This Current Between Us inaugurates its public programming with “Do Not Brake Out of Prior Range” a site-specific, live performance by American artists Miriam Simun and Daria Kaufman. Taking as its starting point the recent inauguration of the Greece-Bulgaria Interconnector (IGB) gas pipeline, “Do not break out of prior range” is a research-based performance in dialogue with the station site that marks the first collaboration between the artists. With the use of movement and language, this newly commissioned work interplay with found text on economic and social facts at a time of a global energy crisis and in relation to the human body. The work gleans content from kitchen appliance manuals, articles about gas pipelines and the historical archives of PPC Greece, interrogating gender, intimacy and social stratification. The artists attempt to turn the spotlight to power in relationships, and how the human body produces, transmits and reacts to electric current, punctuated by a movement score that relates these found words to the corporeality of the body, and the materiality of human interactions with electricity in daily life. Ultimately, the artists’ intention is to find poetry and alternate meanings in these deeply politicized topics that we are all soaking inside of.

Artists bios:
Miriam Simun (1984 Silicon Valley) is an interdisciplinary artist working at sites of collision - of bodies and rapidly evolving socio-technical-ecosystems. Their practice spans multiple formats including still and moving image, performance, installation and communal sensorial experiences. The work can be found at linktr.ee/mseamoon. Simun’s work has been presented internationally, including Gropius Bau (Berlin), New Museum (New York), Himalayas Museum (Shanghai), Momenta Biennale (Montreal), The List Center for the Visual Arts (Cambridge), The Contemporary (Baltimore), Bogota Museum of Modern Art (Bogota), Ronald Feldman Fine Arts (New York), Museum of Fine Arts (Split), Museum of Arts and Design (New York), Robert Rauschenberg Gallery (New York), and the Beall Center for Art + Technology (California). Simun is a recipient of awards from Creative Capital, Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, Joan Mitchell Foundation, Foundation for Contemporary Arts, as well as a 2022 La Becque Artist-in-Resident, 2021 Onassis Foundation fellow, a 2019 Gulbenkian / Carpintarias de São Lázaro Artist-in-Residence, a 2018 Visual Arts residency at the Headlands Center for the Arts, a 2016 Artist Residency with OMI International Arts Center in New York, a 2015 Food Justice Residency at the Santa Fe Art Institute, and a 2014 Art Professionals in Athens residency in Greece. Simun’s work has been recognized internationally in publications including the BBC, The New York Times, The New Yorker, CBC, MTV, Forbes, Art21 and ARTNews. Simun is a graduate of the MIT Media Lab, ITP at NYU Tisch School for the Arts and the London School of Economics and Political Science.

Daria Kaufman (1983, New York, USA) is an interdisciplinary performing artist working at the intersection of movement, text, and action. From phone-based audio performance to domestic object scores, to task-based performance installation, her work is rooted in the body – its mutability and capacity for (un)making meaning. Kaufman has frequently worked with Berlin-based intermedia performance collective StratoFyzika, including on their most recent piece, “Human/ID” – an immersive media installation that explores full-body deepfake mapping technology (presented by CounterPulse, 2021). In 2016, she collaborated with Turkish/Portuguese performing artist Sezen Tonguz and Portuguese visual artist/sculptor Francisco Pinheiro on "Holding it together" – an immersive performance piece that places the audience amidst a continually shifting installation of roughly 60 six-foot-long wooden planks. In 2015, Kaufman was nominated for the Isadora Duncan Dance Award (the “Izzie”) for Individual Performance. Her work has been presented throughout the US and Europe, at venues including: FAKI Festival (Zagreb); Armazem 22, in scope of Festival Dias de Dança (Porto); Pomona and Scripps Colleges (Los Angeles); Zaratan (Lisbon); ODC Theater (San Francisco); Cutting Ball Theater (SF); Mills College (Oakland); and on KQED Spark TV (SF Bay Area). Photo by Miriam Simun. Graphics by The Birthdays Design.