Fenja Abrams
Livia Xie
Sierra Hendrix
Rana San
Eleanor Kipping
Katie Jacobson
Olga Rabetskaya
Dan Friday
TEAM
Rosemary McGeady
Alex Nystrom
Jessa Carter
Jillayne Hunter
Marlys Yvonne
Kim Upstill
Monica Kerr
Kate O'Day
ABOUT
Yellow Fish aims to bring awareness to the significance and study of time through cultural practices and artistic mediums, while facilitating community involvement in the historical and contemporary thought surrounding Durational Performance.
Yellow Fish Festival provides an organized platform for innovation and experimental curation of Durational Performance that supports the exploration of time in constructed actions and ideas. The adaptable festival format supports inquiry within movement, sound, taste, clothing, language, environment, and time as concept and material in performance.
The festival provides support for professional local, national, and international artists to gather, generate, and present duration-based performance in diverse venues and spaces. An extension of the festival is a digital archive of research, writings, reflections, and documentation of past artists, presenters, and curators.
Yellow Fish is currently run by Babette DeLafayette Pendleton.
In sync with the fluid like nature of Yellow Fish, the festival is supported, made whole, and made possible by a collection of different people each year. The growing community of artistic and administrative organizers impact the shape, scale, and tone of each festival. Alongside the artists, the team members working within each festival push their own durational limits, and cultivate care based methods of working that have a direct influence on the present and future Yellow Fish.
All Photographs on this page are taken by Jillayne Hunter. Photos feature artists and work from the 2018 festival
Under the direction of founder, Alice Gosti (Italy/Seattle), Yellow Fish presented four festivals from 2013-2017 which aimed to present Durational Performances lasting a minimum of an hour and a maximum of 48 hours.
Each artist who participated in a previous editions of Yellow Fish // Epic Durational Performance Festival nominated an artist for the following edition. From the database created with the nominations, Alice Gosti, began to build a roster of artists representing a wide range of mediums which made sure the festival allowed for a peculiar variety of creators, some who may have never engaged with Durational Performance.
In 2018, under the new leadership of Babette DeLafayette Pendleton, Yellow Fish presented its fifth festival. Artistic/curatorial direction and administrative support took place in collaboration with Jillayne Hunter, Marlys Yvonne, and Jessa Carter. The festival altered its core curation by placing an emphasis on time that could be of any length. This broke through the constraint that durational work inherently means long. The fifth festival enhanced the durational aspect of Yellow Fish by pushing the festival to involve continuous performances throughout its five day run.The festival’s curation included music, film, food, and fashion with the aim to integrate and represent these mediums within a Durational Performance platform.
HISTORY
Beginning in 2019, under the umbrella of the MICA MFA Curatorial Practice program, Babette utilized the program's resources to interrogate the purpose of Yellow Fish, re-envisioning its viability as a platform for Durational Performance Art. This intensive period focused on ways to include space for curatorial investigations rooted in artistic experimentation, research-driven exhibitions, archiving practices, sustainable collaborations, and audience engagement.
In 2020, Yellow Fish experimented with duration on a programmatic level through a nine month long festival which took place from October 2020 through May 2021. Selected artists, comprised of a nine person cohort, participated in a collective experience emphasizing and expanding upon Care Methodologies in respect to the time and in response to the festival theme: To Stay Alive /| You Must be Live. The artists collaborated with co-curators, Eleanor Kipping (NYC), Rana San (Seattle), and Babette Pendleton (DC) to design a long-form engagement with the festival in consideration of their durational practice. The festival concluded with in person performances held at Coffey Street Studios in Brooklyn, NYC.