Catherine Sullivan

For two nights only, Catherine Sullivan presents the New York premiere of her new performance piece Ice Floes of Franz Joseph Land, which developed out of her video installation now on view in the 2004 Whitney Biennial. This is Sullivan's first live performance in New York City, featuring a cast of roughly 30 actors from Chicago's Trapdoor Theater. The piece derives from the novel Two Captains (1944), by Russian writer Veniamin Kaverin. A romantic adventure story about polar aviation and Russian expansion in the Arctic Sea, the book was the basis for the musical Nord-Ost, the play being performed when Chechen terrorists stormed a Moscow theater in 2002 and took the audience hostage. As director, actor, and visual artist, Sullivan emphasizes the expressive potential of physical gesture and conventions of theatrical presentation using this historical incident where the imaginary spectacle of theater confronts a real spectacle of terror.
A co-presentation by Catherine Sullivan, Trapdoor Theater, the Whitney Museum of Art, and the Angel Orensanz Foundation

About the Artist
Catherine Sullivan was born in 1968 in Los Angeles, where she currently lives and works. She received a BFA in 1992 from the California Institute of the Arts and her MFA from the Art Center College of Design in 1997. Her video installation Ice Floes of Franz Joseph Land is currently on view as part of the 2004 Whitney Biennial, and was included in the 2003 Lyon Biennial. Previously she has exhibited at the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, the UCLA Hammer Museum, and had solo exhibitions at Metro Pictures in New York. Her performance work has been presented at independent venues in Los Angeles, Chicago, Tokyo, and the Opera de Lyon, in Lyon, France.