Ar Utke Acs

Inga Gerner Nielsen

Nat Marcus

In the Mirror of Care Work

In the mirror of care work graphic

Photo: Nat Marcus.

Please check the programme for information on when you need to sign up and when you can just show up.

Tu 5.9.2023, 13:00-21:00, MDT

We 6.9.2023, 11:00-17:30, MDT

"In the Mirror of Care Work" investigates skill-sets within Nordic interactive performance practices. The knowledge is shared by the use of a mirror; on one side, the work of interactive performers – on the other, the work of nurses. By inviting in perspectives of care workers and looking into the history of their profession, we engage discussions about the politics, mythologies and poetics of ours. Do we as performers – like the nurses were once said to – abide by the feeling of a calling? And does this involve a kind of spiritual care for our audience? What would it mean for the field of interactive performance if we, like nurses, started to be viewed as a profession of our own? 

This two-day performance symposium invites professionals in the fields of performers and care workers to take part in the project's methods of storytelling and performative interviews, reading sessions with texts from the project's publication, and poetic score works for collective reflections.

"In the Mirror of Care Work" is initiated by performance artist Inga Gerner Nielsen with a knowledge production team consisting of choreographer, Ar Utke Acs, and publisher Nat Marcus. 

See the full programme here

Ar Utke Acs

Ar Utke Ács is working as an artist within contemporary dance and an expanded understanding of choreography. They work with the poetics and politics of the body in the seams of performance, dramaturgy, text, installation, the social and the imaginary. Ar Utke Ács working with discourse in proximity with their artistic production, in particular, they are busy with counter- hegemonic strategies from queer and crip writing and lived experience. Collaborative and collective processes builds the core of their body of work and Ar Utke Ács often works across different fields and mediums of art and research. Throughout the past years, they have created a series of works focusing on affect landscapes and subversive poetics of positioning oneself non-verbally, including their first major performance production echoes. They are currently working on Thrash Mob, a commission for ESC Youth Company, which deals with social choreographies and alternative Dance History. Furthermore they are currently working on the first piece of their unapparent trilogy which will premiere in 2025 co-produced by MDT (SE) and Dansehallerne (DK). Ar Utke Ács is a part of the queer art club collective fake daughter, which has organized queer art gatherings since 2019, as well as the studio cooperatives Dance Cooperative in Copenhagen and höjden studios in Stockholm.

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Inga Gerner Nielsen

Inga Gerner Nielsen is an artist, artistic researcher and performer working between Brussels and The West Coast of Denmark. She initiated the project In The Mirror of Care Work with a local nursing school when realising how much her one-to-one performances draw on the physical and social skills she once developed as an ”ufaglig”, or “non-professional” helper in the elderly home where she worked throughout her years of studying sociology. She hatched artistically as a performer within the fictional parallel worlds of the performance-group SIGNA during the early 2000s, and then as co-founder of the Copenhagen-based activist performance-collective Club de la Faye (2007) and a little later the smaller bureau, Fiction Pimps (2010, DK). In her solo-works she continued to explore the subtle nuances of interaction in performance installations within art spaces and venues such as Sixty Eight Art Institute (2014, DK), KUNSTEN Museum of Art in Aalborg (2018, DK) and in The Pool SB34 (2022, BE) in Brussels where she opened THiS INSTiTUTE, a structure by which she summons the sensual mode of her thinking. - An immaterial studio, she conjured as part of her artistic research in the post-graduate program A.pass (2022, BE).

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Nat Marcus

Nat Marcus is a Berlin-based writer and designer. Along with Zoe Darsee, she is co-editor of TABLOID Press, an imprint for poetry and art-books founded in 2014. The publishing house maintains a focus on the public space of a poem and the poetics of a social body. In conjunction with the activities of the press, Marcus holds a broadcasting residency at Refuge Worldwide Radio, called TABLOID Soundsystem. Her poetry, art criticism and lyric journalism have recently been published in Arts of the Working Class, The Ransom Note, and Edit.

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