Performance as Sculpture: Ecstasy of Things
March 13-14 and April 21-23, 2015
Konstfack University and Andquestionmark, Stockholm
“Performance as Sculpture” is a project in progress on performance and the objects it activates by curator Valentina Sansone. Conceived for CuratorLab, Performance as Sculpture: Ecstasy of Things is its second event: a series of two workshops run by artists Benjamin Valenza and Nicole Bachmann, and the students of: Konstfack University College of Arts, Crafts and Design / The Royal Institute of Art / Stockholm University of the Arts (DOCH, School of Dance and Circus). With a screening of video works by Ellie Ga.
The combination of things, performers and audience in the same environment defines a particular mode for the object to be present: it builds up the performative space by affecting its surroundings. By coining the term “ecstasy of the object”, as an attempt to describe how things appear as present, philosopher Gernot Böhme also introduced the concept of ‘space’ as an element originating from primary qualities of an object, such as its extension and form, its sound and smell, the modes through which it acts on the performers and seizes the audience.
If the practices that allow the circulation of the performance make also the performative space expand, what is the new condition of the object/sculpture, and how is it critically assimilated?
Workshop 1:
Benjamin Valenza: Performance Proletarians / Hit the North
Friday 13 March 2015, from 10am to 4.30pm
Konstfack University College of Arts Crafts and Design, room S2
Saturday, 14 March 2015, from 6 to 9pm
Anquestionmark, Stockholm
With “Performance Proletarians / Hit the North”, Benjamin Valenza addresses to issues such as the language and the circulation of ephemeral formats. During a one-night public event, the audience can choose to attend a 3-hour programme “live” at off-space Andquestionmark; streamed “live” online; or both, simultaneously.
Workshop 1: Performance Proletarians/Hit the North! by Benjamin Valenza (Marchl 13, 2015), Konstfack University.
Benjamin Valenza, Performance Proletarians/Hit the North!, 2015. Anquestionmark, Stockholm.
Benjamin Valenza, Performance Proletarians/Hit the North!, 2015. Anquestionmark, Stockholm. Performance by Maria Fjell and Petra Hultman, performed by: Olivia PLender and Jorun Kugelberg.
Benjamin Valenza, Performance Proletarians/Hit the North!, 2015. Anquestionmark, Stockholm. Performance by Nicholas Bates.
Benjamin Valenza, Performance Proletarians/Hit the North!, 2015. Anquestionmark, Stockholm.
Benjamin Valenza, Performance Proletarians/Hit the North!, 2015. Anquestionmark, Stockholm.
All photos: courtesy Sara Linderoth
Workshop 2:
Nicole Bachmann: From text to performance to print
From Tuesday 21 to Thursday 23 April 2015, from 10am to 4.30pm
Konstfack University College of Arts Crafts and Design
From Text to Performance to Print is a workshop about performance and text where language/voice/text is at the core of the work. It takes into consideration the different forms and formats text can inhabit e.g. printed, spoken word, or text-based performance, as well as written text that is performative through its structure or form.
Workshop 2: From Text to Performance to Print by Nicole Bachmann (April 23, 2015), Konstfack University.
Workshop 2: From Text to Performance to Print by Nicole Bachmann. Text and performance by Maria Stiernborg and Kajsa Wadhia (April 23, 2015), Konstfack University.
Workshop 2: From Text to Performance to Print by Nicole Bachmann. Text and performance by Maria Stiernborg and Kajsa Wadhia (April 23, 2015), Konstfack University
Workshop 2: From Text to Performance to Print by Nicole Bachmann. Text and performance by Maria Stiernborg and Kajsa Wadhia (April 23, 2015), Konstfack University
Workshop 2: From Text to Performance to Print by Nicole Bachmann. Text and performance by Maria Stiernborg and Kajsa Wadhia (April 23, 2015), Konstfack University.
Workshop 2: From Text to Performance to Print by Nicole Bachmann. Text and performance by Hanna Kish (April 23, 2015), Konstfack University.
Workshop 2: From Text to Performance to Print by Nicole Bachmann. Text and performance by Emelie Johansson (April 23, 2015), Konstfack University.
From March 13 to May 13, Performance as Sculpture Screening section features a selection of videos by artist Ellie Ga, hosted at the Konstfack Library video room. Meant as a fixed device –opposite to the dynamic structure of the workshop series– this section also presents a selected bibliography of texts proposed by invited artists, critics, curators, choreographer and dancers etc.: a platform for the public to meet, read and discuss.
Ellie Ga, Measuring the Circle, 2013-14. Still from video, 21 mins 45 secs.
Nicole Bachmann mixes text-based performances with objects and sound in order to animate her site-specific installations. Bachmann is the founder of Performance as Publishing (with Ruth Beale), an independent practice-based research project that explores the relationship between the written word and exhibition-making, audio and performance. She lives and works in Zurich and London.
Ellie Ga is researcher at the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm. Her work originates from long-term processes that often depart from a research in situ: a scientific expedition near the North Pole or a marine archeology program at Alexandria University. Her most recent projects (Square, Octagon, Circle, 2012 and The Fortunetellers 2007-2014) include a series of videos, performances, photographs and ephemera, installations, texts and interviews that she organizes into separate subcategories, binding narratives from her routines and involving the public through storytelling. She lives and works in London.
Benjamin Valenza’s performances include sculptures, poetry, literature, and videos. In 2014, he conceived the project Performance Proletarians with artist Lili Reynaud-Dewar: a live broadcast of a 36-hour program of performances. He is the co-founder of Galerie 1m3, an artist-run space based in Lausanne. Valenza lives and works in Rome.
In collaboration with: Anquestionmark, Stockholm; The Royal Institute of Art, Stockholm; and the students of Konstfack University College of Arts, Crafts and Design / The Royal Institute of Art / Stockholm University of the Arts (DOCH, School of Dance and Circus)
Ner|slag – Upp|brott – Sönder|fall
4 May – 28 May 2015
Opening: 4 May 15.00-18.00
Public presentation of the exhibition and project on 26 May 16.00- 17.00
Konstbiblioteket
Nationalmuseum/ Moderna Museet
Artists: Åke Hodell, LG Lundberg, Pär Thörn and Sofie Karp.
Curated by Jacob Hurtig
Ner/slag – Upp/brott – Sönder/fall is the first part of the project The exhibition as a publication/ The publication as exhibition and shows works by Åke Hodell (1919-2000), LG Lundberg (1938-), Pär Thörn (1977-) and Sofie Karp (1981-). From Hodells terrifying depiction of the Holocaust in Orderbuch published in 1965 to Thörns alphabetical ordering of Die Leiden des jungen Werthers (alphabetisch) from 2012.
All of the selected works relates to questions about repression, violence and control, but also a possible resistance. Concepts and ideas that is important to talk about with growing fascism and other authoritarian ideas both in Sweden and the rest of the world.
Ner/slag – Upp/brott – Sönder/fall takes place at Konstbiblioteket, is part of the course CuratorLab, Konstfack and is curated by Jacob Hurtig.
PDF of the publication released in conjunction with the opening.
Opening hours is Tuesday- Thursday 1 – 5 pm.
Konstbiblioteket
Nationalmuseum / Moderna Museet
Holmamiralens väg 2, 2 tr. Skeppsholmen
About the project:
The exhibition as a publication/ the publication as an exhibition investigates and researches how artists have used printed matter as a field of creating and presenting independent art works; how a book, a fanzine, or a score can become an exhibition sphere; and what characterizes such field of work with all its possibilities and disadvantages?
Images from a present memory
Artist’s talk and screening by Louis Henderson
in dialogue with Valeria Mancinelli
Saturday 23 May, 3 – 5 pm
At Platform Stockholm
Färgkontoret, Lövholmsgränd 12, Stockholm
Louis Henderson, Black Code/Code Noir, 2015, video still
Images from a present memory is an event that will premiere Black Code/Code Noir, the latest video by British artist Louis Henderson. The new work is introduced in a conversation between the artist and curator Valeria Mancinelli about his research and through two previous works, Lettres du Voyant (2013) and All That is Solid (2014). These videos were filmed in Accra, Ghana, in and around a waste ground where thousands of computers are being recuperated by young men, who break and burn the plastic casings in order to extract the precious metals contained within as a kind of reverse neocolonial mining. Henderson’s work seeks to produce analogies between colonialism and technologies as forms of control.
Black Code/Code Noir brings together various temporally and geographically disparate elements into a critical reflection on two recent events: the murders of Michael Brown and Kajieme Powell in Missouri, USA, 2014. Black Code/Code Noir looks into the ways in which the murders were captured and disseminated on the Internet by citizens who witnessed the events and their aftermath, thus encouraging a reflection on the manipulation, circulation and control of images in this contemporary moment. Focusing on videos recorded by mobile phones and uploaded on YouTube, the forming of social media networks as both meeting points for demonstration and remembrance, and the online (mis)representation through state controlled media – Black Code/Code Noir uses the Internet as a social site of excavation. Taking an archaeological perspective Black Code/Code Noir traces back a certain route through history in order to find the complex origins of what makes such tragedies occur – drawing a series of lines from the murders of Brown and Powell within the age of algorithmic Big Data policing to the Black Code laws that designed the treatment of slaves in the Americas. These codes have morphed in their digital becoming from paper decrees to algorithmic interpretations, yet the intent remains the same: to design the lives of people in minority, to keep them within the plantation capitalist system.
Yet how can human bodies have agency in this situation and how can this necropolitical control be resisted? As a movement towards an answer Black Code/Code Noir makes a historical détournement towards a past future and looks to the Haitian revolution as a symbol of a future possibility; if France’s 17th century Code Noir was the original form of this algorithmic governance then the Haitian revolution was the first instance of its hacking. Yet how do we read this in the present? How do we rewrite this code as a hack?
Images from a present memory is produced in the frame of CuratorLab program at Konstfack and presented by Mount Analogue in collaboration with Platform Stockholm.
Louis Henderson (UK, 1983) is an English artist and filmmaker, his work investigates the networked links between colonialism, technology, capitalism and history. He has shown his work at places such as: Rotterdam International Film Festival, CPH:DOX, Transmediale, the Centre Pompidou, Museo Reina Sofia, Tate Modern and Whitechapel Gallery.
Mount Analogue is a publishing space, curatorial and editorial agency and analogue studio, initiated 2011 in Stockholm by Diana Kaur and Tris Vonna-Michell. Recent projects include the exhibition Port by Yuki Higashino and Elisabeth Kihlström and the publication Collapsing Ourselves, a twelve-inch vinyl record by Mattin and Hong-Kai Wang.
Platform Stockholm is an arts organization dedicated to the development of cultural production through collective participation in net-based systems to create shared resources initiatives. Platform is a place for work, collaboration and meeting for over one hundred cultural producers, mainly artists, but with a large variety of professionals ranging from designers to writers, photographers to architects.
COUNTER PLANNING FROM THE KITCHEN
Kim McAleese and Josefin Vargö
For Season 5, Underverk (Josefin Vargö‘s experience design platform) collaborates with curator Kim McAleese and together we present a series of food events spanning April and May 2015, which focus on home labour and the gender divide in relation to domestic tasks (such as cooking, cleaning and maintenance). The projects ask whether much has changed -if anything at all- since the feminist protests of the early 1970s.
The discussions and participation in the presented food events contribute a vital part and act as the core material of the project’s research. The results and documentation will be presented in a printed matter acting as the final piece of the programme.
EVENT 1
Housewarming Dinner
April 7, 19:00—21:00
Konsthall C, Cigarrvägen 14
In Konsthall C’s kitchen, an invited commercial ‘chef’ and a domestic ‘cook’ respond to the questions posed in the Mierle Laderman Ukeles’ Manifesto for Maintenance Art.
Produced in 1969, the manifesto connected to other feminist activities around the world which began to articulate the gendered inequities between paid and unpaid labour. The chefs Josefin Günther and Magdalena Günther are invited to make a dinner, using the food as their material to convey what they believe to be ‘maintenance work’ as an attempt to readdress the issues raised in Ukeles manifesto.
The dinner is part of the public program of the Ukeles exhibition at Konsthall C, the idea being that members of the public are invited to engage in some of her thoughts and artistic concepts over a meal in the space.
Josefin Günther is a sommelier currently working as a freelance writer. Food, beverages, scents and flavours have always been a very big and natural part of her life and she is always looking to add new scents and flavours to her palate. Finding new ways of expressing what we experience when we eat and drink is an ongoing home-project of hers.
EVENT 2
FEMINIST FILM SCREENINGS
Brännkyrkagatan 13
21 May 2015
20:00—22:00
For many women, the home was a natural subject of artistic production as a highly charged site of rampantly contradictory meanings. As Lucy Lippard noted, ‘[women artists] work from such [household] imagery because it’s there, because it’s what they know best, because they can’t escape it.’
Underverk presents a set of feminist film screenings punctuated by food provided by meal ecologist Ayhan Aydin and experience designer Josefin Vargö, who have translated certain elements from the films into taste. In this film programme, the artists explore domestic issues such as motherhood, familial relationships, control of physical space and the preparation and consumption of food.
20:00-20:30 — Course 1: Blanchisseuse, a steamed introduction.
20:40-20:50 — Course 2: Semiotics of the Carrot, the value of an ingredient.
21:00-22:00 — Course 3: Our time is coming, communal soup experience.
Limited food, available on first come, first served basis.
Ayhan Aydin (Meal Ecologist) works interdisciplinary with how the food system as a whole functions. Aydin integrates social sciences, natural sciences, food craftsmanship and practical farming. Ayhan has previously participated in the projects Restaurant roam (Parkteatern), Fittja Open (Botkyrka Konsthall), Nordic Sound Bite (New Nordic Food). In the three different projects, food has been a central and fundamental part of the story.
Photo from Rohesia Hamilton Metcalfe: La Blanchisseuse (1993)
EVENT 3
Soup lunch with Mischa Billing
27 May 2015
12:00—14:00
We finish the season with a soup lunch, to bring people together in a private and intimate setting to encourage an exchange of ideas regarding identity, work and activities in the domestic space. We invite sommelier Mischa Billing to lead the meal and a discussion about taste and it’s meaning and role in society.
Lecturer of Culinary Arts. Billing teaches at Örebro University’s restaurant and hotel school and also works as a sommelier. She has also been awarded with a number of awards during her career and been praised with “Årets näsa” (The Years Nose). She has extensive experience as being jury among one for Sweden’s Masterchef TV series and coaches in various sommelier championships.
Invite only due to limited space.
Supported by Stockholms Stad, CuratorLab/Konstfack and Konsthall C
Underground Cathedrals
Friday May 22nd, 7pm
Raketa Press, Nytorget 15A, 11640 Stockholm
…Despite the sparsity of the hotel room, its simple conveniences; a large mirror, clothing rack, desk, chair and coffee machine, The Hotel Nytorget managed to achieve hotels’ common strategy of hiding its functionalist apparatus with domestic signs of comfort, to nice effect. In its transitional spaces – its hallways or its stairwell – you’ll find a vintage armchair or an illuminated rotatable globe, telling you that you’re at home, or a home away from home, and the ultimate aim of the modern hotel is to create ‘a home away from home’. The furniture in such liminal spaces has no practical purpose per se, but the effect that its presence has on a guest’s psyche as they pass offers a comfort. This complimented the incongruity of my on-going situation, my constant anonymity, itinerancy and the severe lack of sunlight to be found in Stockholm at that time of year…
Underground Cathedrals is a story and a fictocritical investigation by Sam Perry into a wide sociocultural assumption – that each of us are indeed the central characters in our own literary drama.
This animated reading session tells the tale of a diaspora of artists and writers as their artistic and personal influences flow in and out of each other’s lives, from New York City to Venice and Stockholm. The work and the questions it raises are born from Sam Perry’s continuing exploration into literary tendencies in contemporary art, focusing on themes of biography, legacy and the fictive potential therein. Written from a lonely Hotel room on Södermalm, the anonymous narrator goes in pursuit to find the facts about the life of the artist Frank Heron; an archaeological journey that arouses many thoughts on transcendental homelessness, ontological pluralism, and the application of a simple misunderstanding of these complex doctrines.
The reading will be illustrated by new commissioned works by Frank Heron (UK), Allyn Hughes (CT, USA) and the Rocket Girls (Stockholm). Underground Cathedrals is written in close collaboration with the Stockholm-based collective Raketa and Roger Connah, Associate Professor at the Azrieli School of Architecture & Urbanism, Carleton University, Canada.
Orange Trees That Talk
Mediated performance by Cooking Sections
Sunday 7th June 2015, 1-4pm
@ Fittja, Stockholm
Emerging from parallel residencies in Jaffa and Fittja, the artist duo Cooking Sections and curator Kelly Tsipni Kolaza present Orange Trees That Talk.
Orange Trees That Talk is a mediated performance that will take place at Fittja Festival organised by Botkyrka Konsthall in the suburbs of Stockholm.
Drawing on the relationship between landscape, history and urban architecture, Orange Trees That Talk will explore social, agricultural and economic realities in such ostensibly disparate areas of the planet as Jaffa and Fittja. Focusing on the invention of the famous Jaffa oranges, Cooking Sections will trace unexpected connections through capitalist patterns of global circulation and power structures while mapping out differences and similarities in schemes of urban development.
Over the course of three hours and as part of their Empire Remains project, Cooking Sections will be broadcasting live from Jaffa where they will engage in the personification task of interviewing Orange Trees to learn about the historic and contemporary condition of an urbanised landscape of orchards. The performance will take the various forms of lo-fi advertisements, on and off vocal interventions and intermittent disruptions.
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Cooking Sections (Daniel Fernández Pascual & Alon Schwabe) is a duo of spatial practitioners based out of London. It was born to explore the systems that organize the WORLD through FOOD. Using installation, performance, mapping and video, their research-based practice explores the overlapping boundaries between visual arts, architecture and geopolitics. Cooking Sections was part of the exhibition at the U.S. Pavilion, 2014 Venice Architecture Biennale. Their work has also been exhibited at the Neue Nationalgalerie Berlin; Storefront for Art & Architecture New York; dOCUMENTA(13); Peggy Guggenheim Collection; CA2M; the Bartlett; ETSAM; TEDx Talks Madrid; Fiorucci Art Trust London; ACC Weimar; SOS 4.8; HKW Berlin; 2014 Biennale INTERIEUR Kortrijk; and have been 2014 residents in The Politics of Food at Delfina Foundation, London.
Kalliopi Tsipni Kolaza is an independent curator based between London and Athens. She holds an MA in Visual Culture from the University of Westminster. In 2013 she was an associate curator of the Maldives Pavilion for the 55th Venice Biennale. Over the past four years she has worked for various public art institutions in London such as the Serpentine Galleries, The Architecture Foundation and the Contemporary Art Society. She is part of the Mnemoscape curatorial board and she has recently been awarded the Samos International Curatorial Fellowship 2015.
Residence Botkyrka is a context-based residency program for internationally active artists, curators and architects who are interested in working site specifically. Botkyrka is part of Greater Stockholm and is one of Sweden’s most international municipalities with people from about eighty different countries speaking more than hundred languages. Residence Botkyrka is run by Botkyrka Konsthall and is a collaboration between the Department of Culture and Leisure, the Department of Urban Planning, the housing company Botkyrkabyggen, and the Multicultural Centre, a center with national mandate for migration research, in the municipality of Botkyrka.
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This project was developed through CuratorLab at Konstfack University College for Arts, Crafts and Design, Stockholm, Sweden.
With thanks to: Joanna Warsza, Nina Möntmann, Hadrian Garrard, Helen Nisbet, Tor Lindstrand, Claire Tancons and Botkyrka Konsthall.
Image Credit: Proposal for Fittja, Tor Lindstrand
http://cooking-sections.com/
http://www.empireremains.net/
http://botkyrkakonsthall.se/
Panda Diplomacy
Performance for a Swedish living room by Curandi Katz
curated by Chiara Nuzzi
Detail from Panda Diplomacy visual library, cut-and-paste printed paper
24th – 27th September 2015, Hornsgatan 58, Stockholm
Opening: Thursday the 24th of September 2015, from 6 pm to 10 pm
25th and 26th: 5 pm to 8 pm
27th September: from 4 pm to 7 pm
The artistic intervention Panda Diplomacy is the outcome of a dialogue initiated by curator Chiara Nuzzi with invited artists duo Curandi Katz in the frame of 2015 session of CuratorLab international programme at Konstfack University. The dialogue originated from the reflection about what concepts like migration, otherness, togetherness, soft power, cultural integration and resistance are, how they relate in art and life and how the postcolonial condition might characterize our contemporary society. Curandi Katz’s artistic process and their work face such issues involving and filtering them through the concept of the family as an active strategy in the artistic practice, contextualizing such an idea in a country very dedicated to the care of children’s life and education as Sweden is.
In the living room of a private house in Stockholm, an impromptu dubbing system is set up for a muted screening of the Japanese animation Panda! Kopanda! The main character, a little girl named Mimiko, represents a loose appropriation of the Swedish childhood icon Pippi Longstockings. The animated film is the consequence of a historical incident in which an adaptation of Pippi was denied. As a result, the cartoon acts a pre-textual element that offers a reflection on concepts of re-appropriation and adaptation, cultural trasmigration and soft power and the ways in which they are inserted into and among cultures. The private house, open to the public on specific hours for the duration of four days, hosts karaoke-like sessions of dubbing: any two or three participants can dub in real-time the show into Swedish and spectators in the living room can witness the live performance adaptation of Panda! Kopanda! into Panda! Heja, Panda!.
During the first evening of the screening, the performance features the appearance of Swedish performers and actors Emelie Jonsson, Maria Grudemo El Hayek and David Fukamachi Regnfors. Audience members are free to enjoy the party, take part, take over a character and become performers themselves.
Panda Diplomacy represents empowerment strategies for different communities, focusing on how art practice and education play a pivotal role in the postcolonial discourse and presenting itself as an artistic active de-colonizing gesture. By realizing alternative forms of life at once oppositional and creative, the physical gesture staged by Curandi Katz proposes creative ways to reorganize the political, the familial and the artistic spaces. These concepts, and an artistic methodology that utilizes familiarity as an inclusive process for subverting circumstances in place, will be further developed by the artists during an artistic residency at the Italienska Kulturinstitutet in Stockholm in 2016.
The project is accompanied by a publication featuring texts by Curandi Katz, Chiara Nuzzi and Veronica Wiman, with further visual interventions by the artists.
The project supported by:
CuratorLab – Konstfack University of Stockholm, Italienska Kulturinstitutet “C. M . Lerici”, Stockholm and Raketa Collective.