Collaborative team Longva+Carpenter presents Hunger, a new durational performance. Hunger uses the familiarity of the dinner table to isolate and augment the subtext of small talk between intimate pairs. Two women sit motionless, looking at each other from across a bare table. The women are physically connected by a banded form; their arms are linked in a single tube, as if they are wearing one piece of clothing. The knitted band suggests warmth and coziness, but also becomes a shared straitjacket, confining each to the unrelenting mirroring of the other. In this heightened visual metaphor, each woman has only a single sentence to offer. One is desperate for attention and approval (“Is it good?”), the other is withholding (“If I don’t say anything, it’s good”). Each woman is therefore isolated in her proximity to the other. Exploring the myriad relationships between two people: lovers, parent/child, teacher/student, friends, colleagues, clerk/client, Hunger considers all the ways we cannot communicate, but long to connect.

As interdisciplinary artists, Longva+Carpenter share interests in site, time and the body as both material and tool. Through gesture and duration as well as space and intention, the artists explore aspects from the daily life of memories, fears, desires, dreams, identity, and how these might be in opposition to social expectations.

Longva+Carpenter is a collaborative partnership with Norwegian video/performance artist Terese Longva and US performance/installation artist Laurel Jay Carpenter.  Since 2010, the pair has been collaborating to develop new works that utilize both the body and time as material in their investigations of personal longings, feminist ideology and political urgency.