mohri makes the invisible, the disappeared, the unseen, visible and heard through sculptural forms that respond to the space they find themselves in.

She utilises gravity, magnetism, light and wind—contextual conditions—to animate her work, preferring this to human agency.

Zuleikha Chaudhari
Born in 1973 in Mumbai
Lives and work in New Delhi

Auditioning the Plaintiff. Rehearsing the Witness: The Bhawal Court Case
Performance and installation with archival photographs, performer, text, soundscape and 2 channel video

Zuleikha Chaudhari is a theatre director and lighting designer whoseworks shift between theatre and installation, as investigations into landscapes that are neither real nor imagined, and at the centre engages with the role of the viewer in the performative experience.

'Auditioning the Plaintiff. Rehearsing the Witness: The Bhawal Court Case' is a theatre and installation work which uses original evidence from the Bhawal court case as scripts and reference material, testimonies of witnesses as well as photographic portraits of the young Kumar, re-staged by the older plaintiff to establish likeness.

This material, which bears the burden of proving one’s self, of convincing the court that you are who you say you are and that what you say can be believed, is used as an audition text. The representation is real and staged at the same time.