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The library of emoji art is an ongoing large-scale public art project where hundreds of people unite to create emojis using their own bodies. Each performance is site-specific, designed in collaboration with its community and staged in a public space. Participants include schoolchildren, workers, fire fighters, aged care residents, sports clubs, church groups and businesses. People who would not ordinarily come together, come together to create a work of art.

For each performance, Sylvia brings the community together in workshops to design their emoji, which is then performed in public space. Each performance is paired with the most popular emoji of the year, creating a connection between individual communities and a shared digital culture.

The work asks what it means to communicate in the physical world at a time when so much of our social exchange has migrated online. Creating large-scale analogue versions of digital symbols in the presence of strangers is inherently playful and inherently social.

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The sentiment driving this work is connection. Connection between people and connection with the natural world.

Over 30 people unite in movements to create a large human kaleidoscope, performed under a huge copper beech tree on a meadow of grass and flowers on the grounds of a water-castle. It is a meditative work with an almost spiritual feel. As raindrops fall on the faces of the performers, they share in the experience of connection.

Sylvia creates a body of work that re-presents these feelings. Her 2-channel film transports us back into the performance. One channel is screened on a wall, the other on a ceiling, drawing the viewer into the meadow, the rain, the slow turning of the kaleidoscope above.

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On a Saturday afternoon in Sydney a group of healthy people, including two children fell. They collapsed to the floor. Simultaneously. The fall happened during the opening of an art exhibition in Sydney Australia.

The cause?

A dada inspired work of socially engaged performance art directed by Sylvia, performed by everyday people at Brenda May Gallery.

This short film tells the story of this group of people who only met 30 minutes before the exhibition.

What happened?

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birds and clouds from one life to another by Sylvia Schwenk and German artist Nikola Dicke references Bertolt Brecht’s poem The Lovers, which centres on the lives of a flock of cranes. Over 300 people come together in the German/Dutch border town of Bad Bentheim to watch and participate in the work.

Model airplane performance · Bad Bentheim · 2012

Three model airplane clubs from these two countries fly their planes as a large group, each club with its own distinct choreographed flight set to music composed for the performance. Model airplane pilots typically fly alone, never in formation. Now they fly like a flock.

Origami crane sculptures · 2012

After the model airplane performance, the audience and pilots fold small origami cranes and build large origami crane sculptures. These are later flown over the airfield in a third performance, also set to music. The event ends with a barbeque where connections made during the performances continue.

Origami workshop · 2012

The work draws on the everyday. Model airplanes, origami and shared meals are each familiar pleasures, but not usually experienced together. By combining these through this collective and playful event, birds and clouds from one life to another gives them a new aesthetic quality. Like the cranes in Brecht’s poem, the meaning of the work takes flight when these newly created actions combine.

Extract from publication birds and clouds from one life to another

birds and clouds from one life to another adopts a socio-political approach that simultaneously activates spatial and social processes and negotiates the political and aesthetic field. Art as a moment of revelation, not creating life through imitation or reflecting life’s context to represent content, but to be aware of the reality of life. Art not as a tangible physical representation, but as a way of thinking.

Florian Waldvogel, 2012, published in birds and clouds from one life to another: a project by Sylvia Schwenk and Nikola Dicke — Waldvogel is Director of the Hamburg Kunstverein, Germany

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What happens when a football crowd becomes the art?

At half time during the regional Aussie Rules Grand Final something odd happened. Men, women and children dressed head-to-toe in white overalls jogged single file onto the oval. The suits suggested an emergency but the behaviour was playful. The crowd watched. Children tried to kick balls at them.

The white-suited figures spread across the field. Some lay down tracing the lines of the goal square with their bodies and others stood arms stretched becoming the goal posts. As the crowd watched their bemusement turned to fascination. Their disbelief gave way to a feeling of permission and the crowd ran onto the field and lay down alongside the performers. Together they completely covered the white lines of the centre square.

Over 400 football fans became the work.

Extract from publication Along white lines

The relationship between the artist’s crew of 30 volunteer performers and the public becomes collaborative, the innocent action of lying on the ground one of definition. The football field is a codified space described by lines, distances and boundaries that, without the football teams, becomes a delimited space of possibility. Schwenk’s work is a democratic experience where every step of her process is open to the audience to engage, interact and direct the outcome.

Andrew Frost, Engage, Explore & Evolve, 2012, published in Along white lines — Frost is an art critic, writer and television broadcaster

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A mesmerising film of a man who dances with a lawnmower. He is listening to the music of a harrowingly beautiful waltz as he mows the lawn in an area surrounded by alarmed perimeter fencing and razor wire. The lawn is surrounded by 20 magnificent towering palm trees. It is an oasis in the maximum-security area of the prison, that offers a respite from the confinement of the prison cells and the cold metal surfaces and concrete. It almost seems surreal. The air seems sweeter and fresher here.

The waltz is filled with hope but is underwritten with a score of despair.

Sometimes awful things have their own kind of beauty is both the name of this work and the name of the series it leads. The series is about prisoners and people who were committed in mental asylums. The works consider spaces, lives and environments that are off limits to most of society, and reflect on what performance means for those who live where private and public co-exist.

Also in this series

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One Day I Think I’ll Lend a Hand reflects on our collective desire to help and our equally collective reluctance to act. The work asks what it means to perform as normal, to follow the trends, fashions and lifestyles projected to us on television, at a time when the world needs something more from us.

One Day I Think I’ll Lend a Hand brings together local Germans and refugees from the Middle East and Africa, unified by a communal spirit of making art. The work is created during an artist residency at the Künstlerdorf Schöppingen. Relationships form between a diverse group of people building on what they have in common.

The performers dressed in red tops and black pants are positioned in a grid formation in an outdoor space. Together they perform simple and repetitive synchronised exercises, following Sylvia, also dressed in red and black, in a routine relayed to them via an old TV screen.

What emerges during rehearsals is quietly revealing. Individuals initially group themselves with people who look similar, gravitating toward what feels safe and familiar. As rehearsals progress and the performance takes shape, this distance closes. Four weeks later, at the exhibition showing work from the residency, the same performers greet each other warmly, re-living their shared experience.

One Day I Think I’ll Lend a Hand was performed during an artist residency at the Künstlerdorf Schöppingen, Germany (2009) and adapted and re-performed at Sydney Art Fair, Sydney (2009).

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Everyday people dressed in black with high visibility vests marked Under Surveillance, wearing name badges with only a barcode and number, performed as Officials conducting surveillance. This art intervention masquerading as a real everyday event took place in Martin Place, Sydney at lunchtime during a working day.

The performers photographed and filmed people in public to stimulate awareness of the level of surveillance our society is subjected to. Moving through the crowd and invading people’s personal space, they recorded what people ate, what they said, what they did and who they associated with.

If anyone complained about the surveillance or the invasion of their privacy, they were given a card with only a telephone number they could call to discuss their concerns. No one asked why they were under surveillance, or what would happen to their image.

What does this loss of privacy and loss of freedom that accompanies heightened scrutiny mean for us?