Nina Arsenault Performance
AVAILABLE FOR BOOKINGS / PERFORMANCES:
Nina Arsenault is a Toronto based multi-disciplinary artist. She has worked in live performance, video art, photography, writing and popular national media to explore her continuing real life physical and psychic transformations. These performances and self-objectifications do much more than document her transsexual transition and the 60+ surgical procedures she has undergone in an unreasonable and heroic quest for beauty and femininity. They confront the audience with uneasy questions about the power of the image to transform reality, the interrelatedness of the body and the spirit, and the radical potentialities of womanhood. Furthermore, Nina’s work illuminates surprising paradoxes about the pains, pleasures privileges and powers she has taken from reinventing and embodying archetypes like the phallic woman, the empty vessel, woman as object, woman as art, and the sacred whore.
Her plays The Silicone Diaries and I was Barbie have travelled nationally to sold out houses and critical raves. Her performance art pieces (40 Days + 40 Nights; Working Towards a Spiritual Experience, Ophelia/Machine and Narcissism Will Heal the Sick –OR– For Every Time You Shattered Me I Made Myself Again) have been called “a spiritual gift” and “as stunning as they are ruthless.”
In 2012, Intellect Book published TRANS(per)FORMING Nina Arsenault: An Unreasonable Body of Work, edited by Judith Rudakoff, a scholarly exploration of her life and art by 13 international artists and critics.
Nina’s video art collaborations (Plane of Immanence, Guadalajara Mexico City, Oh Superstar) have shown internationally.
She is currently developing a new theatre piece, as an Artist-in-Residence at Buddies in Bad Times Theatre, called The Raping of Cleopatra / Love Letters for Anthony.
Her work has been called “profoundly moving,” “absolutely unforgettable,” “brutally honest,” and “as stunning as it is ruthless.”