Performing Entities presents current performances by artists of international standing, whose work will be addressed in a three-day programme of workshops and discussions. The symposium updates the dialogue on the blurred areas at the borders between subject and object, sculpture and performance, scientificity and subjectivity, language and body. Performing Entities observes the crossing lines between man and machine and enters the world of things and animals beyond the human.
The artists present non-academic proposals which position the performative state outside the bounds of any clear classification. Artist, observer and artwork revisit their relationship.
With Alex Bailey (UK), Luke Baio (UK), Dominik Grünbühel (AT), Anne Juren (FR/AT), Krõõt Juurak (EE), Hanne Lippard (GB), Michikazu Matsune (JP/AT), Shana Moulton (US), Rabih Mroué (LB), Andrea Spreafico (IT/NO), Kris Verdonck (BE) und Georg Winter (DE), invited by Peter Wendl (AdBK Nuremberg) & Arne Forke (theatre director, dramaturge, producer, curator).
PROGRAMME
Wednesday, 24 January 2018
Academic/Non-Academic
Shana Moulton – Workshop
Rabih Mroué – Sand in the Eyes / A non-academic lecture – performance
Michikazu Matsune – Dance, if you want to enter my Country! – performance
Anne Juren – Studies on fantasmical anatomy – performance
Thursday, 25 January 2018
Subject/Object
Kris Verdonck – Workshop
Shana Moulton – Workshop
Peter Wendl – Performing Entities – performance
Georg Winter – Nemzeti Golyo Táncok – National ball dances – performance
Krõõt Juurak & Alex Bailey – Performances for Pets – performance
Luke Baio and Dominik Grünbühel – Ohne Nix – performance
Kris Verdonck – Presyncope – performance
Kris Verdonck – Dancer#1 – performance
Friday, 26 January 2018
Language
Hanne Lippard – Workshop
Krõõt Juurak & Alex Bailey – Workshop
Shana Moulton – the magical line where your appearance flips over into reality – workshop presentation
Hanne Lippard – Reading – performance
Shana Moulton – This organ wants this, that organ wants that – performance
8.30 pm Andrea Spreafico – What a classic is and how it performs in (our) time. Paul McCarthy, Rocky, 1976 – performance
Anne Juren: Studies on fantasmical anatomy
Fantasmical anatomies names an ongoing experiment that departs from a teaching somatic method and expands it towards an experimental-aesthetic-speculative dimension. It takes from the somatic method the notion that the brain is a corporeal-symptomatic matrix that offers a sense of orientation to the body. In Fantastical anatomies, Anne Juren proposes instead disorientation as an experimental way to reestablish unsuspected and improbable relations between body and mind, imagination and sensation, experience and language, action and non-action. In the end, Fantastical anatomies may lead to the discovery that neither the body nor the brain are necessarily localizable entities -- and how from a somatic-poetic con-fusion new possibilities of producing and creating movement can emerge.
Anne Juren born in Grenoble/ France is a dancer and choreographer based in Vienna. She studied dance at the Conservatoire Supérieur National de Danse in France and at the Trisha Brown Dance Company in New York. In 2003, she co-founded together with the visual artist Roland Rauschmeier the association Wiener Tanz- und Kunstbewegung in Vienna. Her choreographic works and artistic researches have been extensively presented in international theatres, festivals, and different international art spaces and galleries. In her work and through her practice Juren emphasizes matter, desires, phantasms and actions in engaging the body in different states of fantastical, sensorial, kinaesthesic and physical experiences, questioning the boundaries between the public and the private. Since 2013, Anne Juren is a Feldenkrais® practitioner. She is currently a member of the artistic committee for the Master in Choreography at DOCH and is a PhD candidat at UNIARTS Stockholm University of the Arts. www.wtkb.org
Krõõt Juurak: Performances for Pets
The artistic duo Krõõt Juurak and Alex Bailey have been performing for pets since 2014 and will talk about how their practice of performing for pets has developed over the years, how entertainment of pets compares to human entertainment, the differences between audiences across species and how art for pets might be a common thing in the future, just like art for children is now. Performances for Pets are interspecies performances specifically designed for various species of pets. The course of the performance is open-ended depending on the reactions from the animal-audience. Accordingly, the performances are to be understood as a direct and unpredictable form of communication: an offer that the animals can also withdraw from. The pets as recipients also reverse the traditional roles of animals being trained to entertain humans. Juurak and Bailey try to find a zone of indiscernibility between the human and the nonhuman, suggesting a de-anthropomorphisation of their relationships in favour of assuming similarities regarding the life and sensemaking quest of animals and artists.
Krõõt Juurak (Estonia) and Alex Bailey (UK) are artists and performers working and living in Vienna. They received there MFA from the Sandberg Institute of Fine Arts in Amsterdam. Their recent performance collaborations include Animal Jokes (for Animals) performed at Secession, Vienna, Xing, Bologna and Bonnefanten Museum Maastricht, Animal Show performed at WUK Performing Arts, Vienna and since 2014 Performances for Pets which has been performed at various homes and institutions in Zürich, Amsterdam, Brussels, Erlangen, Vienna, Ravensburg, Tallinn and Berlin. They have also been the subject of a VICE interview feature.
Hanne Lippard
Hanne Lippard was born in Milton Keynes/UK (Nationality Norwegian). Currently the artist is living and working in Berlin. From 2006 until 2010 she studied Graphic Design at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie, Amsterdam. Mainly she’s working with language examining the differences between written and spoken word in variable media. Over the years she had a lot of solo and group exhibitions all over the world: Glasgow, Berlin, Sofia, Warsaw, Texas etc. In 2016 she won the ars viva, Kulturkreis der deutschen Wirtschaft and in 2012 the Goldrausch Künstlerinnenprojekt art IT. In addition to that she had a residency at the Goethe Institute Prague in 2017.
Michikazu Matsune: Dance, if you want to enter my country
Earth is a sphere. Almost. There are little cracks here and there. With his performance Dance, if you want to enter my country! and the associated exhibition, Vienna-based performance artist Michikazu Matsune addresses our modern globalised society with all its entanglements and contradictions and the physical and psychological barriers that exist on all levels.The starting point for the project is a story the American modern dance artist Abdur Rahim Jackson experienced on his world tour with the famous Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater in 2008. When he arrived at Tel Aviv Airport, immigration officers showed him to an extra room where they subjected him to meticulous examination. Then they asked him to dance for them in that room. By doing so, he was supposed to prove that dancing was actually his profession and thereby allay any suspicion his Muslim first name had raised. In Dance, If You Want to Enter My Country!, Michikazu Matsune approaches this utterly bizarre but true story in a highly personal manner. The performance sheds a new light on the dark side of globalisation paranoia with its suspicion profiling and surveillance craving. Michikazu Matsune’s works meander between dance, performance and visual art and are often characterised by absurdist approaches and subtle humour. For brut, Matsune has produced quite a number of projects in the past few years, most recently the performance Objective Point of View in collaboration with his Russian fellow artist Maxim Ilyukhin.
Michikazu Matsune was born 1973 in Kobe, Japan, and lives in Vienna, Austria. He is an artist working in various medias such as live-performance, installation, photography and video. His works reflect our contemporary society with a sense of subversive humor and poetical irony. Having his background in contemporary dance and choreography, Matsune often explores relations between body and objects, words and action, space and behavior, the performer and the audience. His works have been presented widely in various contexts such as on stage, in exhibitions, in public and private spaces. Matsune has also been teaching performance and choreography a.o. at HZT Berlin and at SEAD Salzburg.
Shana Moulton: This organ wants this, that organ wants that
Artist Shana Moulton interacts with a video projection of her own making. Using office toys, lava lamps, commercial jingles and live and active cultures she attempts to harmonize her organs and sing structures into existence. Within her attempts, seemingly mundane objects - electric blankets, misting humidifier lamps, Crystal Light diet beverage powder - act as portals into Cynthia's subconscious, where her quest for self-realization is explored through elaborate, hallucinatory sequences.
Shana Moulton lives and works near Yosemite, California. Over the past 15 years the artist has been developing her ongoing video/performance series Whispering Pines, in which she plays the role of "Cynthia", both a fictional figure and the artist's alter ego. Moulton has had solo exhibitions or performances at MoMA, The New Museum, Performa 2009, The Kitchen, Electronic Arts Intermix, Art in General, SmackMellon, The Andy Warhol Museum, SFMOMA, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, The Hammer Museum, MOCA Cleveland, The Wexner Center for the Arts, The Museum of Fine Arts in St. Petersburg, Palais De Tokyo in Paris, The Migros Museum in Zurich, Kunsthaus Glarus, Fondazione Morra Greco in Naples and the Times Museum in Guangzhou. Moulton's work has been reviewed in the Village Voice, Artforum, The Brooklyn Rail, The New York Times, Artnet Magazine, Frieze Magazine, Art Review, Artpress, Flash Art and The Fresno Bee. She is a featured artist at Electronic Arts Intermix and Art21.
Rabih Mroué: Sand in the Eyes. A non-academic lecture by Rabih Mroué
Rabih Mroué explores the image politics of Islamist recruiting videos. These videos are characterized by formats and image styles that correspond with popular viewing habits among youth growing up in Europe, while deliberately testing the limits of what one wants to see and stomach. Based on research material comprised of recruiting videos secured by the officers of the German Intelligence Services, Mroué asks not only what these videos reveal about their producers or the videos’ capacity to engage young people for the means of Islamist propaganda, but also questions the politics inherent in dealing with these propaganda videos from the point of view of the state and society.
Rabih Mroué was born in Beirut, Lebanon, in 1967. The artist currently lives in Berlin. Rabih Mroué is a theatre director, actor, visual artist and playwright. Rooted in theatre, his work includes videos and installation art; the latter sometimes incorporates photography and texts. Mroué is a contributing editor for TDR/The Drama Review. He is also a cofounder of the Beirut Art Center (BAC). He was a fellow at The International Research Center: Interweaving Performance Cultures, Freie Universität, Berlin (2013–14). He is a theatre-director at Münchner Kammerspiele. Mroué’s works include Rima Kamel (2017), Ode to joy (2015), Riding on a cloud (2013), 33 rpm and a few seconds (2012), The pixelated revolution (2012), The inhabitants of images (2008), Who’s afraid of representation? (2005), among others. He has performed and exhibited internationally, including at the Museum of Modern Art, New York (2015); SALT Galata and SALT Beyoğlu, Istanbul (2014); CA2M Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo, Madrid (2012–13); dOCUMENTA (13), Kassel, Germany (2012); ICP Triennial of Photography and Video, International Center of Photography, New York (2010); and Centre Pompidou, Paris (2007); among others.
Andrea Spreafico: Rocky
What a classic is and how it performs in (our) time. Paul McCarthy, Rocky, 1976 is a long title for a short piece that wants to raise questions on how the concept of classic could be applied to a structurally ephemeral form of art such as performance. The word “classic” has several meanings, it can refer to the greek roman culture (the classics), to romantic music (classical music) or to contemporary cinema (a classic of the 90s), but it always refers to a common patrimony, a sort of public space of culture. What happens to a performance in the moment it becomes a classic? Can performance be considered as public space of culture? How does this condition affect our relation to it? Facing the reasons of reproducing old performances, Spreafico Eckly collaborates this time with dancer and choreographer Sergiu Matis to the re-enactment of Paul McCarthy’s video Rocky. Originally, the video was a provocative parody of the idea of man proposed by the homonymous film and an answer to the performance scene of its time based on staging real, and often dangerous, situations. Our piece though, focusing on its rhythmic composition, treats it as a piece of classical music or as a classical ballet. We transcribed and translated in a new score its random movements in order to be able to re-produce them as a choreography. What a classic is and how it performs in (our) time. Paul McCarthy, Rocky, 1976 is both an academic work as well as a rough, provocative performance. On one hand, the work is a ruder, straighter, more aggressive version of the original video thanks to its “live” quality, on the other hand it will loose its original spontaneity, by being a rigorous 1:1 copy of the original movements.
Andrea Spreafico was born in Ravenna, Italy, in 1976. He studied philosophy in Bologna and Reims (PhD in 2006) and did a post graduate study in Art and Public Space at the Academy of Fine Arts in Nürnberg (2008). He has been a researcher at the University of Bologna (2008-2010) and since 2011 he is a teacher of participatory approaches to urbanism and concept development at the Bergen School of Architecture. He has exhibited internationally, include Details of Love - an exhibition about cars (with D. Baur), Premiss, Bergen; Show (with P. Bergmann), Muffathalle, Munich; Flagg, Entrée, Bergen; f_ommt (with the forschungsgruppe_f), Kunstverein Bamberg; among others.
Kris Verdonck: DANCER #1
A grinding wheel with a big steel 'L' hangs from the ceiling. When the disc starts to turn, the 'L' twirls round uncontrolled. The motor races but still tries to find its equilibrium, still tries to function despite the strangeness of the situation. However the machine does not succeed. It starts to take on the appearance of a classical hero in distress, with movement making the situation become more and more unbearable.
Kris Verdonck: Precyncope
‘Look at the shadows/ An abstract painting/ And that sun/ What a beautiful day/ How wonderfully short life is/ It is so dense that I can see everything clearly now/ Anything that dies has had some kind of aim/ A bit dizzy/ I'm not in the right place/ I cannot rid myself of the feeling that I’m not in the right place/ Time is out of scale/ A lot of space/ That void/ Ridiculous/ I can see myself/ Look at me/ And again that solitude [...]
They are so small/ That's how it will be/ Standing outside my own body/ A body, a head, a forehead/ Touching my own forehead/ Insurance/ Sure
One hopes one did not forget to pay this month/ No/ Security [...]
I would love to slap my forehead/ All clear now/ All light/ All clear [...]
I have never seen a hand with the separate fingers so sharply differentiated from each other/ a face grown quite old out of fear/ And now again/ All over/ Restart
Look at the sun.’
From: PRESYNCOPE (K, a Society)
Kris Verdonck was born in 1974 and studied visual arts, architecture and theatre and this training is evident in his work. His creations are positioned in the transit zone between visual arts and theatre, between installation and performance, between dance and architecture. As a theatre maker and visual artist, he can look back over a wide variety of projects. He directed theatre productions and produced various installations, a.o. 5 (2003), Catching Whales Is Easy (2004), II (2005). The first STILLS, consisting of gigantic projections, were commissioned by La Notte Bianca in Rome. In 2007 he created the theatrical installation I/II/III/IIII, while in 2008 END premièred at the Kunstenfestivaldesarts in Brussels. Verdonck often presents combinations of different installations/performances as VARIATIONS. VARIATION IV was shown during the Festival d’Avignon in 2008. A tour of the adaptation of I/II/III/IIII - in repertoire at ICK Amsterdam - is anticipated at the end of 2017. In September 2017, A Two Dogs Company / Kris Verdonck and Het Zuidelijk Toneel present Conversations (at the end of the world) with actors Johan Leysen, Jan Steen, Jeroen Van der Ven, José Kuijpers and pianist Marino Formenti on stage.
Georg Winter: Nemzeti Golyo Táncok – National ball dances
While the academic performance art scene circles around its own butt, the new Right is creating collective dance and performance choreographies. Border, fence, ball and chain elements characterise the expression of these starkly symbolic performances. We shouldn’t stand for this! With the help of the "Orbit" 1:1 model from Hungary the participants seek to identify, subvert and completely transform Eurofascist performance dynamics. Totally in the spirit of Carl Einstein: "Miracles are a matter of training."
Georg Winter was born in 1962 in Biberach/Riss (D) and lives in Stuttgart, Saarbrücken and Budapest. Georg Winter’s art is characterised by temporary laboratories, urban situations, self-organizing performances, research projects in a cross-disciplinary creative environment. UKIYO CAMERA SYSTEMS has ranked Georg Winter as one of the most important activists of “Expanded media” and spatially related experimental art since the 1980s. Based on the Universität im Koffer [University in a case] Winter has taught at Stuttgart University, Merzakademie Stuttgart since 1994, and the Zurich Academy of Art and Design between 1999-2003. From 2003-2007 he held the chair in Art in Public Spaces at AdBK Nuremberg. Since 2007 he has held chair of Sculpture/ Public Art at HBK Saar. He founded the “forschungsgruppe_f” in Zurich, the “Arbeitsgemeinschaft Retrograde Strategien” Berlin, the “Urban Research Institute” Nuremberg, the “S_A_R Projektbüros” in Völklingen and the “AG AST Arbeitsgemeinschaft Anastrophale Stadt”.
