Arturo Vidich

Biography

Since 2003, Vidich’s performance work has been presented in New York by The Chocolate Factory, New Museum, Abrons Art Center, Facade/Fasad, Dorkbot NYC, Brucennial 2010: Miseducation, SITE Fest, Danspace Project at St. Mark’s Church, Movement Research, Catch Series, Dixon Place, Chashama, and AUNTS; and in LA at AT1 Projects. In 2008, Vidich was awarded a Movement Research Artist Residency. In 2007, Vidich was awarded the International Artist Residency at the Red Stables, Dublin, Ireland. In the same year, he co-founded Culture Push, a non-profit arts organization that brings together diverse professionals to share knowledge and resources (culturepush.org). Through Culture Push, he has initiated a collaborative open- source residency, called Genesis Project, for artists who work or want to work with or through the body. Vidich has collaborated and performed with Deborah Hay, Yvonne Meier, Daria Faïn, Allison Farrow, Ishmael Houston-Jones, Hari Krishnan, Lower Lights Collective, Christopher Williams and Nami Yamamoto, and Aki Sasamoto. In 2010, Vidich recieved a “Bessie” (New York Dance and Performance Award) for his collaboration on Yvonne Meier’s Stolen. Vidich has a degree in Dance from Wesleyan University, and has a graduate degree from the Interactive Telecommunications Program at NYU's Tisch School of The Arts.

Artist Statement

Arturo Vidich’s work consists of open-ended stories that are completed and complicated by active spectators. He uses actions, objects and video to prompt urgency of thought in unpredictable encounters. Improvisation is essential to his artistic practice. Guided by the concept of ‘becoming-animal’, Vidich operates under the belief that to examine human-animal relationships is to reach understanding of ourselves as cognitive beings, biological substances and kinesthetic potential. The result is an artwork where spectators face a collapsed set of poetic, informative, enticing impulses that resonate with their own history. Many of Vidich’s projects demand learning new skills or taking on apprenticeships, thus the nature and format of his work shifts depending on the project at hand. This holistic process, in addition to Vidich’s life long interest in non-human animals, led him to work as a veterinary technician for three years, and achieve a certificate in dog training. The experiences he had while working closely with animals, and their associated people, have been an endless well of material for his process as an artist.