Daniela Beltrani (b. 1968, Rome, Italy) is an artist based in Singapore. In 2011 she attained her Master of Arts in Contemporary Asian Art Histories from LASALLE College of the Arts, Singapore. She also holds 500-hour Yoga instructor, Sound practitioner, and Mindfulness coach certificates. In 2018 she attained a Graduate Diploma in Applied Positive Psychology.
Since 2010 Daniela has led solo and group exhibitions, and contributed articles for art publications, and catalogues with a focus on contemporary art in Southeast Asia, and performance art.
Early in 2011, sensing a gap in her studies of art, she embarked on an experiential journey in performance art to enhance her research, and this art form became her preferred form of artistic expression. Since then she has been organising performance art events, in Singapore and abroad, and presenting over 90 performances, in the Philippines, Singapore, Italy, Cambodia, Myanmar, Turkey, Indonesia, Finland, China, Malaysia, India, Mexico, and Iran. In 2011, she also set up S.P.A.M. (Self Performance Art Meetings), a performance art platform.
Daniela intends to promote an experience of art that is non-elitist, and can offer opportunities for alternative and more visceral readings, and reflections. She favours marginal spaces, where she feels she could recover the authenticity and connectedness between art and life, that she regretfully finds missing in most main-stream and market-oriented encounters. Benefitting from a strong humanistic background, and ongoing research on human nature and spirituality, her efforts encourage the audience of her performances into a more holistic experience of art, as a means to cultivate their own individual sense of aesthetics, and to recover their humanity and interconnectedness beyond the flimsy parameters of a decadent and materialistic society.
Her wholesome approach to performance art – as performer, spectator, photographer, and writer – allows her to explore this malleable art form, in the awareness that its very practice informs its elusive definition.
Her continuing research into and practice of yoga enrich her repertoire. More recently, she has expanded her artistic practice to include knowledge and insights from mindfulness, and positive psychology.
Her latest series, From Human Doing to Human Being, has the intentions of facilitating a meaningful encounter between artist and audience, and of eliciting an audience response from levels of consciousness beyond mind, intellect, and ego, with a view to recover our sense of true self, through actions of meditative quality, carried out mindfully, in repetition, stillness, silence, and/or non-verbal communication.
During her time in the studio, Daniela will be making connections with the school community. This is what she has proposed:
The THEME I chose will be self-awareness (the gnothi seauton of Greek tradition).
The inspiring IMAGE will be the Narciso painting, attributed to Caravaggio and exhibited at Palazzo Barberini, Roma, Italy. See above.
The ELEMENT from nature will be water.
The MENTOR will be the Stoic emperor Marcus Aurelius (Meditations).
The BOOK I plan to read during this time in relation to the theme is The Hero With a Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell.
Daniela will be in the studio from the 2nd of May and until early June. There will be plenty of public time where she will be happy to share with the children, the teachers and the general public. Do stay tuned as we inform you of her schedule over the next few days, as well as document her adventures alongside the children go Blue House International School.
L'Observatoire 