Through my life situation, I lived and worked in different locations and countries – among others,
Germany, Ireland, Spain, The Netherlands, Argentinia, Australia, India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Myanmar China, Taiwan, Armenia and Russia. This kind of life style and art career I had at the end had a great impact on my creative vision and concepts as an artist. To be on the move, curiosity of crossing borders, feeling like nowhere was home, and a certain restlessness became an important source of inspiration. Themes in my work include identity, relationships (between humans and humans’-environment), transition, boundaries, being lost, loneliness, sexual issues, inner strife, experiences of time, destruction, and death. Accordingly, I pay close attention to the candid subtle details within the environments we create and live in. My interpretations are, in the end, embedded experiments through changing observations and analysis of our visible and non visible environments and human behaviours.
Since 2014 I try out different video and life performance concepts. Much of my work has emerged as collaborative projects, working together for example with the DFT Stage theater group from St. Petersburg, solo dancer Tsai Hsin-Ying and performance artist Kao Yu-I (both from Taiwan). At the beginning, I was more in charge as the Author / Director. Over the time, however, I actively began to participate as well in the performance, increasingly playing the role of performance artist – very often in collaboration with other artists, groups of students or general public. In several of my projects, the naked body plays an important role. The desicion here was to underline the subjects of body awareness, the relationships with the social and natural environment around us and maybe most importantly, the vulnerability of humans respectively with ourselves.
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Johannes Gerard was born in 1959, and currently lives in The Hague, Netherlands and Berlin, Germany. Gerard studied at Dun Laogharie School of Art , (IADT) Dublin, Ireland, and since 1981 participated in exhibitions and art festivals in Europe, Asia, Australia, North and Southamerica and Africa. In 2007, photography, installation, printmaking became the main disciplines. In 2012 arrived the first video installations, followed by first films in 2014/15. In the same period, Gerard became interested in performance arts. Since 2014 several video and performance collaboration projects with artists from Taiwan, Russia, Netherlands and Germany were conducted. In 2017 Gerard developed the performance workshop Unfolded & Unwrapped.