Alexandra Zierle
Paul Carter

Alexandra Zierle and Paul Carter's collaborative work is interdisciplinary, multi-sensory and site and context responsive spanning from live art/performance art, happenings and interventions, to sound, video and installation. Through their practice, Zierle & Carter critically examine different modes of communication and what it means to be human both as individuals and as a collective entity. Their work addresses notions of belonging, cultural identity, the dynamics within relationships, harmony through conflict and the transformation of limitations.

Rooted in a fine art context their work adopts a simple yet rich visual aesthetic, which employs various approaches and guises. The work fundamentally explores societys conventions, traditions and rituals both old and new, often flipping them on their head, peeling them back, reversing orders and disrupting the norm. Zierle and Carter's work sites an embodied investigation into human interactions with their immediate environment and exemplifies a profound curiosity of the unknown, the void, of embodiment, and the now.

At times charged with raw unedited energy and at others, sensitive, composed and sincere, their work initiates contemplation and prompts us to reconsider the way we perceive the foundations that our society and individual realities are based upon. Their work acts as an invitation to venture into the spaces that lie in-between the external and internal, the permanent and transient, the spoken and unheard.

Shifting in format, content and duration, their works have varied in length, from a series of short actions to three days durational works, a week long intensive to a three-week long residency. To date their work has explored one to one interactive performances, social sculpture, process led actions, devised work, improvisation and the making and breaking of rules, body centred works, object led works, bold/highly visible work, and sensitive/discreet actions.

Exploring Site, Zierle & Carter's work has occupied both gallery and public space. Non gallery sites have included busy shopping streets, a indoor city market, a library, a World War 2 bunker, a disused railway tunnel, and under stairways. Also working nomadically and to hand during the Ferdinand Zweig Scholarship in Argentina, work was created in city squares, housing estates, in Patagonian Welsh communities, the top of a volcano, at the base of a glacier, in a hot spring, and in deserts.

Biography

Zierle & Carter's work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, including Grace Exhibition Space (US), Exist-ence (Australia), and MOMA (US) and Plymouth Arts Centre (UK) as part of Marina Abramovics Institute for the Preservation of Performance Art and The Pigs of Today are the Hams of Tomorrow. They are currently in receipt of an Arts Council England grant for their Through the Heart: Works on Love, Life, and Laughter project.

In 2006 Zierle & Carter received the Ferdinand Zweig Memorial Scholarship to produce new work in Patagonia, Argentina. As former members of The Western Alliance they presented To Good To Be True, URGENCY/AGENCY Residency exhibition with The Western Alliance and Turkish artists Iz Oztat and Volkan Aslan as part of the Visiting Arts Artists to Artist scheme, The Delfina Foundation, London, UK. In 2011 they also attended the 'What's love got to do with it?' visual arts residency at the Banff Centre, Canada, and participated in a collaborative research and production residency with choreographer and artist Jill Sigman and her company thinkdance. In July 2011 Zierle & Carter were artists in residence for the month at MEANTIME Project Space, UK.

Select forthcoming 2011 and 2012 exhibitions and residencies include a series of photographic works and residency with Manuel Vason for Performance Transitions (UK), Marginal Arts Festival in Virginia (US), Sounds Off programme for New Territories 2012 (UK), performance at R.I.T.E.S and residency on Pulau Ubin (Singapore), as well as a performance for PIPAF 2012 (Philippines).