Banquet For Pantagruel

Banquet For Pantagruel, Leigha Mason
A Performance and Film Event

With live soundscape by Emil Bognar-Nasdor and a special performance by Genesis Breyer P-Orridge

The triumphant nature of every banquet renders it not only a fit conclusion but also a framework for a number of essential events. The body transgresses here its own limits: it swallows, devours, rends the world apart, is enriches and grows at the world’s expense…Here man tastes the world, introduces it into his body, makes it part of himself.
Mikhail Bakhtin

Banquet For Pantagruel is a transformative environment, which simultaneously seduces and repulses. It revolves around a banquet table vanitas with a new video projected above. Emil Bognar-Nasdor of Dawn of Humans performs a live soundscape to accompany the banquet.

The performance moves through contexts ranging from a peaceful evening sky to the inside of a diseased person’s lungs, in an interrogation of the intersections between social and physical revulsion and the spaces in which they play.

Leigha Mason grounds this visual and spatial displacement by using the performance as a site of production, filming throughout and live-streaming her footage on a projector-screen-pinata, which hangs over the banquet awaiting the climax.

In a contemporary condition where bodies are so casually mutable, why should the politics of every day life be different? If we can recognize any system as constructed so too is it changeable.
-Leigha Mason

MoMA PS1’s acclaimed VW Sunday Sessions program welcomes visitors to experience art live and in real time. Embracing performance, music, dance, conversations, and film, the program vividly demonstrates how these art forms can push us to engage with our contemporary world in creative, illuminating ways. With an emphasis on artistic practices that blur and break traditional genre boundaries, the program supports and commissions new work, inviting artists, curators, and other cultural instigators to share their latest projects.