Corporeal Biography: S.J Norman

Episode 44

S.J Norman is a multi-award winning artist, writer and curator.

S.J Norman (b. 1984) is a multi-award winning artist, writer and curator. His career has so far spanned 18 years and has embraced a diversity of disciplines and formal outcomes, including solo and ensemble performance, installation, sculpture, text, video and sound.  He is a non-binary transmasculine person and a diasporic Koori of Wiradjuri descent, born on Gadigal land.  Since 2006 he has lived and worked between so-called Australia, Germany, the UK and the continent known to many Native peoples as Turtle Island.

His practice is routed through the volatile interstices of the social and the corporeal. Working extensively with durational and spatial practices, as well as intimate/one-to-one frameworks, Norman's primary medium is the body: the body as a spectacle of truth and a theatre of fantasy; a siphon of personal and collective memory; an organism with which we are infinitely familiar and eternally estranged; a site which is equally loaded and empty of meaning, where histories, narratives, desires and discourses converge and collapse. Norman frequently utilises relational and process-based choreographies as a mode of structural critique: reflected in his work is an abiding interest in the space of co- and inter-corporeality, the forces that suffuse it, and how the live act might be utilised as a mean to examine, disrupt and re-inscribe prevailing systems of social power. Drawing on embodied ancestral lineages of ceremonial praxis, Norman seeks through much of his work to implicate the body of the audience and the body of the performer as co-agents in magickal acts. He has received numerous awards for both his art and his writing, including a Sidney Myer Fellowship and an Australia Council Fellowship, two of Australia's most prestigious honors for art.

In this episode, we discuss the precocity of the body, how death awareness shapes S.Jā€™s view on life and the way being in transit helps him feel most at home and much more.

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My Body is not a Burden: Erica Woodland