Janice Kerbel, Fight!, 2022, live performance, 4 minutes, 40 seconds. Performance documentation, Catriona Jeffries, Vancouver, 2022. Photo: Rachel Topham Photography

Janice Kerbel

Janice Kerbel has been recognized internationally since the 1990s for work that inhabits existing languages and forms. Her most recent exhibition is comprised of two new performative works, Speech!, 2022, and Fight!, 2022.

Speech! distills the language and structure of symbolic oratory into a singular address delivered by an actor. Speeches from multiple contexts are fused to comprise a spoken, embodied form. Fight! transposes the physical language of unarmed combat into movement for a single performer. A fight between 12 people is compressed into a solo choreographed sequence performed by a dancer.

Recent forms of Kerbel’s practice have engaged synchronized swimming (Sink, 2018), music composition (DOUG, 2014), and theatre lighting (Kill the Workers, 2011), in addition to audio recordings and print. In Bank Job, 1999, Kerbel produced the plans to rob a London bank; the work was published as 15 Lombard St., 2000. In 2014, The Common Guild commissioned DOUG, a musical composition of nine songs for six voices, for which Kerbel was nominated for the prestigious Turner Prize. In this cacophonous performance, the title’s fictional character experiences nine imagined catastrophes.

Janice Kerbel’s (b. 1969, Toronto; lives/works: London, England) solo exhibitions include Catriona Jeffries, Vancouver (2022); The Common Guild, Glasgow (2018); Justina M. Barnicke Gallery, University of Toronto (2013); Arts Club of Chicago (2012); Chisenhale Gallery, London (2011); Badischer Kunstverein, Karlsruhe (2011); Tate Britain, London (2010). The work Nick Silver Can’t Sleep was commissioned by Artangel in 2006 with BBC Radio 3 and was performed live at Tate Britain in 2007.

Kerbel’s work has been included in numerous group exhibitions including Southbank Centre, London (2022); Liverpool Biennial (2018); Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (2017); Hamburger Kunsthalle (2017); V-A-C Foundation, Venice (2017); La Biennale de Montréal (2016); Fondazione Antonio Ratti, Como (2016); Tramway, Glasgow (2015); Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto (2014); Museum of Modern Art, New York (2013); Project Arts Centre, Dublin (2012); Kölnischer Kunstverein, Cologne (2012); KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin (2010); and Musée des beaux-arts de Montréal (2006).

Kerbel received an MFA from Goldsmith’s College, University of London and a BFA from Emily Carr College of Art in Vancouver. Kerbel is currently Professor of Fine Art at Goldsmiths College. In 2010, she received an Award for Artists from the Paul Hamlyn Foundation, London, UK and she was a nominee for the 2015 Turner Prize.