Oh you’re a performance artist, so…do you like to be the centre of attention?

Combing through the grunt archives, artist-researcher Manuele Arias found themselves charmed by the creative, critical, and cranky statements made by performance artists to describe themselves and their practices in the early 1990s. As an MFA candidate (and native Spanish speaker), Manuele knows that the struggle to talk about your work is real, so they have created a ready-to-print zine with excerpts from some of their favourite artist statements of grunt-yore. Artist statements in the zine include words from Percy Lezard, Sandra Lockwood, Iris Moore, Lowell Morris, Oliv, Judy Radul, and Diane Wood.

Please download, print, fold, cut, read, be inspired, share, and enjoy this zine, Oh you’re a performance artist, so… do you like to be the center of attention? from the grunt gallery archives. 

Manuele Arias is a Colombian artist based in Vancouver working primarily in performance. Their practice explores endurance, physicality, and identity in response to systems of violence and oppression. Engaging found objects – especially stones – as collaborators, they confront cultural and bodily binaries through acts of discomfort, intensity, and resistance. Through sustained physical endurance and public acts of vulnerability, Arias positions the body as a site of both pain and defiance. Rooted in queer phenomenology and critical theory, their work transforms suffering into testimony, creating spaces of witnessing that challenge normative structures and insist on the visibility and resilience of queer lives.

Maunele is the 2025 artist-researcher in residence with grunt gallery and the Hemispheric Encounters Performing Archives Stream. They are exploring and engaging with grunt’s archive to learn more about the history of performance art and embodied practice in Vancouver.  @manueleariass