Translate, intertwine, transgress!

Curatorial team: Björn Säfsten; Per Nilsson; Catrin Lundqvist, Moderna Museet; MDT. Co-ordination: Säfsten Produktion; Nordberg Movement; MDT. Project manager: Magnus Nordberg. With support from Umeå Academy of Fine Arts, Swedish Research Council, Swedish Arts Council, Stockholms City Council, Stockholm County Council and The Swedish Arts Grants Committee.

10.00–17.00
LAB
Location: MDT and Moderna Museet, studios and outdoor spaces.

11.00–17.00
METTE EDVARDSEN
“Time has fallen asleep in the afternoon sunshine”
Location: Moderna Museet. Meeting point: The entrance of “After Babel”

17.00
Opening drink at MDT
Location: MDT foyer

18.00–19.00
JENNIFER LACEY “Bad reader”
Location: MDT

19.00–22.00
Preview opening ”After Babel”, Moderna Museet.
For “Translate, Intertwine, Transgress” pass holders and by invitation

10.30–11.30
PEGGY PHELAN “Andy Warhol: Performing Philosophy”
Location: Moderna Museet, Auditorium

11.00–17.00
METTE EDVARDSEN “Time has fallen asleep in the afternoon sunshine”
Location: Moderna Museet. Meeting point: The entrance of “After Babel”

12.00–13.00
CRISTINA CAPRIOLI “Notes on a tumble”
Location: Moderna Museet, Auditorium

13.30
Coffee tasting – handbrewed coffee of various origins, craft roasted by Da Matteo
Location: MDT foyer

14.30–15.30
PER NILSSON & GERD AURELL “Non Serviam: Introduction”
A performance lecture in-between art and philosophy
Location: MDT

16.00–17.00
HAEGUE YANG “Movement Studies”
Location: Moderna Museet, Auditorium
(Free admission)

17.15–18.45
ABRAHAM HURTADO “Between The Two”
Location: In the exhibition After Babel, Moderna Museet
(“Translate, Intertwine, Transgress” pass required only)

17.30–19.00
MICHAEL KLIËN WITH STEVE VALK “Choreography for blackboards”
Location: Moderna Museet, Auditorium, entrance by the side door.

20.00-21.00
EMMA-LINA ERICSON “Blackbirds” (installation)
Location: MDT foyer

21.00–22.00
JENNIFER LACEY “Bad reader”
Location: MDT

21.00-01.00
Evening hang-out, DJ:s and performance surprises
With: Shake it Collaboration/Maria Johansson Josephsson, DJ Sally Khan and Elin Bjornstrom.
Location: Restaurant Hjerta

10.30–11.30
RICHARD SHUSTERMAN “Philosophy as an Art of Living –On Camera”
Location: Moderna Museet, Auditorium

11.00–17.00
METTE EDVARDSEN “Time has fallen asleep in the afternoon sunshine”
Location: Moderna Museet, Meeting point: The entrance of “After Babel”

11.15–12.45
ABRAHAM HURTADO “Between The Two”
Location: Moderna Museet
(For “Translate, Intertwine, Transgress” pass holders or with ticket to the museum.)

12.00–13.30
MICHAEL KLIËN WITH STEVE VALK “Choreography for blackboards”
Location: Moderna Museet, Auditorium, entrance by the side door.

13.00-16.30
“Poetry will be made by all!” “After Babel” Sessions
Location: Moderna Museet, In the exhibition After Babel

15.00–16.00
BOJANA CJEVIC “Six Notes on a Society of Performance”
Location: Moderna Museet, Auditorium

16.30–17.30
ALMA SÖDERBERG & HENDRIK WILLEKENS “Idioter”
Location: Moderna Museet, “After Babel”
(“Translate, Intertwine, Transgress” pass or ticket to the museum)

19.00
SHAKE IT COLLABORATIONS “Bad Romance Cake”
Location: MDT foyer

20.00–21.00
SARAH VANHEE “Lecture For Every One”
Location: MDT

21.00-01.00
Evening hang-out, DJ:s and performance surprises
With: Shake it Collaborations and DJ Karim & Karam, (Karin Dreijer + Maryam Nikandish).
Location: Restaurant Hjerta

Wednesday – Thursday 10-11 June / MDT and Moderna Museet, studios and outdoor spaces
Open call

In conjunction with the symposium “Translate, Intertwine, Transgress” we present a two-day lab in collaboration with Dansalliansen (Dance alliance) and The Swedish Arts Grants Committee (Iaspis programme and the International Dance Programme). The lab is led by Jeanine Durning and Melati Suryodarmo. Please find an introduction to the two artists below.

The lab will be led by the two artists, one based in the field of visual arts and one in the field of choreography. They will lead a mixed group of artists and the lab will serve as a meeting point of practices, an encounter between the artists participating. The two-day lab and its content will be created around the 20 chosen participants and the set up of the lab days will be announced in the middle of May. The selected participants will be offered free participation on the lab, working with both Suryodarmo and Durning. The grant also includes admission to all events during “Translate, Intertwine, Transgress”. A possibility of travel grants will be awarded based on individual applicants homebase.

To apply:
Send a short presentation of yourself and your current artistic work, max one A4 to lab@bjorn-safsten.com no later than 1 May. Notification of selection are given 10 May.

Presentation Melati Suryodarmo
Melati Suryodarmo’s performances deal with the relationship between a human body, a culture in which it belongs to and a constellation where it lives. Through the presence, she compiles, extracts, conceptualizes and translates some phenomenon or subjects into movement, actions, and gestures that are specified to her performance. Melati Suryodarmo´s performances concern with cultural, social and political aspects, which she articulates through her psychological and physical body. Her performances feature elements of physical presence and visual art to talk about identity, energy, politics and relationships between the body and its environments. Melati Suryodarmo studied at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste Braunschweig, Germany, under Marina Abramovic. Suryodarmo has presented her works in various international festivals and exhibitions since 1996, including the 50th Venice Biennale 2003, Marking the territory, IMMA Dublin. e.t.c. Melati Suryodarmo has performed at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, during the Exhibition of the Life of Egon Schiele (2005), Videobrasil Sao Paolo (2005), Haus der Kulturen der Welt Berlin, 52nd Venice Biennale dance Festival (2007), KIASMA Helsinki (2007), Manifesta7 in Bolzano, Italy (2008), in Transit festival, HKW Berlin (2009) and the Luminato festival of the arts, Toronto, (2012). During the last six years, Suryodarmo has preented her work in Indonesia and other South East Asian countries. For the Padepokan Lemah Putih Solo Indonesia, she has since 2007 been organizing an annual Performance Art Laboratory Project and “undisclosed territory” performance art event in Solo Indonesia. In 2012, she founded Studio Plesungan, an art space for performance art laboratory.

Presentation Jeanine Durning
Jeanine Durning is a choreographer, performer and teacher from New York City, creating solo and group works since 1998. Her performances, always grounded in a rigorous exploration of the plurality and potentiality of the body, exist within a precarious ecology of perception, relation, psychology, and ontology, often dealing with the slippery terrain of identity and the invented and paradoxical narratives of self. Durning’s current research deals with a practice she calls nonstopping which has manifested as a solo performance practice of nonstop speaking called “inging”. “inging” has been presented in Amsterdam, Berlin, Leuven, Zagreb, Toronto, and across the US in Pennsylvania, Minnesota, NYC, Massachusetts, and Wisconsin, with upcoming performances in San Francisco and Los Angeles. Durning is working on a companion practice of nonstop moving, which will premiere in New York City in September 2015. Durning has received numerous awards and residencies in support of her work, including a New York Foundation for the Arts award and the Alpert Award for Choreography. She was recently nominated for the US Artist Fellowship. She is currently a Movement Research Artist in Residence (2013-2015). Her writings on dance have been published in Contact Quarterly, ARTI/Amsterdam, and the International Journal of Digital Media and Performance.  Durning is dedicated to the transmission, translation and ultimate collaboration among artists through her teaching practice. She has been faculty at SNDO/Amsterdam and HZT/Berlin on and off since 2009, and has been current guest faculty at New School/Lang College. She has taught, mentored and advised students in movement and creative practices across the US, throughout Europe and in Canada. She often teaches through Movement Research in NYC. Since 2005, Jeanine has worked with and performed in several ensemble works by Deborah Hay, and most recently has been involved Hay’s project with the Motion Bank, an interactive archival project of the Forsythe Company, which includes her performance adaptation of the solo “No Time to Fly” and the trio “As Holy Sites Go”. In addition, Jeanine was consultant to the Motion Bank team on Hay’s choreographic work from 2011-2013, was choreographic assistant to Hay’s work and has been a performance coach to several Hay solo adaptations.

Saturday June 13 20.00 / MDT

Lecture For Every One is a short artistic intervention consisting of a text that Sarah Vanhee or another performer brings/performs at occasions where people are anyway already gathered in order to discuss/exchange/undertake something together. She intrudes into existent situations that are strange to her, and where she herself is a stranger. The text is exactly the same on all the occasions. Some examples: a sales meeting in a luxury hotel, a city council, a team meeting at a multinational, a high society club, the army, a union meeting, an informal meeting of antique collectors, a choir rehearsal, a football training of homeless people etc. Mostly there is only one person within the organization that knows of her coming, for the others it’s a total surprise. She grafts Lecture For Every One onto the meeting, in a moment where there is the necessary concentration and focus, e.g. just before a meeting starts. When the lecture is done, she leaves immediately.

In the text, she tries to address citizens both collectively and individually – avoiding the rhetoric known from political messages, mass media, advertising, rules and laws – in an attempt to speak “freely”, in a gesture that addresses both the individual and the collective, and considers society as a co-creation of “every-one”. Lecture For Every One is a personal and an artistic gesture, a simple but strange object that enters a certain homogenous environment consisting nevertheless of individuals.

The text consists of a hybrid of stories, political reflections and performative momentum. It addresses concerns about our living together, about the state of the common in our societies, about current forces operating upon the human condition. It proposes “fictions” other than those prevailing in our contemporary Western Societies.

Lecture For Every One is a viral project that temporary spreads itself in a city, with the support of many different (in) visible agents. It exists in live situations, in hearsay and stories, and online on www.lectureforeveryone.be, Facebook and Twitter.

One lecture is announced in advance and is open for the audience. At the end of the series of unannounced lectures, Sarah Vanhee looks back on the project and presents her (provisional) conclusions in a public look back: has the artist succeeded in collectively addressing the citizens inside this fragmented society? Has she discovered something like a common frame of reference?

Sarah Vanhee’s artistic practice is linked to performance, visual art and literature. It uses different formats and is often (re)created in situ. Her work has been presented in various contexts such as De Appel arts centre (Amsterdam), iDans (Istanbul), Centre Pompidou (Metz), Kunstenfestivaldesarts (Brussels), Impulstanz festival (Vienna), Van Abbe Museum (Eindhoven), Printemps de Septembre (Toulouse), Biennale (Bern), Arnolfini Gallery (Bristol), Contour (Mechelen), Théatre de La Cité (Paris), HAU (Berlin) etc. She published two books with Onomatopee (Eindhoven) and De Appel (Amsterdam), and she published one short novel, ‘TT’, with Campo (Ghent). Her book ‘The Miraculous Life of Claire C’ is part of the artist novel collection ‘The Book Lovers’. In 2008 she was a resident at Cittadellarte/Fondazione Pistolleto, Biella (I). Her work was nominated for the Ton Lutz prijs 2007 (honourable mention), Prix Jardin d’Europe (2010) and for the VSCD Mimeprijs 2012. Sarah Vanhee is a co-founder and member of Manyone.

(Concept & text Sarah Vanhee | In collaboration with Juan Dominguez Rojo, Berno Odo Polzer, Dirk Pauwels & Kristien Van den Brande | Management host organisations & website Marika Ingels | Performance Sarah Vanhee, Salka Ardal Rosengren | Production CAMPO (Ghent) | Co-production Kunstenfestivaldesarts, Frascati Producties (Amsterdam) | Supported by STUK Kunstencentrum (Leuven) | Thanks to  Kunstencentrum BUDA (Kortrijk). Special thanks to everyone who helped us spread Lecture For Every One.)

Thursday 11 June  / Moderna Museet
Friday 12 June  / Moderna Museet
Saturday 13 June  / Moderna Museet

In the performance Time has fallen asleep in the afternoon sunshine, a group of people/ performers memorise a book of their choice. Together they form a library collection consisting of living books. The books are passing their time in a library, sitting in chairs, walking around, talking together, looking out of the window, reading in paper-books from the shelves, ready to be consulted by a visitor. The visitors of the library choose a book they would like to read, and the book brings its reader to a place or setting in the library, in the cafeteria, or for a walk outside, while reciting its content (and possibly valid interpretations).

The idea for this library of living books comes from the science fiction novel Fahrenheit 451. It is a future vision of a society where books are forbidden because they are considered dangerous, that happiness must be obtained through an absence of knowledge and individual thought. The number 451 refers to the temperature at which book paper starts to burn. As books are forbidden in this society, an underground community of people learns books by heart in order to preserve them for the future. Books are read to remember and written to forget.

To memorise a book, or more poetically ‘to learn a book by heart’, is in a way a rewriting of that book. In the process of memorising, the reader for a moment steps into the place of the writer, or rather he/she is becoming the book. Maybe the ability to learn a whole book by heart is relative to what book you choose and the time you invest, and perhaps your skills. But, however much or well you learn something by heart you have to keep practicing it otherwise you will forget it again. Perhaps by the time you reach the end you will have forgotten the beginning. Learning a book by heart is an ongoing activity and doing. There is nothing final or material to achieve, the practice of learning a book by heart is a continuous process of remembering and forgetting.

Book titles:
Bartleby the Scrivener by Herman Melville (English)
Answered Prayers by Truman Capote (English)
Four Quartets by T.S. Eliot (English)
Hakkepølsa by Torgny Lindgren (Norwegian)
I am a Cat by Soseki Natsume (English)
Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury (Swedish)

Thursday 11 June 6 PM / MDT
Friday 12 June 9 PM / MDT

For Translate, Intertwine, Transgress, choreographer Jennifer Lacey is elaborating and developing the work “Bad Reader”. Lacy describes the process below:

“Nabokov, in his lecture series on literature, says that a bad reader is someone who implicates him or herself in the writing, in the story.

I have been doing a series of solos for the past 10 years that involve language and dance, always using the inefficacy of both mediums to create a third, rather efficient, space of performance.

These solos de-localize discourse from verbal language to create a particular performative energy. The audience is sometimes treated as a group of colleagues, sometimes as observers, sometimes as pure energetic force. The accessibility/inaccessibility to the performer is always shifting. This is the main performance material of these works. They are not “lecture performances” but they do in part rest on the fact that this form has become convention and can be played with.

The version for MDT will be starting in the text for a previous presentation; blue or the persistence of dance held in a bucket. This used (in the most pejorative sense!) texts by Agamben, Heidegger and Garcia to discuss DD Dorvilliers work, or more specifically her work through objects associated through her work. I hope to continue this discussion but move it towards the situation of the symposium and other materials present there.

What I realized after the fact is that, in terms of theory/philosophy I am a Bad Reader. This is one way of looking at what I do. I encounter the writings in a haphazard fashion linked to my dance and performance practice and tend to personalize them. I am implying myself and my body in every encounter. It is Bad but is it bad? Let’s discuss.”

Jennifer Lacey is an American choreographer now based in Paris. During the 90’s in New York City Lacey was a member of the Randy Warshaw Dance Company as well as a dancer with Jennifer Monson, DD Dorvillier, John Jasperse, Yvonne Meir among others. At the same time she began developing her own work, which was presented at PS 122, Movement Research, Danspace St Marks, the Kitchen as well as at many European venues and Festivals notably the Kaai theatre, Beaubourg/Centre Georges Pompidou, Festival d’Autumn, Weiner FestWochen, the Tate Modern and Montpellier Danse

In 2000 Lacey moved to Paris, founded Megagloss with Carole Bodin and began what became a longstanding collaboration with artist Nadia Lauro. Their collaboration has produced many works including “$Shot”, “Chateaux of France”, “Mhmmmmm” and “Les Assistantes”. A monograph of their work was published in 2007. In addition to her work with Lauro, Lacey has founded a number of projects with ambiguous borders: “Projet Bonbonnière” – a research and living project designed to rehabilitate Italianate theatres; “Prodwhee” – a disposable series of performances using the dance residency as currency; “Robinhood” – a mythic and invisible performance with artist Cerith Wyn Evans; “Robinhood – The Tour” – an act of theft perpetuated with composer/musician Hecker, presented recently at the Tate Modern; and “Transmaniastan” – a work commissioned for “a choreographed exhibition” at the Kunsthalle, St. Gallen. She has also produced several solos: “Two Discussions of an Anterior Event” (2004), “Tall” (2007) and “Ouch”(2007) (a tap version of Carolee Schneeman’s Internal Scroll). In 2009 she presented “Culture & Administration”, a duet in collaboration with Antonija Livingstone. For the past two years she has been in residence at the Laboratoires d‘Aubervilliers in Paris. During this time she has produced two projects, “Ma premiere fois avec un dramaturge”, and “I heart Lygia Clark”. These projects are performative but fall outside the standard modes of dance production and spectacle. In 2011 Lacey premiered a collaboration with American choreographer Wally Cardona and Jonathan Bepler, “Tool Is Loot”. This group is currently engaged in a 4 year 8 part project, “The Set-Up” based in meetings with international dance “masters”. She is also currently presenting Culture Administration and Trembling a work made with Antonijia Livingstone Steven Thompson and Domanique Petrin.

As far afield from traditional dance performance as the work often goes, Lacey is committed to her essential point of view as a dancer and strives to produce a thinking body of work in which poetics transcend a conceptual basis. She has taught technique, improvisation and composition etc. all over the globe for the last 15 years in institutions, studios and festivals. As a teacher of technique Lacey has been influenced by her studies with Release Technique pioneer, Joan Skinner. Over the past 10 years her teaching has expanded into her artistic practice. The form of the workshops is taken as performative and capable of producing content rather than just transmitting it. Consequently, she has been developmental in designing and running a project at the Impulstanz Festival in Vienna for artists who also teach. This program is in its 6th year and will function as the DanceWeb coach this year. Jennifer received a Doris Duke Impact Award in 2014.

Friday 12 June 10.30 PM / Moderna Museet, Auditorium

This paper returns to the extraordinary text; The Philosophy of Andy Warhol: From A to B and Back Again.

Situating the book in relation to the history of Warhol’s art, Phelan suggests that Warhol’s book enacts a series of performances that link Pop Art and the tradition of American pragmatism.

Making a case for Warhol as a major, perhaps even THE major, American artist of the post-war period is easy, but his value as a philosopher has been, when considered at all, derided and jeered. Why? How value and cultural capital are assigned tells us much about the intersection of performance and philosophy, especially in the U.S. context, today.

Perhaps the foremost authority in performance art, Professor Phelan’s numerous works include Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (1993); Mourning Sex: Performing Public Memories (1997); Acting Out: Feminist Performances (1993); and The Ends of Performance (1998). Phelan’s work reflects her broad-ranging and passionate interests in contemporary theater, art, photography, literature, dance, and film. She has written in recent years about an extraordinary array of artists, writers, and cultural figures including Samuel Beckett, Andy Warhol, Ronald Reagan, the photographer Andres Serrano, and the avant-garde performance artist Marina Abramovi?.

Phelan recently edited and contributed to Live Art in LA: Performance in Southern California, 1970-1983, (Routledge, 2012) and contributed catalog essays for Everything Loose Will Land: 1970s Art and Architecture in Los Angeles (Mak Center, 2013), Haunted: Contemporary Photography, Video, and Performance (Guggenheim Museum, 2010); WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution (Museum of Contemporary Art, 2007); and Andy Warhol: Giant Size (Phaidon, 2008), among others. She is the Ann O’Day Maples Chair in the Arts and has been at Stanford since 2003. In 2006, she joined the English department and now holds a joint appointment in Drama and English. She is also the author of the survey essay for Art and Feminism, ed. Helena Reckitt (Phaidon, 2003, winner of “The top 25 best books in art and architecture” award); the survey essay for Pipilotti Rist (Phaidon, 2001); and the catalog essay for Intus: Helena Almeida (Lisbon, 2004).

Friday 12 June 12.00 / Moderna Museet, Auditorium

“She will move at a distance
Tumbling amongst words and other ropes
Then strike a pale pose, and address the topics at stake:
Translate
Shifting delay of sustained survival – absolute accuracy of description whilst resisting seizing strategies –Unconditional loyalty to the given, for the purpose of elsewhere engrafts.
Place of departure – Textures of environment – Verbal behavior – Exits – Hypo_thesis – Power
Intertwine
Uncertain navigation in between – not rising up but hanging below, cutting down language to resist the name – Suspended lace narratives, knowing the net will last only so long
Practice of oversizing – And recycle strategies – Survival and Promiscuity – Complicity instead of sharing
Transgress
To walk limitation and enter a promise – To disrupt embarked narrative with a few perverted habits –
To uphold attention, at best ignite a different step – and recall the idiosyncratic traits of a choreo_poetic thrust.
Labor of not not production – No growth excess – Optimistic disarray – Seriously there, never for real, perfect for the cause”

Raised in Italy, dancing in Germany and the United States, since the mid-80s resident of Stockholm, where 1998 she founded the production company ccap, still base of her practice. Over the years she has produced over 30 works, several films, two festivals, one symposium, one exhibition, published an anthology, run several research projects, toured nationally and internationally, worked for institutions and extensively taught.

After more than two decades of continuous innovative input, Caprioli has gained the indisputable position as one of Sweden’s foremost choreographers. Her work is marked by stringency, precision, complexity and a cerebral physicality. All work is media-specific and trans-medial – all work challenges normative formats and economies. All work demands, but also generates specificity of attention and engaged participation. Choreography as collective process of singularities. Choreography as formation of response, as channel of dissent.

Cristina was Professor of Choreography (2008 – 2013 at DOCH) and has received a number of grants and prices.

Friday 12 June 14.30 / MDT

For years we have experienced how our culture has reached its limits of growth, physically as well as spiritually. It becomes more and more apparent that the paradigm called modern, or even worse postmodern, has exhausted its resources intellectually, spiritually and humanistically. Through its claims to justification, at last reduced to power and consumption, modernity is continuing its ideological growth beyond limits of its own survival.

In this performance visual artist Gerd Aurell and philosopher Per Nilsson investigate the importance of both disobedience and personal expression for developing a critique of a culture they fear increases interests in streamlining, as well as, objectifying its members. Practically they conduct their investigation through working in-between the thresholds of image making/manipulation and text reading, striving to reach the frictious relationship between the two. The performance Non Serviam: Introduction is a call for disobedience.

Gerd Aurell is a visual artist, living and working in Umeå, Sweden. Her main focus is drawing, but she also works with performance, film and installation. She has exhibited in Sweden and around the world, among other places at Moscow Museum of Modern Art and Gana Art Gallery in Seoul. Gerd Aurell is Director of studies and lecturer in Aesthetics at Umeå Academy of Fine Arts. She also runs the artist-run gallery Verkligheten (meaning “Reality”) together with nine other Umeå- based artists.

Per Nilsson is a PhD and Reader in Philosophy focusing on the Philosophies of Art. He works as a senior lecturer at the Academy of Fine Arts at Umeå University. Apart from essays in books, jour- nals and catalogues, Nilsson has published the books The Amphibian Stand: A Philosophical Es- say Concerning Research Processes in Fine Art, (2009) and Non Serviam: Philosophical Essays on The Art of Living, (2015). Since 2012 he, together with the choreographer Björn Säfsten, is heading the artistic research project De-Creations in Choreography and Philosophy, financed by the Swedish Research Council. Nilsson has a long experience of research cooperation with artists from different fields, from visual art, performance and butoh to choreography, contemporary dance and architecture.

Friday 12 June 16.00 / Moderna Museet, Auditorium

Haegue Yang’s work is known for its eloquent language of visual abstraction combining sensor experiences. In “Movement Studies” Haegue Yang elaborates on development of her art and her references around the notion of movement, oscillating between physical and mental as well as anachronistic and historic apects. Bringing together a variety of working methods – ranging from complex installations with industrially produced items, to hand-made sculptures using quasi-traditional or domestic crafts, like knitting, paper folding, – origami, and macramé -Yang is in constant search for new materials, methodologies, as of spatial and plastic articulation. Industrially manufactured items unfold in non-conventional arrangements as Yang translates her ongoing observations on figures of diaspora quasi-exile and non-conformist and their concrete domestic environments into a meticulous language of formalistic abstraction, narrating invisible politics. In her work, Yang uses quotidian objects and materials—including laundry racks, lights, infrared heaters, venetian blinds, scent emitters, and industrial fans—to create abstract sculptures.

Haegue Yang was born in 1971 in Seoul, South Korea. She currently lives and works in Berlin and Seoul. She has exhibited in major international exhibitions including the 53rd Venice Biennale (2009) both in Arsenale as well as in the South Korean Pavilion, dOCUMENTA (13) in Kassel (2012), Mediacity Seoul (2014), Taipei Biennale (2014) and Sharjah Biennale 12 (2015). Her recent solo exhibitions include Leueum, Samsung Museum of Art, Seoul, (2015) the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Strasbourg (2013), Bergen Kunsthall, Bergen (2013), and major institutions including the New Museum in New York, Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, Kunsthaus Bregenz in Austria, Haus der Kunst, Munich in Germany, Modern Art Oxford, Aspen Art Museum in US, Arnolfini and Tate Modern Tanks in UK among others have hosted her solo shows and projects.

Live Installation
Friday 12 June 17.15 / Moderna Museet, After Babel
Saturday 13 June 11.15 / Moderna Museet, After Babel

Video:
Microview of our internal moving body.

A vertical plane running from side to side; divides the body or any of its parts into anterior and posterior portions. A vertical plane running from front to back; divides the body or any of its parts into right and left side.

A horizontal plane; divides the body or any of its parts into upper and lower parts. Sagittal plane through the midline of the body; divides the body or any of its parts into right and left halves. The two main cavities in the body are ventral and dorsal cavities. The ventral is the larger cavity and is subdivided into two parts – thoracic and abdominopelvic cavities.

A cell consists of three parts: the cell membrane, the nucleus, and, between the two, the cytoplasm.

Concept:
The presence of the body with the absence of the mind, a perfect machine working unwittingly. The physical, the matter bereft of the rational thinking, away from the rules we were taught, which drive us to void: Keep distance, do not touch. do not invade personal space.

The piece is composed by two bodies fusing, constantly connected, making minimal movement, mechanic, organic. One body which listens to another, adopting one another´s space. There are the muscles which take decisions, a non-mental emotion, the emotion of the body, of the matter.

This Installation is produced by AADK and was presented on the frame of AADKunexpected Festival in a private session only by invitation on the 6th of July 2012 in Berlin.

Abraham Hurtado (Murcia, Spain, 1972) is performer and visual artist from Murcia who has been living in Berlin since 2005. He has collaborated with numerous visual artists and dance and theatre companies within Spain and internationally. In his own work he explores the notions of presence and space, the multiplicity of contexts and possible arrangements of the public and as they affect the perception-reception of the proposals. Abraham Hurtado, he is a founder of the AADK platform in Berlin alongside Vânia Rovisco and Jochen Arbeit. The platform is a curatorial project with members and invited artists pursuing activities in the fields of performance, installation, music, literature, video art, etc. They have regularly presented their work in over twenty-five countries in Europe and elsewhere, including Mexico, the USA and Turkey, among others. The art they produce is specific to each member but the configuration and strategies they adopt for their presentations are developed in common with the invited artists. Since 2012, Abraham Hurtado is Artistic Director of AADK Spain, conceived Centro Negra as space for research and contemporary creation in Blanca, Murcia (Spain). www.aadk.es www.fakelessproject.com

(Concept and video: Abraham Hurtado. Medium: two bodies (Maureen López, David Fernández). Digital Video HD 1028 x 720 neons lights, Red Fabric. Variable Dimension. Live sound: Pablo López Jordán. Installation assistance: Victor Colmenero. An installation that is executed during two hours. A continuous movement through the two bodies. Presented with kind support of the Spanish Embassy in Sweden)

Friday 12 June 17.30 – 19.00, Moderna Museet, Auditorium
Saturday 13 June 12.00 – 13.30, Moderna Museet, Auditorium

Participants, chosen both locally and internationally, work on monolithic blackboards spread throughout a large open space. Actively drawing over a set period of time, they follow a series of precisely rehearsed choreographic instructions and procedures. These involve developing and exchanging insights and individual expressions in analogue and codified forms, weaving relations into a concentrated collective dance of minds. The process is supported by an electronic music score composed by long-term collaborator Volkmar Kliën. Once the process has come to an end a landscape of drawings is left for display as a collective trace. Throughout the process, observers are free to walk the perimeters of the dance floor, to sit, drink as well as read.

Choreography for blackboards outlines a vision of dance that not exclusively understands itself as an art form, but as a constituting principle, a technology of the self at the edges of modern consciousness.

“Choreography is not to constrain movement into a set pattern; it is to provide a cradle for movement to find its own patterns.” – Michael Kliën

MICHAEL KLIËN

Since his early 20s Michael Kliën’s work has been concerned with the theoretical and practical development of choreography and dance. Engaged in deconstructing our assumptions on choreography, dance and culture, he has set out to redevelop choreography as an autonomous artistic discipline concerned with the workings and governance of patterns, dynamics and ecologies. In response to the urgency of our contemporary environment, this new conception of choreography engages its social potential to pursue conditions where new orders of human relations and patterns can emerge. Kliën’s artistic practice encompasses interdisciplinary thinking, critical writing, curatorial projects, and centrally, choreographic works equally at home in the Performing as well as the Fine Arts.

Born in Austria in 1973 Kliën studied choreography in Vienna and London. He received a PhD from the Edinburgh College of Art in 2009 and has lectured at numerous distinguished institutions (including the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London; the Royal Opera House, London; and the Laban Centre, London). Kliën was co-founder and Artistic Director of the London based arts group Barriedale Opera House (1994–2000) and Artistic Director of Daghdha Dance Company (2003–2011). Kliën’s choreographies have been performed and situated in many countries across the world. Commissions include Ballett Frankfurt; ZKM Centre for Contemporary Art and Media, Karlsruhe; Tanzquartier Wien and the Vienna Volksoper. Recent key-projects include Choreography for blackboards at the Hayward Gallery, London; the solo-exhibition Silent Witness/A Dancing Man at the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, solo-exhibition Parliament at the Benaki Museum Athens, and the performance ‘Jerusalem’ for the Athens Festival.

www.michaelklien.com

VOLKMAR KLIËN

Volkmar Kliën (*1971, Vienna) strives to extend traditional practices of composing, producing and listening far beyond the established settings of concert music. He works in various areas of the audible and occasionally inaudible arts navigating the manifold links in-between the different modes of human perception, the spheres of presentation and the roles these play in the communal generation of meaning.

His works have been widely recognized, exhibited, performed and presented. The range of the Kliën’s oeuvre is reflected in the list of institutions from which he has received commissions, including organizations truly varied in nature. For the Volksoper Wien (Vienna, Austria) he composed music to a full evening ballet, the Curtis R. Priem experimental media & performing arts center (Empac, Troy, NY) invited him to produce multi-channel electronic sound works and for Transitio MX (Mexico City) he produced a mixed media installation acoustically surveying landscapes. In his installation ‘Aural Codes’, funded by the Arts Council England, he turned the radio sphere over London into his exhibition space inviting residents to tune in and also interact.

He has been awarded numerous prizes and awards, amongst these an honorary mention at the Prix Ars Electronica, the State Scholarship for Composition of the Republic of Austria, the Max Brand prize for Electronic Music, the scholarship of the Vienna Symphonic Orchestra and the Gustav Mahler prize for Composition. Having received a PhD in Electroacoustic Composition from City University London he has held research positions at the Royal College of Arts in London, the Austrian Research Institute for Artificial Intelligence (ofai) and the University for Music and Performing arts Vienna, where he currently holds the position of senior lecturer in electronic music and media.

www.volkmarklien.com

STEVE VALK
Steve Valk (1962) is a contemporary dance dramaturge, visual artist, designer and currently the director of the first Institute of Social Choreography in Frankfurt Germany.

In 2007 he founded the international dramaturgical and social choreographic design agency „r.i.c.e.“ (radical institute of cybernetic epistemology) with headquarters in Limerick, Ireland, Helsinki Finland and Frankfurt Germany. For twelve years (1992-2004), he was Head Dramaturge and creative collaborator for William Forsythe and Ballett Frankfurt. During this period, his ground-breaking visual dramaturgy informed Forsythe`s seminal choreographic works. From 1998 to 2004,Valk`s dramaturgical practice and focus on trans-disciplinary networking strategies led to the development of a new participatory / situational epistemology for the institution of contemporary dance. The resulting large-scale projects “Schmalclub”  (1999-2002) and “New Meaningful Public Space”  (2003-2004) are now recognized as seminal works in the emerging field of Social Choreography.

From 2004-2011, Valk, in partnership with choreographer and Artistic Director Michael Kliën, became Head Dramaturge and artistic collaborator of Ireland`s Daghdha Dance Company. Through a persistent process of rigorously re-examing the core principles of contemporary cultural practice, Daghdha became one of Europe‘s most progressive arts organizations, “a complex and living ecology, one which conceptually transcended and extended far beyond the boundaries of its formally prescribed institutional structures”.

In December 2012 – with the support of, and in collaboration with, a longstanding network of local, regional, and international trans-disciplinary theorists, cultural workers, civic partners, and friends –  Steve Valk founded the first Institute of Social Choreography in Frankfurt Germany.

(Choreography: Michael Kliën. Concept: Michael Kliën & Steve Valk. Dramaturgy: Steve Valk. Music: Volkmar Kliën. Artistic collaborator: Jeffrey Gormley. Orininally produced by Daghdha Dance Company, Limerick, Ireland in 2006)

Saturday 13 June 10.30 / Moderna Museet, Auditorium

Exhorting philosophy as a way of life, Socrates eschewed the practice of philosophical writing as a corrupting distraction. But writing soon became philosophy’s privileged medium. To what extent can philosophy be reclaimed as an art of living, and in what ways can it take advantage of new media — not simply through the digital production of articles, books, and blogs but also through visual media of performance? Experimentation in performative visual media seems especially appropriate for the philosophical field of aesthetics, and particularly the new interdisciplinary field of somaesthetics that remains grounded in philosophy. In his presentation, Richard Shusterman will introduce some examples from his recent work in the medium of video as part of his continued efforts to develop somaesthetics and revive the idea of the philosophical life while expanding philosophy’s reach and public.

The videos take two very different forms: experimental performance art (in collaboration with the Parisian artist Yann Toma) and a three-part educational documentary concerning Shusterman’s philosophical work and its inspirational sources (directed by the Polish filmmaker Pawel Kuczynski). This video work has been exhibited in various art and academic venues in Europe, China, and North America, but not yet in Sweden.

Richard Shusterman is the Dorothy F. Schmidt Eminent Scholar in the Humanities and Director of the Center for Body, Mind, and Culture at Florida Atlantic University. His major authored books (in English) include Thinking through the Body; Body Consciousness; Surface and Depth; Performing Live; Practicing Philosophy; T.S. Eliot and the Philosophy of Criticism, and Pragmatist Aesthetics (now published in fifteen languages). A philosopher, Shusterman received his BA and MA from Hebrew University in Jerusalem and his doctorate from Oxford. He has held academic appointments in France, Germany, Norway, Denmark, Israel, Italy, and Japan. The French government honored him as a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Palmes Académiques, and he has developed two projects for UNESCO. Awarded research grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Fulbright Commission, American Council of Learned Societies, and the Humboldt Foundation, Shusterman has, since 2010, included performance art as a mode of research. His work in somaesthetics (a field he initiated in 1999) is nourished by his training and professional practice in the Feldenkrais Method; and he is one of the editors of the Journal of Somaesthetics.

Saturday 13 June 15.00 / Moderna Museet, Auditorium

What if Guy Debord was to resurrect under a commission to rewrite his Society of Spectacle for the current form of capitalism, characterized as neoliberal and post-Fordist, entertaining the notions of experience and service (economy), as well as knowledge (production)? In my imaginary exercise of a theoretical pamphlet for2014, Debord would be ready to relinquish the concepts of “image” and “representation” and substitute “performance” for them. Society of performance, in difference to the society of spectacle, entails another ideological mechanism, away from the ocular regime of false consciousness or blindness, distorted image or speech, toward a conscious and self-monitored re-embodied doing and showing doing. We are speaking here of a ritualized motion based on the psychosocial power of embodiment, the affective-experiential ground of persuasive expression by which the subject finds a more real sense of the self. The talk presents five theoretical stories about homo performans in sports and everyday life, in dancing solo and the museum of the self.

Bojana Cvejic (Belgrade) is a performance theorist and maker based in Brussels, and a co-founding member of the TkH editorial collective (http://www.tkh-generator.net). Cvejic holds degrees in musicology and philosophy (PhD, Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy, London). Since 1996, she has (co-)authored and collaborated in many dance and theatre performances with J. Ritsema, X. Le Roy, E. Salamon, M. Ingvartsen, and E. Hrvatin. Her latest books are Choreographing Problems: Expressive Concepts in European Contemporary Dance and Performance (Palgrave, forthcoming), Drumming & Rain: A Choreographer’s Score, co-written with A. T. De Keersmaeker (Mercator, Brussels, 2014), Parallel Slalom: Lexicon of Nonaligned Poetics, co-edited with G. S. Pristaš (TkH/CDU, Belgrade/Zagreb, 2013), and Public Sphere by Performance, co-written with A. Vujanovic (b_books, Berlin, 2012). Cvejic teaches at various dance and performance programmes throughout Europe (e.g. P.A.R.T.S. Brussels). Her latest works include the exhibition Danse Guerre at CCN Rennes (2013) and Spatial Confessions at Tate Modern (2014).

Saturday 13 June 16.30 / Moderna Museet, After Babel

In Idioter Alma Söderberg and Hendrik Willekens work together. They play a concert performance where the music supports Alma’s personal way to explore rhythm and Hendrik’s geometric landscape drawings. The music flirts with concrete music and concrete poetry. Drawing and voice are treated as sound.

Alma Söderberg works with voice and movement. She plays with syllables, intonations, cadenzas, gestures; a dream language, a game of intensity and rhythm. The focus is on flow. The flow will be cut, there will be breaks, the flow will continue. You get sucked into the rhythm.

Hendrik Willekens draws geometrical landscapes disappearing in a single vanishing point. He draws this drawing over and over again, thus expanding the landscape to a theme; again and again you find yourself drawn into the same nothingness.

“For this project we took on idiocy as a discipline. Paradoxically the discipline involves abandoning a perspective, staying close to the empty vanishing point, embracing that place of mystery that we cannot see.”

Alma Söderberg works as a choreographer and performer. She makes performances where sound and movement are equally important and in her practice she is constantly re-discovering how intertwined the two are. She has made three solo performances: Entertainment, Cosas and TRAVAIL, has an ongoing collaboration with Jolika Sudermann with whom she made A Talk and plays in the performance band John The Houseband. In 2014 she made the performance Idioter together with Hendrik Willekens with whom she also started the music project wowawiwa. In 2015 she will make a new solo by the name of Nadita. almasoderberg.com

Hendrik Willekens, Belgium 1985, studied theatre and mime in Leuven and Amsterdam. He works as a dancer, performer and musician within several collaborations. Most notably, he is a member of John The Houseband. Willekens received no formal training in music or visual arts but he enjoys very much to intertwine these artforms with a thing called life: his life.

(By and with Alma Söderberg and Hendrik Willekens. In close collaboration with Igor Dobricic. “Idioter” is produced by Het Veem Theater Amsterdam in coproduction with Kunstenfestivaldesarts Brussels, Göteborgs Dans & Teater Festival and Baltoscandal Festival as part of the NXTSTP network, with support of the culture programme of the European Union. The production is furthermore coproduced by SPRING Performing Arts Festival and workspacebrussels. Additional support was received from the Swedish Arts Council (Kulturrådet), Swedish Arts Grants Committee (Konstnärsnämnden).Thanks to Pianofabriek, Q-O2, Nordiska Akvarellmuseet, Vitlycke – Centre for Performing)