Aaron Williamson

Works with Live Art Danmark
2013 “Activating the Wasteland” for Alt_CPH 13 performance program
2014 “Institutional Classics” and “Demonstrating the World” at Hitparaden 2
2023 “Hijacked Songs” at Life Art for Children 2023
2024 “Let Your Hair Down” at Managing Discomfort Festival, and “Outlandish” at Friisland.

Activating the Wasteland
Aaron Williamson collaborated with Live Art Danmark for the first time as part of the performance program for Alt_CPH 13. He showed a site specific, durational piece, “Activating the Wasteland”, that explored an abandoned site on the outskirts of Copenhagen, as a frontier of the city, soon to disappear as it was to be developed with a high rise apartment block.

Institutional Classics
He returned for our performance festival Hitparaden 2 to perform “Institutional Classics” with his band Disabled Avant-Garde, which he founded and fronted together with Katherine Araniello. Aaron performed children’s tunes, with the goal to find out, as he said, if he could remember and recreate melodies he learned as a child, before he turned deaf.

Demonstrating the World
At the same event Aaron presented his solo performance “Demonstrating the World”. The performance, like much of his work, takes a humorous approach to the phenomenon of ‘demo videos’ in which amateur filmmakers demonstrate (or perform) aspects of everyday life, usually on Youtube. For Aaron, the sheer quantity of these videos raises the question: Why and for whom is the world being demonstrated so avidly? For an impending alien invasion? In the ten minute performance you can view on Youtube below, Aaron demonstrated a number of rather basic everyday skills,  including putting on his glasses and zipping a jacket, to a live audience instead of a Youtube camera.

Hijacked Songs
Aaron returned to Copenhagen once again for the 10th anniversary edition of our Live Art for Kids festival. In his wildly entertaining and anarchic karaoke performance he improvised new melodies to popular songs everybody knows – except himself, because he turned deaf in 1990. The performance, besides being a lot of fun, raised important questions about issues like inclusion and memory. What, if anything, remains of the modern day classics that define the identity of generations of pop-afficionadoes in a mind that does not perceive any sounds at all?

Let Down Your Hair
In his performance Let Down Your Hair, deaf artist Aaron Williamson humorously critiques the accessibility of theater spaces, while confronting the audience’s awkwardness and well-meaning pity toward those with disabilities. We presented the piece at Husets Teater in Copenhagen as part of „Managing Discomfort“, a festival we co-curated with Toaster, a Copenhagen based artist’s initiative.

Aaron turns a typical theater challenge into an opportunity. The venue’s top-floor performance space, inaccessible by elevator or ramp, becomes the setting for his provocative work. Inspired by the Grimm Brothers’ ‚Rapunzel’, Williamson lowers a golden-haired sculpture from a window high above to the ground below. He performs the entire story in sign language, with a live interpreter translating his movements into spoken Danish. ‚Let Down Your Hair’ is an invitation to rethink accessibility, audience roles, and the boundaries between performer and spectator.

 Outlandish
Reviving the tradition of his very first piece for Live Art Danmark (see top of this page), Aaron went way out on the artificial tip of Nordhavn, beyond even our project space Friisland, and discovered a muddy bog that sparked his imagination. In a cold and lonely first attempt at land art, he constructed a dam from rocks across this small pond, reminiscent of nature taking back the small slice of land that humans just recently put into the sea. Aaron left his distinctive mark in this ever transforming area between land and sea, before all too soon loaders and caterpillars will arrive to add yet another glitzy block of new housing by the sea to the hip capital of Denmark, as fashionable as unaffordable.

About the Artist
Aaron Williamson is an artist whose engagement with performance, objects, place and space is entirely transformed through the experience of becoming profoundly deaf over the course twenty years. Informed by this radical personal alteration, his art practice takes an interdisciplinary approach. Hence, his artistic projects remain open to innovation according to circumstance and he has explored working with performance, installation, photography, video, sculpture, text, choreography and digital art – often combining elements within one work. In the last ten years he has created performances, publications, installations and artist’s videos in Britain, Europe, Japan, Greenland, China and North America.

Aaron Williamson’s Website.