Benjamin Hackman
Listen to: A Note to the Players / Benjy's Education / Benjy in the Supermarket
Benjamin Hackman is an interdisciplinary artist working with performance, poetry and installation as a way to insert narratives into non-traditional spaces.
His work is concerned mainly with early childhood trauma and domestic violence. Through his art he strives to replicate and fabricate trauma in a concentrated and controlled manner, both to serve therapeutic purposes, as well as to satiate a self-deprecating desire to affix himself to childhood. Inspired by a motivation to comprehend those events which contribute to neurotic fantasies and life style choices, Hackman designs psychoanalytic road maps to help us make sense of the gunk inside our heads.
In the process of doing so, he attempts to encourage dialogue about domestic violence and child abuse, and to provide a starting point for other survivors to begin navigating their own narratives, and make sense of their adult lives in the context of their childhoods.
The Benjy Poems is a collection of poetry in-progress funded by the Ontario Arts Council and the Ontario Poetry Society. Additional funding was granted by CUE for the production of eleven theatrical adaptations of The Benjy Poems for the audio stage. These three tracks are an excerpt from that project.
Audio-installations of The Benjy Poems are being exhibited at Art Space, Peterborough, from September 8-October 27, and at the Gladstone Hotel, Toronto, from September 20-September 26.
Credits
Written and directed by Benjamin Hackman
Produced and Engineered by Craig Saltz
The poems were performed by their author with additional voice talent provided by Jess Popeski, Ben Reinhartz, Caitlin Morris-Cornfield, Schön Faria, Sarit Cantor and Bradley Benninger