TEMPER #2: LIZ ROSENFELD PRESENTS I LIVE IN A HOUSE WITH A DOOR

I live in a house with a door is a performance work exploring the material of flesh through a narrative of cruising, erotic potential, environmental futures and discursive time.

Rosenfeld explores their flesh as a collaborative material moving in its own time and space. Through dancing with breath and flesh, Rosenfeld culminates this experience with a science-fiction text, where they implicate themself in an erotic cruising scene with an invisible gas called the Shimmer. The Shimmer effects both the physicality and emotionality of their relationship to flesh as material, while also implicating bodies of flesh in questions of climate change, natural disasters, and queer sexuality. Through this work, Rosenfeld arrives at the realisation of their non-binary identity through the materiality of their body, rather than through the marker of her gender. In a resistant relationship to metaphor, Rosenfeld collaborates and experiments with their own flesh and the possibilities it presents within its own autonomy and rhythm. In this dialogue with matter, they pose questions of assumption and responsibility regarding environmental shifts, while also offering a body of excess, their own flesh, as an alternative energy source for a future. The title for this work references the text, 'Time is a thing a body moves' through by T Fleischmann. 

The FULL iteration of this work PREMIERED in 2022 at The Anti Festival, Koupio, Finland as part of the Short List Live Art Prize in which Liz Rosenfeld was nominated for.

Text Written about ‘I Live In a House With a Door’ by The Short List Live Art Prize Jury for the 2022 Anti Festival
Prize Jury: Robin Deacon, Anna Teuwen and Gabi Ngcobo

"Breath, body and desire… to watch Liz Rosenfeld’s performance is a pleasure, a gift, a revelation. In all our interactions with this body of work, the jury was taken by Liz’s special ability to create co-presence as a caring practice. The bond between the audience and those performing was often tangible, both in the documentation and the live experience of the work. This is alongside a sense of community generated in their methods of working – a collaborative ethos is clearly central to their practice.

In conversation with the jury, Liz spoke of a pleasure in “building a body of work over your whole life.” As well as a beautifully constructed portfolio, they shared a phenomenally well written piece of text with us on the practice of cruising that was incredibly effective in the way their voice merged with, and emerged from the writing. That this kind of pleasurable melding of voice and text is central to Liz’s practice was also apparent in their performance for ANTI, I live in a house with a door.

The jury were impressed and moved by their sensual use of the body as material, that gave vivid, touching and unexpected images to seemingly unimaginable feelings. That there still remained the possibility for humour in Liz’s work was refreshing, particularly in relation to the depictions of risk and danger (both covert and overt) that have come into play in much of their work."

CREATED AND PERFORMED by Liz Rosenfeld
With an excerpt from the short film " What's at the Bottom?" by Liz rosenfeld, featuring the voice of Jón Albert Méndez

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PERFORMANCE DATE
Friday 17th October 7.30pm 

LOCATION
Temperance Hall, Main Hall
199 Napier Street, South Melbourne 

ACCESSIBILITY 
Wheelchair accessible
 

CONTENT
Nudity, sexual content

TICKETS 
$25 Full
$20 Concession

Liz Rosenfeld is a Temperance Hall TEMPER Artist for 2025. 

Liz Rosenfeld is a Berlin/London based interdisciplinary artist and educator who works with performance,moving images, drawing and experimental writing practices. Liz addresses the sustainability of emotional and political ecologies, cruising methodologies, past and future histories in regard to the ways in which memory is queered. Liz's work deals with flesh as a non-binary collaborative material, specifically focussing on the potentiality of physical abundance and excess, edging questions regarding the responsibility and privilege of taking up space. Embracing an auto- theoretical style, Liz's writing is rooted in questions that contend with how queer ontologies are grounded in variant hypocritical desire(s.) Liz's inaugural book "Crossings: Creative Ecologies of Cruising," co- authored with Professor João Florêncio, was recently released in April by Rutgers University Press. Liz has shown work in international museums and venues including The Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, The Forum Expanded Program of the 2022 Berlinale, Anti-festval, Bärenzwinger Berlin, Mousonturm, Tanzhaus nrw, Kampnagel, 2019 Bergen Assembly,Berlinischer Galerie, Mapa Teatro, Sophiensæle, The Hebbel am Ufer Theatre, The Gorki Theater, Arts Admin, Galerie Emanuel Layr, The Tate Modern, The Hammer Museum, The Leslie Lohman Museum, The Barbican Centre, The CAC- Glasgow, Tramway, The Stedelijk Museum, The C/O Gallery, and The Deutsches Historisches Museum. Liz’s short films are represented by Video Data Bank and LUX Moving Image. Liz received an MFA in Performance from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2005, followed by an MA from The Department of Performance Studies at New York University in 2007. Liz is slated to commence their PhD research at the Ruskin School of Art, University of Oxford, in 2026.

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TEMPER is a new program inviting 3 choreographic artists/collaborations to develop and show new choreographic work at Temperance Hall, while in residence on-site in the Apartment Studio.

Bringing experimental, radical art/work/ideas/experiences/research/perspectives/practices/dances from farther afield to share with local audiences at Temperance Hall.

#1 Martin Hansen (Melbourne/Berlin): August

#2 Liz Rosenfeld (Berlin/London): October

#3 Juliet Widyasari Burnett (Gold Coast) and Ishvara Devati (Jakarta): November

TEMPER is supported by Creative Australia, the Australian Government's principal arts investment and advisory body.