Marilyn Arsem
Seven Disappearances by Marilyn Arsem, photo by Nabil Vega
Arsem has been creating and performing live events for more than forty years and has presented her work in thirty countries around the globe. Based in Boston, Massachusetts, USA, she also teaches performance art workshops internationally.
Many of her works are durational in nature, minimal in actions and materials, and have been created in response to specific sites, engaging with its history, use or politics. Sites have included a former Cold War missile base in the United States, a 15th century Turkish bath in North Macedonia, an aluminum factory in Argentina, the grounds of an abandoned tuberculosis sanatorium in Poland, the site of the Spanish landing in the Philippines, and a deserted Russian mining outpost in the Arctic Circle. Since the pandemic, she has performed online in various festivals, including La Pocha Nostra's Juneteenth 2020 event, How to Survive the Apocalypse.
Arsem established one of the most extensive programs internationally in visually-based performance art at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (SMFA), where she taught for 27 years. Since leaving SMFA in 2014, she has increased her teaching of performance workshops internationally.
In 1975 she founded an interdisciplinary collaborative of artists, incorporating in 1980 as Mobius, Inc., a non-profit, tax-exempt, artist-run organization, with the mission to generate, shape and test experimental art. Mobius has presented work involving thousands of artists over its 40+ year history.
A book on her work, Responding to Site: the performance work of Marilyn Arsem, edited by Jennie Klein and Natalie Loveless, was published in 2020 by Intellect Books of the UK.
Website: <http://marilynarsem.net>
