VestAndPage

Since 2006, artist Verena Stenke and artist and writer Andrea Pagnes have been working internationally as VestAndPage in performance art, film, publishing, and temporary artistic community projects for generative inquiry and collective imaginings. Artists of the tender collaborations, VestAndPage have explored performance art and filmmaking as phenomena through their transdisciplinary art practice, artistic research and curatorial projects for over a decade. Embodying philosophical and queer feminist thought, they have produced performance-based art and films, among others, at critical sites under Antarctic glaciers, the Himalayan foothills, military enclaves, on vulcanos or in cave systems. They move between embodiment and research, the unseen and the unforeseen, the oppressed and unspoken, the forgotten and the repressed. Their art practice focuses on art's liminal, spectral and ritual nature and in an ongoing poetics of relations, they move through speculative encounters with bodies of humans, nonhumans and sites.

Their art and curations have been presented worldwide at exhibitions, festivals and conferences, from month-long performance walks to 24-hour durational performances. They have received various recognitions, including the Robert Schuman Silver Medal for European Unity (1990) and Best Film at the Berlin Independent Film Festival (2018). Performances and exhibitions include the Museum of Fine Art Leipzig, Museum of Contemporary Art Belgrade, National Gallery of Albania, Sculpture Quadriennale Riga, Prague City Gallery, MEET Digitual Cultural Centre Milan, State Museum of Contemporary Art Thessaloniki, Oostend Art Triennial, Arnolfini Bristol, Akbank Sanat Istanbul, Museo Universitario del Chopo Mexico City, Museo de Arte Tigre Buenos Aires, Taipei Artist Village, Museum of Contemporary Art Caracas, Biennial of Young Artists from Europe and the Mediterranean and the European Cultural Centre in Venice.

Since 2012, they have been the co-founders, artistic directors and curators of the Venice International Performance Art Week, the referential platform for exhibition, production and education of performance art, and presidents of the non-profit cultural association EntrAxis, which promotes interdisciplinary and intercultural social practices that focus on bodies and sites. They were lead coordinators and curators on the Creative Europe supported project DigiLabAiR which promoted inclusion, participation, and reflection through performance art and live art co-creation processes in a hybrid online artist-in-residence mode.