This website is a portfolio site for artist, Charity Be. It is as much a space for sharing thoughts, studies and ideas relating to Be’s artistic praxis, as it is for sharing finished work.
biography
An embodied sculptor, Charity Be works four-dimensionally with video, sound, objects, space and gesture, to compose environments, score performative work and make sculpture. Drawing upon philosophical texts and field research, Be works contextually and often site-specifically to activate a deeper awareness for interconnectedness and is motivated not only to compose the experiential landscape, but importantly, to engage the sensory perceptions of the audience multiplicitly.
Approaching this potentiality of experiences in body space through scale, with a curiosity that is akin to a pulsation, I am looking for how and where energies are transferred. These energetic boundaries relate also to the hegemony of relationships and infrastructures which I see as the underlying consideration in my work. Where to encourage; where to interrupt.
Employing both digital and analogue tools to undress the liminal spaces between the infosphere and the biosphere and the tensions for the body worked out there, I seek through art to offer potential solutions towards sustainability, if not, to borrow the phrase from Deleuze and Guattari, a re-territorialization.
Be has a professional background in film and television, as well as in sound and movement arts. She also spent many years learning and practicing permaculture-influenced urban farming while working in tech-dependent professions. The tension of a push and pull between the body and machine, the felt and the conceptual plays a pivotal role in her work. Charity Be has worked and exhibited internationally, including in California USA, Korea and Germany. She has also participated in international arts residencies. Charity holds a BFA in Intermedia Art from Mills College, Oakland, California (2017) and an MFA from Massachusetts College of Art and Design, Boston, Massachusetts (2022). Hailing originally from Chicago, Illinois, Be is a modern nomad who, after many years in Oakland, California is now based full-time in Berlin, Germany.
Lebenslauf
See also, Now, A Manifesto