CV
b. Semaphore, South Australia
Lives & Works in Finland
rebekah_rousi(at)yahoo.com.au
Biography
Personal history
Rebekah Rousi, born Rebekah Ann Pitman, was born in a small city called Adelaide in a place named South Australia. Rousi’s artistic career spans from 1998, when as a painter, she exhibited extensively throughout Central Finland. After attending art school from 2001-2004 her ideas of art had changed. Rousi was encouraged to take up printmaking due to both the fact that it was fun to do, in addition to the fact that she simply loved the lecturers.
Early works
Rousi began to perform art, instead of simply making it in 2004 after being told by a consultant that her movements are much more interesting than her prints. So, she began with creating a solo piece called David: from where I stand which was subsequently performed at the spECtrUm Project Space, Western Australia, where she was undertaking a studio residency agreement.
Shortly after David, Rousi assisted performance artist Lorraine Corker in one of her White Woman performances at Terminal, a festival of live art (2004). Another performance of the same period was A Great Way to Fly a collaboration with Brandon Chen, as a part of the Putting on an Act festival at the Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts, Western Australia.
The Researcher
In 2004 Rousi also started working on The Researcher [hyperlink]. Rousi began forming a character called The Researcher by doing photographic performances in the storeroom studio at spECtrUm, positioned with a laptop amongst cobwebs, an earth floor and a bathroom hand basin. The Researcher started expanding into satirical prints of book covers and newsletters of academic associations. These prints and a website were created in preparation for The Lecture a multi-media performance to have been held in a 300 seat lecture theatre at the Edith Cowan University, Western Australia.
After The Lecture was cancelled (due to concern for it being in an academic environment) Rousi became determined to completely immerse herself, as a performer, in academia. Academia in the form of lectures, seminars and conferences, was the training ground and gateway into developing The Researcher as a fully fledged academic. The Researcher, Miriam Blakely (alias Rebekah Rousi) has now completed a Masters Degree in cultural studies, in commencing a PhD, and has appeared at numerous conferences (see Conference Performances on CV). To extend her repertoire, The Researcher has become ever more competitive, and has taken the leap into delivering The Longest Lecture Marathon which will be increased by half an hour every time it is performed.
Artist direction
As an artist Rousi is interested primarily in observing the human condition(s), her work aims at identifying and recreating social interactions such as those taking place when one is part of a crowd, and those taking place in formal environments such as classrooms, lecture theatres and business meetings. Socially constructed frames of hierarchy and exclusivity, combined with the restructuring of language as an attempt to restructure societal thought (i.e. the concept of lifelong learning) are at the heart of her investigation.
