Our library catalog in the Shedhalle is available on request. You can make an appointment for access by emailing mail@shedhalle.ch. The library’s holdings can be viewed online via these PDF documents:

In the course of the last weekend of ProtoZone14, Shedhalle hosts an iteration of “The Institute for Embodied Creative Practices” for the second time. Isabel Lewis has been modeling “The Institute” since 2016 under various names and different formats. The experimental Institute and research center reimagines the format of “institution” and speculates what a cultural/educational institution of the future can and could be. It works toward innovation on the structural, organizational and sensory levels in order to make fertile ground for the emergence of new forms of cultural production, reflection, and critique.

The Institute for Embodied Creative Practices at Shedhalle is co-hosted by Isabel Lewis together with artists and scientists from Zurich as well as international academies. (more info on program and participation coming soon)

artist-in-residence

Reading: 11.05.2024

Naghmeh Manavi is a freelance theatermaker and performer living in Tehran.

She studied theater at the Tehran University of Art. She has been working in performing arts as a writer, performer, director, and festival coordinator since 2010.

As a creator she is interested in power structures in any kind of human relations, as a writer, she is writing essays and lecture performances on the intersection of political, personal, and neuroscientific matters, her early works were mostly around object theater and the relationship between a performer’s body, and the objects.

In the last 4 years, she has been experiencing researching/directing in lecture-performance or documentary theater. As a performer, she has a broader view, works on different worlds and aesthetics, and discovers performative experiences. Her current works center around invisible overpowering, neuroscience, and the human brain, studying political matters at the personal daily life level, considering social and collective acts as a performance practice with the collective narrative as the scores …

Her latest creations are “ But, will I Remember?” a lecture video performance about narrative and human brain function in memory and information processing. She performed in Kaserne Basel in 2022.

“The Possible”- a lecture performance about inheritance as a biological and social phenomenon, and the position of watching and being watched as a personal and social relation. She has created and performed in Tehran in 2019, Istanbul in 2020, and Brussels in 2023.

JP Raether’s transdisciplinary performative work attends to a group of constructed and constantly evolving identities. These aLifveforms are composed of language, technological skins, digital devices, and Raether’s fleshly body, which they embrace and from whose identity they simultaneously continue to detach themselves more and more. The SelfSisters, or AlterIdentities, are site-specific, colorful beings interwoven with everyday objects, whose works address the constitution of reality through language.

Currently, three active lines are “alive”, dedicated to topics such as reproductive and biotechnologies (Transformella), globalized tourism (Schwarmwesen) or occult substances of contemporary technology (Protektorama). The reproductive lifeline Transformella malor visits each of the 468 “Ikealities” around the world – the local store of the global furniture chain. In the course of her algorhythmic ritual, which is set to last for decades, she has already appeared in Berlin, Bergen, Warsaw, Hamburg and Düsseldorf, among other places.

On 18th of May 2024, she will take Shedhalle visitors on a journey to Ikeality in Dietlikon.

METCH

– interactive solo performance by Ivo Dimchev

04.05.2024

Ivo Dimchevs’ METCH invites to different modes of gathering around an artwork and builds gentle forms of trust by generating an intimate community with the audience.

“METCH is a concert exhibition, an auction, an exercise, an excessive production of paintings, an obsessive dialog with the audience and of course the songs… I know many people come to my shows because they like my songs. For good or for bad those people will need to experience or crash with my very complex and unpredictable relationship to theatre, dance, politics, and contemporary art.“

*M.E.T.CH. – Music, Exhibition, Text, Choreography

concept, music and text by Ivo Dimchev

Artist Bio:

Ivo Dimchev is a theatre maker, choreographer, visual artist, singer-songwriter, and queer activist from Bulgaria. His work is an extreme and colorful mix of performance art, dance, theater, music, painting, and photography. He is the author of more than 40 stage performances and has received numerous international awards for dance and theater. His work has been presented throughout Europe, South and North America, and Asia.

During the Covid pandemic Dimchev performed more than 400 private concerts in people’s homes in Bulgaria, Istanbul, New York, and Los Angeles.

Dimchev is the founder and director of Bulgaria’s Humarts Foundation. In 2009, after doing his master’s studies on performing arts at Dasarts Academy in Amsterdam, he opened Volksroom in Brussels, a performance space that presents young international artists. In 2014, he opened MOZEI in Sofia, Bulgaria, as an independent space for presenting contemporary art and music.

In addition to his artistic work, Dimchev gives master classes at the National Theater Academy (Budapest), the Royal Dance Conservatorium of Belgium (Antwerp), Hochschule der Künste (Bern), Amsterdam University of the Arts, and DanceWeb (Vienna), among others.

Politics of doughs is an itinerant recipe library and a participative meal gathering in which the process of dough making is the center of each encounter. For these get-togethers, Larissa Tiki Mbassi invites artists, researchers, amigas, mothers, aunties to share with an audience the story of a dough dear to their heart.

Usually made from very simple ingredients – meal, plantains, beans, chick-pease, cassava, malanga, corn or potatoes etc. – these doughs will help us connect ecologies of transmission as well as political aspects of making and sharing food.

For the first gathering, Cynthia Mai Ammann and Zoé Nguyen foodvestigated the « bánh baos » and will be presenting their visual and sensory approach on the 6th of April. As they wrote, « Bánh » in Vietnamese refers to a wide variety of sweet and savory dough-based foods. By incorporating seasonal and local products, they are asserting their identity as Swiss artists of Vietnamese descent.

Politics of doughs on 06.04. 13-16h is sadly already booked out.

Larissa Tiki Mbassi is a curator and a researcher currently doing a Phd In contemporary history (CH). Her work lies at the intersection between provenance research, colonial history and cultural decolonisation. Through those lenses, she is curious to explore dough, as a community binding material that enables to share memories, emotions and know-hows.

Cynthia Mai Ammann is a Switzerland based freelance photographer and artist. Her work reflects on notions of identity, belonging, change and memory, stemming from her mixed cultural heritage. Growing up in a family where cooking is a love language, she is interested in exploring food’s capacity to serve both as a creative medium and a form of care.

Zoé Nguyen is a Lausanne based designer & scenographer. Her practice aims to focus on perforative experiences. Trained as a product designer, she applies this creative process to food related projects and researches.

DEAD TIME (Maggie’s Solo), 2021

A Wall-to-wall film projection “DEAD TIME” (Maggie’s Solo)”, 2021: an editorial clock is counting time by the millisecond upward while a solo dancer performs exhausting choreography, swiping, hooking, and tackling, accompanied by a loud beep repeated every 42 seconds.

Following this temporally pressurised “tune,” the choreography opens with a high-pitched mix of contemporary gladiatorial activities: jabs, burpees, and rugby moves. Even running in circles while on the floor, Maggie’s movements suggest a painful and pointless circular acceleration, a self-inflicted, impossible pace. Maggie’s movements follow the repeated choreographic instructions of a voice (Spooner’s voice): “Jackal,” “Stop,” “Still Life.” She next arranges herself into a selfie pose, available to the camera.

The extreme close-ups of Maggie’s limbs, heavy breathing, and intense studies of her face are chased by the cinematographer carrying a wearable body camera. Falling in and out of focus, the images flicker between rehearsal documentation and rushes of a tightly composed “still life”, disturbed by the cinematographers sweating, wobbling body, or rugby moves caught in film shots of high commercial quality, captured at high speed. At other times, she appears to give this performance up; she waits, rests, spine rolls, even steps out of the frame entirely to drink, rattling her water bottle out of frame and out of sight.

The sound of Maggie moving and breathing captured on a radio mic, tangled up with a frantic radio wave frequency, makes it increasingly difficult to understand where Maggie’s moving body and the technology that records her begins and ends. This soundtrack is broadcast in a room that is separate from the film, and hence, this film soundtrack is encountered long before the large-scale screen becomes visible, dislocated from its source. The uncontainable sound of Maggie’s body thus spills over, traveling to the visitor before seeing an image.

Choreography: Maggie Segale and Cally Spooner

Performance: Maggie Segale

Scoring and timing: Cally Spooner

Single-take Steadicam recording: Charles Billot

Audio interference: New York City’s crowded electromagnetic spectrum

Postproduction audio mixing: Tom Sedgwick

Color grading, exporting: Charles Billot

43 minutes, 59 seconds

Commissioned by Walker Art Center, Minneapolis

Courtesy ZERO…, Milan

Artist Bio:

Cally Spooner is an artist who exhibits performances that unfold across media—on film, in text, as objects, through sound, and as illustrated in drawings. Recent institutional solo exhibitions have taken place at Cukrarna, Ljubljana; Museum Dhondt-Dhaenens, Sint-Martens-Latem; Parrhesiades, London; the Art Institute of Chicago; the Swiss Institute, New York; Castello di Rivoli, Turin; Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève; the New Museum, New York; and the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam.

Her live performances have been staged at, amongst others, Tate Britain and Tate Modern, London; Performa 13, New York; the Centre Pompidou, Paris; Museum M, Leuven; and the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA), London.

Spooner is the author of recent and forthcoming monographs published by Lenz Press and the Swiss Institute (2023); Hatje Cantz (2020); Mousse (2018); and Slimvolume/Cornerhouse (2016). Her novella, Collapsing in Parts, was published by Mousse in 2012.

Spooner is the recipient of numerous awards and prizes, including the Paul Hamlyn Award and the Novo Nordisk Foundation’s Mads Øvlisen PhD Scholarship for practice-based art. She was born in the United Kingdom, is British Italian, and lives and works between London and Turin.

Maggie Segale (New Jersey, 1991) is an artist working between the fields of dance and visual arts, focusing on interfaces of the body and its material and immaterial forms. She has been working with artist Cally Spooner since 2016. She graduated with a BFA in Dance from The Juilliard School, NYC (2014), and holds a post-graduate certificate from Maumaus Independent Study Program in Lisbon, PT (2022). Maggie is currently an MFA candidate at University of Illinois, US (2026), studying Dance and Art History. More information and contact: Magdalynsegale.com <3

“Federico” (2015) by Alex Baczyński-Jenkins is a minimal choreography for touch between two performers. The figures formed between the hands of the performers are at times recognisable as an intimate touch and at times abstract figures of relationality and entanglement. This is a choreography of desire in the smallest scale, that mobiles affect and sensuality, as a means for a queer archive of touch.

CREDITS

Choreography: Alex Baczyński-Jenkins

Each iteration is choreographed in collaboration with the performers and specific to that duo.

Shedhalle iteration performed by: Bassem Saad and Nomi Sladko

First iteration in collaboration with and performed by Jayson Patterson and Nick Finegan.

Further iterations performed by Katarzyna Szugajew, Anton Ambroziak, Rafał Pierzyński.

A production: Alex Baczyński-Jenkins Studio

Studio director: Andrea Rodrigo

Studio manager: Sarie Nijboer

Management Consultant: Rui Silveira

Distribution: Something Great

“Federico” was commissioned by Montague Space.

Artist Bio:

Alex Baczyński-Jenkins is an artist and choreographer engaging with queer affect, embodiment and relationality. Through gesture, collectivity, touch and sensuality, his practice unfolds structures and politics of desire.

Relationality is present in the dialogical ways in which the work is developed and performed as well as in the materials and poetics it invokes. This includes tracing relations between sensation and sociality, embodied expression and alienation, the textures of everyday experience, the utopian and latent queer histories.

He approaches choreography as a way of reflecting on the matter of feeling, perception and collective emergence, while indulging in other ways of experiencing memory, time and change. He is co-founder of “Kem”, a Warsaw based queer feminist collective focused on choreography, performance and sound at the interface with social practice. Through various experimental formats and community building, “Kem” engages in critical intimacy and queer pleasure.

My Bodily Remains, Your Bodily Remains, And All The Bodily Remains That Ever Were, And Ever Will Be, is a fantastical series of filmic tableaux drawing from various genres ranging from horror to technicolour cinematic dreams, it features four protagonists; two characters called ‘Them who Love’, whose relationship is unclear, they speak of love in a profound and epic, almost spiritual way, ‘The Ghost for Revolution’, the ghost recounts somatic histories of fascism, and ‘The Reader of The Book of Love’ that reads historical quotes from individuals or groups that were involved in non non-violent action.

The film is inspired by various sources; classic works of literature including Destroy, She Said by Marguerite Duras, the writing of scholars including Jackie Wang and works by filmmakers such as Jacques Rivette. The film is a poetic meditation on various historical resistance movements and groups, the spiritual dimensions of anti-supremacism, intersectional queer feminism, communism and revolutionary thinking to recognise the emancipatory power of love and pleasure as a catalyst for radical change.

The film features an original score composed by Shani’s long term collaborator Maxwell Sterling and Richard Fearless (Death in Vegas) which was developed to incorporate gamelan instruments during the Southbank Centre Studio residency, alongside digital animations by Adam Sinclair also Shani’s long term collaborator.

Courtesy of the artist and Gathering, London, co-commissioned by the Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati, Art Night, Dundee; KM21, The Hage; and POR:TA, Lisbon. Additional support is provided by Southbank Centre, London; Creative Scotland, Edinburgh; the Henry Moore Foundation, Hadham; Luminous Art Foundation, Lisbon; and the Museum of London with support from Arts Council England.

Film duration: 01:02:48

Artist Bio:

Tai Shani’s artistic practice, comprising performance, film, photography, and installation, uses experimental writing as a guiding method. Oscillating between theoretical concepts and visceral details, Shani’s texts attempt to create poetic coordinates in order to cultivate, fragmentary cosmologies of marginalised nonsovereignty.

Taking cues from both mournful and undead histories of reproductive labour, illness and solidarity, her work is invested in recovering feminised aesthetic modes – such as the floral, the trippy or the gothic – in a register of utopian militancy. In this vein, the epic, in both its literary long-form and excessive affect, often shapes Shani’s approach: Her long-term projects work through historical and mythical narratives, such as Christine de Pizan’s allegorical city of women or the social history of psychedelic ergot poisoning. Extending into divergent formats and collaborations.

Shani’s projects examine desire in its (infra-)structural dimension, exploring a realism that materially fantasises against the patriarchal racial capitalist present. Tai Shani is the joint 2019 Turner Prize winner together with Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Helen Cammock and Oscar Murillo. Her work has been shown extensively in Britain and internationally.

AGORA BILLS & CHILD’S PLAY

The scene here holds an intricate game of hide and seek. Crafted doll sculptures in neoprene suits involve the visitors in a playful dance across the levels of rolling scaffolds. The scaffolds with their strapped-on prints evoke large-scale advertisements on building sites. In this case, those “advertisements” are themselves partly hidden and partly exposed. They show (or hide) movie characters trapped in liminal spaces: a green screen, a blurred street environment. These are film stills of an actual horror movie: the artist’s latest video work Horripilations.*

The horror genre capitalizes on fear as a major drive of human action. At the same time, it provides a platform to reflect on profound existential themes and to explore and confront the darker aspects of life in a controlled environment. Thus, it’s also a tool for social commentary.

The title of the series of sculptures, “Childs play” cites the title of a horror movie featuring killer doll Chucky. It focuses on the uncanny presence of a doll: representing a living being while being an object.

This installation questions dehumanizing and commodifying representations by gestures of refusal. It rather invites into its own oblique uncanny puppet-play on the stage of advertisement walls.

*Horripilations is on view in Karma International Gallery Zurich from 1st of December.

Bantone’s artistic practice is an ongoing exploration and troubling look at identity obsession. Through installations that play with the poetics of anonymity, subsequent perspectives and subjectivity, combining photography, sculpture, and video, Bantone not only questions contemporary markers of violence in a geography of whiteness, but also the refusal of the identification of his subjects and therefore their exploitation. By appropriating the “tools of fashion world” and, sometimes, by perverting their application, Bantone approaches a new method of representation wrapped in layers of refusal — tightly-sewn neoprene suits reveal neither skin nor face, oversized prosthetics impose the grotesque, and at times, all anthropomorphic signifiers are forgone. Accompanied by a distinct interest in the horror genre, the artist is driven to reconfigure and design bodies, objects and clothes staging them, in this way, striking a chord of absurdity into the most primitive of emotions.

Winged Eros, 2023

Sound installation

Pillow speakers, pillowcases and bed sheets

Winged Eros is a sound installation that offers an intimate encounter with the stories of six characters. Each character recounts stories of political conviction and personal desire.

Their stories are encountered in a series of remote pillow talks they have with each other. In these conversations, they struggle to unravel the tangled strands of Love and Revolution. Moving at times in unison, at others in discord, they ask, ‘What is this spectre of Revolutionary Love?’ And: “How can it be lived? Not just understood?”

Voices by Lou Drago, Nina Emge, Misa Harz, Kyra Kraus, Penny Rafferty, Sophia Rohwetter

Steph Holl-Trieu is an artist and writer based in Berlin and Vienna. She is interested in questions of materialist aesthetics, that is, the historical contingency of our modes of perception. Her work materialises between writing, sound, (role-playing) games, and is often situated within collaborative or collective settings. Past exhibitions and performances include Roter Salon, Volksbühne (2019), 3HD Festival (2021), Exhibit Gallery Vienna (2022), LAS Art Foundation (2023), HAU (2023), Kunstverein Braunschweig (2023) and Klosterruine Berlin (2023).

Virus Becoming (6:30, 2022)

Virus Becoming (2022) is a 3D sketch for the birth of UKI the virus. It is derived from Cheang’s full length feature film UKI (2023), a Scifi Viral Alt-Reality cinema.

The full film is shown on the 1st of December from 20:40 as a double-feature with the earlier film IKU in a collaboration of Shedhalle with Porny Days Zurich at RiffRaff cinema.

Taking the plot from UKI, Virus Becoming follows the trajectory of Reiko, a defunct humanoid. Reiko was deemed redundant and dumped as a piece of electronic trash at the Etrashville by Genom Corporation. Reiko unpacks their electro-body parts in an attempt to reboot themselves back to existence. Hereby, they encounter the Etrashville’s inhabitants – the trans-mutants, the hackers, the coders, the migrants, the refugees and the native labourers. Reiko codes and is coded, code sexing code. Reiko emerges as UKI the virus.

3D avatar animation: Roland Lauth

Etrashville construct: Mathieu Marguerin

Music: Atau Tanaka & Oscar Martin

Shu Lea Cheang is an artist and filmmaker who engages in genre bending gender hacking art practices. Celebrated as a net art pioneer with BRANDON (1998 – 99), the first web art commissioned and collected by Guggenheim Museum, New York, Cheang represented Taiwan with mixed media installation, 3x3x6, at Venice Biennale 2019.

Crafting her own genre of Scifi New Queer Cinema, she has made 4 feature films, FRESH KILL(1994), I.K.U. (2000), FLUIDø (2017) and UKI (2023). In 2023, she is touring UKI at LAS Art Foundation (Berlin), Centre Pompidou (Paris) , MoMA (New York) and ICA (London) among other venues, also exhibiting RED PILL (2023) at Hope, Techno-Humanities (Museion, Italy) and UTTER (2023) at Attention After Technology (Trondheim, Norway). http://mauvaiscontact.info

Important information: Our classroom is a bit chilly. Please bring thick socks and warm clothes. Let’s get cosy!
Language: German/Swiss German, English subtitles

by melanie bonajo, Daniel Cremer, Yanna Rüger and the ensemble of Theater HORA, spatial installation by Carolin Gieszner

In what kind of school could we have learnt all the things that nobody taught us in reality? How to feel and communicate a yes and a no in your body; how to flirt, maintain your boundaries, touch with care and how to love yourself?

SCHULE DER LIEBENDEN is a humorous, sensitive, empowering and genre-bending art experience on the subject of love and intimacy. It is created for people with and without disabilities.

Video artist and somatic sex coach melanie bonajo shoots an educational film 2.0 with the HORA ensemble. Scenographer Carolin Gieszner invents a school space where learning is pleasurable. The HORA performers bring the teaching bodies of this school to life together with directors Yanna Rüger and Daniel Cremer.

DATES AND HI-INTENSITY PROGRAM SCHULE DER LIEBENDEN

The spatial installation by Carolin Gieszner can be visited from the start of Protozone13 during the regular opening hours of Shedhalle on the weekends. Theater HORA will then rehearse in the space during the week, when Shedhalle is closed.

Both the movie by Theater HORA and melanie bonajo as well as the theatre show by Theater HORA, Daniel Cremer and Yanna Rüger premiere on the 08.12. From then on, the movie can be experienced during the regular opening hours of Shedhalle. The theatre show is shown in the evenings of 08.12./10.12./14.12./15.12/16.12./05.01./06.01./07.01. and requires a ticket that can be purchased here: https://www.seetickets.com/ch/tour/theater-hora

On 23.11. 19h, Le Foyer in Process hosts a conversation about the process of SCHULE DER LIEBENDEN with members of the artistic team. https://www.lefoyer-lefoyer.ch/talks/act-10-n3/

On 02.12. 14-16h, Chill Pawel Dudus und Eeeezzii melanie bonajo host the workshop Just say it! – A million ways of rephrasing, praising and other gestures of intimacy at Shedhalle in collaboration with Porny Days. Please register here: https://pornydays.love/festival-program?e=just-say-it–sa-2-12–14-00

CREDITS

CONCEPT melanie bonajo, Daniel Cremer, Yanna Rüger

DIRECTION LIVEPERFORMANCE Daniel Cremer, Yanna Rüger

DIRECTION FILM & ART DIRECTION melanie bonajo

SPATIAL INSTALLATION Carolin Gieszner

COSTUME Lara Lancereau-Jaulin

PERFORMANCE & IDEAS FILM

Noha Badir, Gianni Blumer, Caitlin Friedly, Simone Gisler, Matthias Grandjean, Nikolai Gralak, Fredi Senn, Simon Stuber, Fabienne Villiger

PERFORMANCE & IDEAS LIVE

Noha Badir, Gianni Blumer, Caitlin Friedly, Matthias Grandjean, Simon Stuber, Fabienne Villiger

MUSIC & SOUND DESIGN LIVEPERFORMANCE Thomas Jeker

ASSISTANT DIRECTOR Yanik Riedo

SPACE- & COSTUME ASSISTANT Giuliana Gjorgjevski

SPACE ASSISTANT Liene Murken

THEATER PEDAGOGY Anna Fierz, Svenja Koch

INTERNSHIP Katrin Heydekamp

TECHNICAL DIRECTION & LIGHT DESIGN Micha Bietenhader

SOUND SET UP CONSULTING Rebecca Vonlaufen

PRODUCTION MANAGEMENT HORA Jörg Schwahlen

GENERAL MANAGEMENT THEATER HORA Curdin Casutt

SCRIPT FILM melanie bonajo, Daniel Cremer, Yanna Rüger

CAMERA & IMAGE DESIGN FILM Nadja Krüger

TECHN. ASSISTANT & LIGHT FILM Janne Ebel

SET SOUND FILM Anuk Schmelcher

MAKE-UP & STYLING FILM Giuliana Gjorgjevski

CUT, 3D ENVIRONMENTS, COMPOSITING, VFX, SOUNDDESIGN & COLOUR GRADING FILM Kolbeinn Hugi

3D ENVIRONMENTS, ANIMATION, COMPOSITING, VFX & ADDITIONAL SOUND DESIGN FILM Coco Magnusson

MUSIC, SCORE, SOUNDMIX & MASTERING FILM Tommie Bonajo

SUBTITLES, TRANSLATION LIVE/ FILM Yanik Riedo

GRAPHIC DESIGN, TITLE DESIGN FILM Philippe Karrer, Ronja Burkard

PRODUCERS FILM melanie bonajo, Yanna Rüger

SUPPORTED BY Elisabeth Weber Stiftung, Ernst Göhner Stiftung, Kanton Zürich Fachstelle Kultur, Kulturpark Zürich-West, LANDIS & GYR STIFTUNG, Mondriaan Fund (NL), Migros Kulturprozent, Schweizerische Interpretenstiftung SIS, Stadt Zürich Kultur

SPECIAL THANKS TO Stiftung Züriwerk, Förderverein Theater HORA, Miriam Haltiner & Adrian Schiess, Content Park Operations AG, Gallery Akinci, Studio Stinkie, Skinship Berlin, Fuck Toy and Orgasm Generator

A Co-Production by Theater HORA, Fabriktheater Rote Fabrik and Shedhalle

Theatre HORA from Zurich is one of the most well-known independent theatre, dance and performance groups in Switzerland. It regularly collaborates with important artists and collectives from Switzerland and abroad and performs at local, national and international theatre venues. Theatre HORA has also been a (cultural) workshop for people with learning difficulties since 2003. As such, it is part of the Züriwerk Foundation, which is committed to support people with mainly cognitive disabilities. Theatre HORA has received several important theatre prizes and awards for its work.

melanie bonajo is a queer, non-binary artist, filmmaker, feminist, sexological

bodyworker, somatic sex coach, educator, cuddle workshop leader, and animal rights

activist. In their videos, performances, photographs, and installations, they explore pressing issues of coexistence in a paralyzing capitalist system and address the erosion of intimacy and isolation in an increasingly sterile, technological world.

Daniel Cremer is a somatic researcher, a director and a performance artist. On massage tables, in workshop spaces as well as on stages, Daniel aims to facilitate intimate encounters between bodies, ideas, emotions and gestures. His recent work has been produced at Maxim-Gorki-Theater and Komische Oper Berlin, Künstler*innenhaus Mousonturm Frankfurt (Main) and Nationaltheater Mannheim. His last solo show, “The Miracle of Love”, toured internationally and has been invited to the festivals “Radikal Jung” in Munich and “La Fête Du Slip” in Lausanne.

Yanna Rüger is an actress and director. From 2023-2016 she was a permanent member of the ensemble at Theater Neumarkt in Zurich. In 2017 she founded the network “Infinite Cooperation”, with which she realized the theatre works “Chronik der Zukunft” in 2018 and “Über Wunden” in 2020/22. As an assistant director and artistic collaborator, she worked with Theater Hora and Nele Jahnke on “Egotopia”, among others. She has been the artistic co-director of Theater HORA since July 2020 and directed the science fiction feature film “Planet Hora” in 2019.

Carolin Gieszner’s practice involves sculpture, scenography and immersive installation. Her work emphasizes spaces of togetherness. She explores the sensual relationship that we form with our surroundings, bringing forth more-than-human forms of expression. Her works are realized in various contexts such as museums, theatres, nightclubs, public spaces and galleries.

Spill I-III is filmed almost entirely around the volcano Mount Etna in Sicily. The experimental three-channel video, Deborah-Joyce Holman departs from Glissant’s “tremblement”.

“The earth is trembling. Systems of thought have been demolished, and there are no more straight paths. There are endless floods, eruptions, earthquakes, fires. Today, the world is unpredictable and in such a world, utopia is necessary. But utopia needs trembling thinking: we cannot discuss utopia with fixed ideas. (…) What I call tremblement is neither incertitude nor fear. It is not what paralyzes us. Trembling thinking is the instinctual feeling that we must refuse all categories of fixed and imperial thought. Tremblement is thinking in which we can lose time, lose time searching, in which we can wander and in which we can counter all the systems of terror, domination, and imperialism with the poetics of trembling—it allows us to be in real contact with the world and with the peoples of the world.”

Édouard Glissant, “Archipelago Conversations”

Spill I-III utilises the strategies of asemic writing that can function beyond linguistic understanding. Asemic writing is a wordless, open form of writing that conveys no specific meaning. The camera shots take their time for details in the landscape, wander, get lost. The soundtrack by Yantan Ministry breathes with the landscape and our bodies. Voices rise and ebb away. These sounds, movements and touches do not seek a destination, but find contact with the world in different ways.

The presence of the volcanic landscape reminds very physically that the now solid surface used to be liquid. It speaks of the lasting change of the landscape by flowing spill. Thus, the work evokes another of Glissant’s ideas: archipelagic thinking. It is intuitive, emphasising the unpredictable, the unstable. Forms and connections are random, temporary, fragile and are constantly being formed anew.

Deborah-Joyce Holman has chosen an intuitive approach for Spill I-III. The work’s aspects are interwoven guided by the intelligence of the body. Visitors encounter an audio-visual poem through the association of images on the projection screens and the physically experienced sound. Spill I-III invites to rethink ways of relating to the world, mediated through a camera.

Spill I-III
2022
14min
3-channel film, 4K UHD
5.1 surround sound
By Deborah Joyce Holman

Performers: Phoebe Collings-James, Bernice Mulenga, Mawena Yehouessi

DoP: Jim C. Nedd

Camera Operator: Antonio Annese

Sound Recordist: Sebastiano Caceffo

Producer: Letizia Gullo

Production assistant: Shantelle Palmer

Styling: Alice Lushima

Editing: Deborah Joyce Holman

Colour Grade: Andrea Vavassori

Score: Yantan Ministry

Vocalist: Makeda Monnet, Deborah Joyce Holman

Field recordings: Deborah Joyce Holman

Mixing & Mastering: Fitzrovia Post

Conceived by Deborah Joyce Holman & Tarek Lakhrissi

With some images directed by Tarek Lakhrissi

Featuring Nisha Ramayya’s poem Joy of the Eyes, published in States of the Body produced by Love (Ignota, 2019)

Commissioned by Istituto Svizzero in co-production with Confort Moderne Poitiers, Nottingham Contemporary and Shedhalle Zurich, upon original proposition by Caroline Honorien

Special thanks:

Clelia Bartoli, Canan Batur, Phila Bergmann, Yann Chevallier, Gioia Dal Molin, Thea Reifler, Marged Siôn, Maxim Young

The practice of Deborah-Joyce Holman (lives and works between London, UK and Basel, Switzerland) is concerned with the relationship between popular visual cultures and capital and the intertwined politics of representation. Holman contrasts the exploitative potential of how images collide with capital with approaches of artistic and cinematic subversion, repetition and refusal using differing approaches across media such as video, sculpture and painting. Their work has recently been shown at Kunsthalle Bern, Simian, Copenhagen, Galerie Gregor Staiger, Biennale für Freiburg, Oregon Contemporary (all 2023), Cordova, Barcelona; and Istituto Svizzero, Palermo (both 2022), among others.

From 2020-2022, Holman worked at East London arts organisation Auto Italia as Associate Director. They were the founding director of 1.1, a platform for early-career practitioners in arts, music and text-based practices, with an exhibition space in Basel, Switzerland, which ran 2015 – 2020. Deborah-Joyce has curated the 2018 and 2019 annual group exhibitions for the arts and music festival Les Urbaines, Lausanne.

Finding Pathways to Temahahoi explores the Taiwanese Indigenous Atayal oral story of the place of Temahahoi. The multimedia installation (video, performance, cyberspace) engages with Ciwas’ journey to reconnect to this place. In Ciwas’ work, Temahahoi tells of a place deep in the forest where only women and gender non-conforming people live. The community flourishes by communicating with bees and its people become impregnated by wind.

The story of Temahahoi is interpreted as a queer space for sustainable relationships within communities and with the land. In a climate of disconnection and displacement, the work intertwines the bond between quiet queer bodies and environmental issues.

Parts of the installation:

The double-channel video work Perhaps She Comes From/To____Alang weaves together three distinct narratives. The first oral story connects the relationship between bees and the land in the telling of the place of Temahahoi. This story is fused with a second narrative of Ciwas’s personal queer journey. A third historical narrative tells how Japanese colonial-gifted brass pots caused infertility among the Taiwanese Indigenous Atayal people.

My land, glitched me is an online space that engages Ciwas’ desire to have a sense of place and connect to her ancestral land. It expands cultural knowledge and queer connections beyond the soil into the cloud. Find it via https://raxal-mu.glitch.me (raxal mu – my land) and via the QR codes on the glass panes.

Pswagi Temahahoi traces Ciwas’ search for Temahahoi by combining different sources of documentary video work and ceramic instruments. In Atayal language, ‘P’ is future tense, ‘S’ is the instrumental case indicating a tangible or intangible tool and ‘wagi’ means sun or sisters in some Atayal regions of Taiwan. One thread follows Taiwanese Indigenous Atayal Elder Yumin, who uses the Indigenous knowledge of sunlight and shade ‘pswagi’ to trace the locations of wild bees. Another thread documents a performance with a self-built ceramic instrument. This ocarina is used as a wayfinding tool to connect to the queer space of Temahahoi through shared intimate moments of sound creation and the sharing of air to belong beyond the physical.

Anchi Lin (Ciwas Tahos) is a New Media and Performance Artist of Atayal/ Itaṟal and Taiwanese Hō-ló descent. They are raised and based in Taipei, Taiwan. Ciwas’s body-centred practice weaves threads of Indigenous Atayal worldview, performance, moving image, cyberspace, ceramics and kinetic installation to claim a self-determined queer space. Ciwas’s work is an exploration of cultural and gender identity. They use their body as a medium to trace experiences with linguistic and cultural displacement and seek out new queer forms of understanding beyond the hetero-patriarchal status quo.

Following a BFA in Visual Art at Simon Fraser University (Canada), they are completing an MFA in New Media Art at Taipei National University of the Arts (Taiwan). Ciwas has exhibited, presented and performed across countries, including recent artist residencies in Vietnam for Ba-Bau AIR, the Portland Institute For Contemporary Art, USA and the Kyoto Art Centre in Japan. Most recently, Ciwas was awarded the Biannual Prize of Pulima Art Award and represented Taiwan in Australia as the inaugural Artist for the Australia-Taiwan Friendship Year Arts Exchange Partnership for 2023. Ciwas performed and exhibited work at Documenta 15 in Germany and Indonesia 2022, at the 2023 Ars Electronica Festival in Austria, as well as the Taiwan Austronesian Art Triennial in Taiwan. They are also the guest curator for the second year, running the 2023 ADAM Artist Lab for the Taipei Performing Art Centre.

“The Creeps” is a series of miniature hair pieces made with the artist’s own hair. Shampooed, blow-dried, straighten, dyed, brushed and sprayed; these avatars play with the social conventions of gender, race or status associated to hairstyles, somehow directing a queer critique to the current economy of self representation.

“Half human and plastic, the complicated identity of each piece is entangled with social meaning, symbolic associations and genetic makeup.” – Dan Souza

BIO:

Isaac Contreras is an artist working primarily with sculpture, image making and writing. He investigates the construction of meaning and social expectations associated with images and objects, particularly those found in liminal spaces or in states that imply transition, cultural contact and alterity.

His artistic practice is invested in manual labour and motivated by research, most notably from the standing point of queer studies and decolonial thought. With his work, he seeks to present the in-betweenness as a possibility of emancipation.

He holds an MFA from Haute École d’art et de Design de Genève, Geneva, Switzerland (2017); has been a fellow of Fondo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes & PECDA, Mexico (2010-2011) and artist in residence at Triangle France Marseille, France (2014), Fondazione Ratti, Como, Italy (2017) and Stadtgalerie Bern, Switzerland (2020).

International exhibitions include the 3rd Poly/Graphic Triennial of San Juan (Arsenal, Puerto Rico, 2012); Sarai Reader 9: The Exhibition (Devi Art Foundation, India, 2013), Lulennial: A Slight Gestuary (Lulú, Mexico, 2015), Bourses Ville de Genève (Centre d’art Contemporain, Switzerland, 2017) and Abusos de las formas (Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil, Mexico, 2020).

Hailed from Ciudad Constitución, Baja California Sur, Mexico. Currently based in Mexico City.

blackmilk 

Performance and Video

“Trompoppies” is an Afrikaans word for “Drum Majorettes” who perform formation dance in uniform. blackmilk looks at one of the main choreographic elements of these trompoppies dances – the precise hand gestures. Through morphing Trompoppies movements with melodramatic gestures of white divas and heavy gesticulation linked to the image of black male rap-stars, the choreographer explores the performative dimension of race and gender. The practice invites a new kind of sensitivity into cultural representations of black masculinity, opening them up to queer readings.

PERFORMANCE CREDITS

Choreography & Performance: Tiran Willemse

Music: Manuel Riegler

Styling: Lucas Meyer-Leclère/LML Studio

Production: Paelden Tamnyen, Rabea Grand

Co production of blackmilk with Sophiensaele Berlin, Tanzquartier Wien, Gessnerallee Zürich, WP Zimmer Antwerp

Residency support by Tanzhaus Zurich, Buda Kortrijk, Les Urbaines Lausanne, Impulstanz Vienna, Trauma bar and Kino Berlin.

as part of the Hi-Intensity-Phase, 15.09. at 19.30 during Protozone12: Syncretic Sites

VIDEO CREDITS

Director & Choreography : Tiran Willemse

Co director : Thyago Saint

Music : NKISI

Performance : Tiran Willemse, Kevin F.E Bonono,

Styling : Lucas Meyer-Leclère/LML Studio

as part of Protozone12: Syncretic Sites

Tiran Willemse is a dancer, choreographer and researcher from South-Africa based in Zurich. Their performance based practice is rooted in a careful attention to space, imagination, gesture and sound, focusing on how they relate to the ways in which construction of race and gender are performed, communicated and challenged. They worked and collaborated with Trajal Harrell, Meg Stuart, Jerome Bel, Ligia Lewis, Eszter Salamon, Susanne Linke, Andros Zins-Browne and with Cullberg Ballet under Deborah Hay and Jeftha Van Dither. Their work has been shown in Arsenic Lausanne, Impulstanz Vienna, Tanzquartier Wien, Gessnerallee Zurich, Sophiensaele Berlin , Palais de Tokyo Paris, Santarcanagelo festival and MCBA in Lausanne and continues touring internationally.

Physique of Consciousness

“Physique of Consciousness” is the first cultural fitness exercise ever made, initiated in 2011 by Xu Zhen (produced by MadeIn Company). It comprises movements derived from dance, gymnastics, spiritual and cultural rituals. The whole series is composed of more than two hundred steps and moves inspired from ceremonies, worships and traditions accumulated through the histories of humanity. It combines physical and spiritual virtues, enhancing body conditions and well-being. As dance can be a form of expression and as ritual is usually linked to civilizations, the spiritual fitness Physique of Consciousness reflects the diversity of human ideologies.

Physique of Consciousness consists in ten exercises, as ten chapters, with a progression of levels from easy to hard. The whole set of exercises lasts for thirty minutes. Movements are flowing, peaceful and aesthetic, accompanied by a relaxing music. This fitness exercise is open to any public, young people as much as elders. It has various benefits such as maintaining a healthy physical condition, strengthening muscles, joint mobility, and improving the immune system. It can also bring peace of mind, by relieving stress and providing a feeling of wellness. The diversity of the movements participate to the enhancement of memory capacity and focusing functions. The movements in Physique of Consciousness present numerous symbolic meanings, issued from various cultures and civilizations of different periods and regions. The fitness exercise, Physique of Consciousness, by definition reflects the spirit of Humanity, it describes and depicts Human “consciousness”. This sport ensues from contemporary thoughts and reflections on today’s World, and aims to propose a solution to the continuous antagonism between body and mind.

Throughout History, exploration and control of body and spirit have always been a central matter, and the establishment of Physique of Consciousness results from research led by MadeIn Company on this topic. In 2013, Physique of Consciousness Museum was established. It presents each movement, posture’s religious background, their meanings in their original context and related artifacts’ images. It explores the nature and source of our ideologies by creating parallels between our social, religious and political beliefs. Physique of Consciousness Museum challenges observing habits as well as our understanding of the world, offering a new perspective on humankind’s spiritual heritage.

as part of Protozone12: Syncretic Sites

Xu Zhen (*1977) lives and works in Shanghai. Xu Zhen has been considered as an iconic figure in Chinese contemporary art. In 2004, Xu won the prize for ‘Best Artist’ at the China Contemporary Art Award. His practice covers various media such as installations, video, painting and performance.

Xu Zhen has exhibited internationally, at museums and biennales, such as, Venice Biennale (2001, 2005), The Museum of Modern Art (New York, 2004), Mori Art Museum (Tokyo, 2005), MoMA PS1 (New York, 2006), Tate Liverpool (2007), Hayward Gallery (London, 2012), Lyon Biennale (2013), Armory Show (New York, 2014), Long Museum (Shanghai 2015), Al Riwaq Art Center (Qatar, 2016), Sydney Biennial (2016), Guggenheim Museum (New York, 2017), Sharjah Biennial (2019), Museum of Contemporary Art (Los Angeles, 2019), National Gallery of Australia (Canberra, 2020), among others.

XU ZHEN®, founded by artist Xu Zhen in 2013, is the flagship art brand of MadeIn Company. XU ZHEN® is committed to art creation and cutting-edge culture development. Through collecting and appreciating artworks and events produced by XU ZHEN®, users can enjoy spiritual aspirations and life experiences of the finest quality.

Emergency in favour of twice

„The divine is everywhere you sense it.“ The first time I heard about Tantra Yoga, it echoed Marcel Duchamp’s Readymades*

The title of this work refers to one particular Readymade. Duchamp mentions Emergency in favour of twice in a letter to his sister Suzanne, yet without giving any further details. No other reference to the work has been found. No one knows what it is or even, if it ever existed.

Emergency in favour of twice revisits the Readymade as a spiritual object, as a catalyst within a spiritual practice. Recent research in Art History suggests that Duchamp was strongly influenced by so-called Eastern philosophies**. Looking at the Readymade through this lens shifts the canonized gesture of Duchamp. It adds another layer of understanding, laying hidden in the sediments of a narrative untold. On the surface, the Readymade has long turned into a highly functional commodity, serving the cynicism and extractive mechanisms inherent in late Capitalisms’ relation to Contemporary Art***

Starting point of this research process is the legacy of Mira Alfassa. Having been active in Paris as an artist in the same period as Duchamp, she is suspected to be the person who introduced him to the teachings of Tantra Yoga. Later in her life she became an influential spiritual figure on the coast of south-eastern India. She was a spiritual collaborator of Sri Aurobindo who championed the idea of a Yoga of Action, or Karma Yoga. Known to her followers as ‘The Mother’, she co-founded the utopian city of Auroville in 1968.

It is there, that Emergency in favour of twice starts its process of reconnecting to the Readymade. Speculating that ‘the Mother’ contributed to the spark which set the Readymade’s Art revolution in motion, the artist sets out to reconfigure the Readymade through repeated/cyclic actions, as the doing/undoing of Karma.

Every action triggers reaction. Countless such intertwined layers create several multiple bonds, reaching through time and space. Thus every work becomes a means of bondage. To what degree is a maker able to let go of their entanglement with a work? Will they be able to devote their practice to a realm such as ‘the divine’, in other words – toward a more-than-human sphere and beyond their own desire?

“My life situation suggests I take this path and leave the one I have been on, turning a corner, turning from skeptic to seeker.”

Through a continuous and daily practice based on making clay objects, the work has turned into a vessel for an undetermined spiritual heritage. Drawing inspiration from mythological narratives and figurations of the divine that bring about destruction to give way for transformation, this piece does its own undoing.

The answer to the question whether the work has ever existed will not be solved. An answer remains suspended while suggesting that over a long-term duration, such practices of (re)connecting and (un)doing may develop the agency to transform existing narratives and shape the destiny of the Readymade in ways a human maker alone would not be capable of.

*a term to describe prefabricated, often mass-produced objects isolated from their intended use and elevated to the status of art by the artist choosing and designating them as such.

** Marcel Duchamp and the Art of Life, adapted introduction by Jacquelynn Baas. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, U.S.A., 2019

*** […] There are other narratives present such as the feminist art collective’s claire fontaine […] “who seeks to clarify [Duchamps] fountain, to reset the terms of the readymade device to suit current conditions. In part such counter narrative mean ”to wrest the Readymade away from its abuse as a luxury object or a mass logo (as in Jeff Koons or Takashi Murakami) or as an inflated prop in a nihilistic acting out (as in Damian Hirst or Maurizio Cattelan).

as part of Protozone12: Syncretic Sites

Frank Hesse is an artist, designer, yoga teacher and father, living in Zurich. After studying at the Hochschule für bildende Künste Hamburg, he has worked as a researcher and lecturer for the HfbK Hamburg, Hochschule für Kunst Bremen, Zürcher Hochschule der Künste, HSLU Luzern and HKB Bern.

Solo Exhibitions at Adamski Gallery (Berlin), Kunstverein Leipzig, Stadtturmgalerie Innsbruck and Corner College Zürich (selection). Group shows at Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, Palazzo Strozzi Florence and Neues Museum Weserburg Bremen (selection). Collections (selection): MACBA, Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (ES), Lemaitre, London (GB), Dalle Nogare, Bolzano (IT), Wessel, Berlin (DE).

Department of Para Pedagogic Practices: Peça da India

The Department of Para-Pedagogic Practices is an eight-part series of installations/publications, critically engaged in contemporary alterities of the Indian Ocean region. The series responds to the planetary turn and its complex entanglements with the indigenous, the decolonial, the technological and its cosmo-aesthetic potentialities. The first installation/publication of the series, titled ‘Peça da India’, unweaves complex historiographies of textile making and trading in India c.17th-20th century, and constructs a para-pedagogy of the catastrophic legacy of European trade in India and its far reaching implications in the trans-Atlantic human trafficking.

Textiles had been the principal maritime trade commodity between India and the world up until the 17th century, when India was producing 25% of the world’s textiles. Yet, stories of how this figure fell to just 2% by the end of British colonial rule in 1947 too often remain silently spun into colonial historiography. Tapestries (white gold) woven across looms in India, were worn by Europeans or displayed on mantelpieces in their richer homes, and came to be called Peça da Índia or Boa Peça (trans. a Piece of India / good piece). This Portuguese phrase, which originated in the mid-17th century, infamously also transformed into the unit of value used in the trading of enslaved peoples by colonies in West Africa.

Enslavers in the African continent traded these bespoke Peça da India for millions of human bodies who voyaged across the Middle Passage. Tarnished unwittingly, yet indelibly with these ethical implications, over the course of the next century of colonial rule, the making and trading of textiles from India would suffer further violences motored by the complex pan-European emergence of industrialization and capitalism.

Situated at the Shedhalle, a former silk factory in Zürich’s centuries old Rote Fabrik, the work further relates to Switzerland’s own techno-financial entanglements with other European colonial nations. A large-scale industrial espionage took root in European textile factories (like the Rote Fabrik) where textiles were produced in unprecedented quantities, spiriting away the intricate know-how of Indian textile making and eventually rendering India entirely devoid of its main economic sustenance.

The present installation comprises a 24 metre long piece of un/woven cotton, a constellation of 7 pieces of ruptured and sutured silks measuring 1 Peça*, a custom-coded rendering of a speculative digitised fabric, and other fabric and paraphernalia from the colonial era trade, on loan from local Swiss public & private archives. A publication associated with this installation will follow in the next iteration of the work alongside further indigenously-made fabric pieces.

Cumulatively the constellation of text and textile works in the installation/publication ‘Peça da India’ asks how we may reconsider the binaries of the oppressor and the oppressed in decolonial practices and how we may uncover closed off narratives of the past and lay bare the knots of contemporary nation-states and wealth making.

* Each Peça, a fabric piece woven in India, measured seven palmos (palm’s breadth) and fetched one healthy enslaved male or female between the ages of 15 and 25 years; further deductions were made for physical variances and deviations of age.

as part of Protozone12: Syncretic Sites

Shruti Belliappa (born in Bangalore, based in London) is a writer, Post-war and Contemporary Art historian and theorist whose practice interrogates counter-cartographies, liminality and the technologies of belonging. She is currently a doctoral candidate at Goldsmiths (Visual Cultures), researching sonic epistemologies and spatial justice in the post-national borderlands of the Mekong. Since 2016, she is the Founding Editor of Hanuman Editions (a follow on from the cult Hanuman Books series) a forthcoming publication series on the planetary avant-garde, and is writing her first novel Home is the Place You Left.

Kiraṇ Kumār’s (born in Bangalore; based in Auroville/Berlin) practice lies at the intersection of dance, critical historiography and speculative computing. Drawing from embodied and conceptual inquiries into yogic & tāntrik practices, he articulates dis/continuities in contemporary thought through performance, writing and visual art. His works have shown at Jeu de Paume Paris, Singapore Biennial, Gessneralle Zürich; and published with Performance Research Books, transcript Verlag and Archive Books. He has held research fellowships at Berlin Centre for Advanced Studies in Arts and Sciences (2016-18), Academy for Theatre and Digitality (2021), Akademie Schloss Solitude (2022/24) and Medienwerk.NRW (2023).

Credits:

by Shruti Belliappa & Kiraṇ Kumār

Research Consultant: Sourav Das, Textile designer & Revivalist
Weaver (cotton): Asif Ansari, 3rd-generation indigenous weaver from Maheshwar (India)

Seamster (silk): Malek, S K Abdul Saleem

Custom-coding: Matthias Härtig

with objects and loans from the collections of the Swiss National Museum, Schweizerisches Nationalmuseum Zürich and Club zur Geduld Winterthur

We would like to thank for the kind loans of the SNM Swiss National Museum, Zurich

We would like to thank for the kind loan of Club zur Geduld, Winterthur

We would like to thank for the kind loan of focusTerra

Please Listen to my Demo

Nunca vas a comprender

A Chamada

An old dance floor offers space for three bodies. Traces of past movements can be seen on the floor, while the bodies are standing in stillness. They are made of iron, copper and glass. The three sculptures are idiophones, playable percussive instruments whose bodies themselves generate the sound when they are set in vibration. Idiophones illustrate how closely the production of ephemeral sounds is coupled to solid materiality. Ephemerality is always connected to solidity. Thus, the forms of the three sculptures trace the medium of movement and sound on different sensory levels. Visible, audible and tactile elements synthesize in ‘Please Listen to my Demo’, ‘Nunca vas a comprender’ and ‘A Chamada’, reminding us how closely coupled individual senses of perception operate, that are often separated from each other.

Nina Emge based her work on research into the formation of a classical musical canon, which is closely connected to different mechanisms of exclusion. Here, too, the question arises of the relationship between fleeting movement and solid form, that is, the archiving and repetition of sounds and musical traditions. This usually takes place through notation and preservation in compositions. Diasporic musical traditions and collective musical practices that are not fixed by composition thus often go unheard or forgotten. Another way to give voice to the ephemerality of sound and vibration is through the instrument itself and the way sound-emitting bodies are constructed.

Nina Emges’ sculptures propose the extension of a musical canon through other ways of remembering sounds. In this context, the percussive sound-emitting body does not merely serve as an instrument for the repetition of fixed, canonized music: the three percussive bodies are tools that can be reinterpreted by the players at the moment of sound production. An extension of the canon through idiophones offers a space to long forgotten, quiet or unimagined forms of playing and listening.

as part of Protozone12: Syncretic Sites

Nina Emge (*1995, currently in Zurich) reflects on the social dimensions of sound, voice, silence and practices of listening through her artistic practice. Emge’s work is centered around issues such as decentralization, shared working methods and redistribution. This is evident in her installations and drawings, which reflect her research and archival work, as well as in the production processes of her artworks. Emge is an active member of the Transnational Sound Initiative.

Emge’s works have been exhibited at institutions including Halle für Kunst in Lüneburg, Kunsthalle Zurich, Istituto Svizzero Rome, Frac Bretagne + Centre Culturelle Suisse Paris, Uferhalle Berlin, Kunstverein Braunschweig, Helmhaus Zurich, Haus Konstruktiv Zurich, and other national and international exhibitions.

Credits:

Sculpture hanging from ceiling:

Please Listen to my Demo

193 x 235 cm / Iron, Copper, Glass

Sculpture standing on floor:

Nunca vas a comprender

175 x 124 cm / Iron, Glass

Sculpture hanging on wall:

A Chamada

160 x 120 cm / Iron, Glass

Thank you Tanzhaus Zürich for the Dance Floor

The New Book of Mountains and Seas Part 3

Based on Chinese traditional classic book <Classic of Mountains and Seas>, Qiu Anxiongs animation trilogy questions the onrushing progress of social and technological development and their cost to the environment, to traditional values, to nature-culture as a whole and humans’ role in it.

In Part III, the artist depicts an apocalyptic future in the post-information age, where a deteriorating environment turns humankind itself into virtual reality. A man with a mask falls from a skyscraper, fish eyes serve as surveillance cameras installed throughout the empty street, no human is around. The urban landscape is projected onto circuit boards transported on a production line housed in a dark factory, while the once-existent mountains and seas of nature have become a lost utopia in a virtual spectacle world. The scenarios’ depiction reveals this worldview like a prophecy for the city after the pandemic.

Qiu Anxiong is considered a pioneer in deepening the resonance of animation by introducing the aesthetics of ink painting. This approach serves a non-linear narrative which, in Part III, is most evident. Interlacing imagery of the real with the virtual, the animation reflects on the contemporary world where the delineation between the virtual and the real has become increasingly blurred, and the fictional can augment our sense of what is real.

as part of Protozone12: Syncretic Sites

Qiu Anxiong (*1972) was born in Sichuan (China). He lives and works in Shanghai. His works are in collection at Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, MoMA, Art Museum of Brooklyn, New York, Pompidou Center，Kunst Halle Zurich, Spenser Museum, Kansas University, Museum of University Oxford, Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo, Art Museum Hongkong, Astrup Fearnley Musum of Modern Art.

Solo Exhibition at Fosun Art Center in Shanghai (C), Aken Museum of Modern Art in Copenhagen (DK) Crow Collection of Asian Art Museum in Dallas (US), OCAT Contemporary Art Museum in Shenzhen (C), Spencer Museum of Art in Lawrence KS (US), 4A Art Center in Sydney (AUS), Museum of Contemporary Art in Tokyo (J).

Group Show (selection): Show and Tell: Stories in Chinese Painting, Metropolitan Museum of Art 2016, “Ink Art, Past as Present in Contemporary China”, Metropolitan Museum of Art 2013, 29th Sao Paulo Biennale, Busan Biennale 2010, The 6th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, 2nd Biennale Thessaloniki, Greece 2009, “11th Cairo Biennale, 3rd Triennial of Guangzhou, 16 Biennale of Sydney, “China Power Station Part3”, Museum d’art modern Grand-duc Jean , Luxembourg, “Video Lounge”, Kunsthaus Zurich “China Power Station Part2”, Arstrup Fearnleys Museum of Modern Art, Oslo, “Animation Painting” San Diego Museum of Art 2007, 6th biennial Shanghai, Shanghai Art Museum 2006

Forever Unblocked is an event series that will be launched on Saturday 02.09.2023 at Rote Fabrik Zürich. The series focuses on time-based media art exploring discourses that shape the post-internet era.

For the first edition, a thematic focus will be placed on new age mysticism. Works in the field of performance and music will be shown, which investigate mysticism in the post-internet era.

Co-directed and produced by Émonie Fay Chetwin, Florian Schlessmann and Tereza Glazova.

The death of all narratives | ft. Xleepyfay & Laure

audioplay, in the framework of The Long Night of the Museums Zurich, 02.09.2023, curated by Forever Unblocked

The death of all narrative is an audioplay produced by bod [包家巷], featuring voicenotes by Xleepyfay & Laure. The piece situates itself at the end of the global multicrisis of the past 5 years and the alleged feeling of the end of the world. It investigates the decade of a new narrational entropy that we seem to be entering.

The death of all narratives sheds a whitepilled light onto the future, a future where literalism and grand narratives as we know them are dead. Where the old layers of landfill and the sorrowful depth of the riverbeds shall become the garden and the flame of a new life. A new truth shall be birthed and remain forever unblocked.

BaoJiaXiang ( bod [包家巷]) considers themself an all-encompassing artist, with vested interest in the mutualities between the real and artificial and post-digital thinking. Actively engaged in critical thought regarding ethnographics and as a total synthesis of their existence on the technological and psychological planes.

Their take on virtuality, a popular idea of the last decade, is more rooted in semantics. In terms of music, there lives an anxious echo of melodic tunes, backed by orchestral or traditional Chinese instrumentals. There often sees a balance between futurist and old, and western with eastern sounds. “I was not accepted as Chinese, American, or European.” (source Coeval Magazine)

Pluto’s Cave

When I was a kid I grew up in different places. One of them was a cave. I lived mesmerized by the outside lights shed into it and by the shadows it produced. I fell asleep to the stories I heard and observed coming from the outside. I grew up until I was finally able to leave the cave. I realized that all that I had learned in the cave was neither right nor wrong, but a fragmented truth and image of a story bigger than I had ever imagined. Sometimes I still look back into the cave to see how new sources of light play into the new stories that are being told. Lights and narratives change over time; to peek into my old cave of a home helps me to understand the changing of it on a grand scale.

Maxime Buono is a multi-disciplinary artist and graduate from Angers School of Fine Art (France) in 2021. He moved to Marseille (France) in 2022 where he is still living and working today.

As a self proclaimed alchemist – a person who transforms or generates something new through a seemingly magical process – and through his artistic story-telling, he is depicting his ethereal reality, working with mainly physical installations and digital editing. Using his phone (he likes to view it as a modern talisman) and graphic messengers, Maxime shows a world where fantasy takes place in reality until reality eventually even reverses itself into full fantasy.

Maxime creates places of void, where you are free to create anything you like if you’re able to create the right plot. The only rule remaining is: DON’T RUIN MY FANTASY

anybard transmission on the shadow channel [an invocation for the Spellchestra]

The vast open space between transmitting and receiving is where anybard currently finds themselves; longing for connection and collective memories. During the course of the past year’s Spellcaster shows, they have developed a song-and-narrative-engine (the “mem.mel.-engine”), allowing for a “re-shuffling” / expansion / altering of the already existing narratives and sonics.

this ever-morphing “matrix-opera” plays out within the scenic/sonic installation of a radiofield consisting of 8 walkie talkies – “the shadow channel” – through which anybard sings, transmits and receives songs, in endless feedback loops and wormholes: communicating with the ghosts of the shadow channel, singing invocations for their future ensemble; the Spellchestra.

Spellcaster is a music drama project by danish composer and musician holger hartvig (they/them), exploring the musical and narrative potentials of operatic expression, roleplaying game engines and bardic methods. The musical output is primarily based on (re)sampling and montage techniques, consisting of both electronic and orchestral elements, rock guitars as well as field recordings, all tied together by the sung narratives, processing themes such as memory, identity and community.

Two albums have been released under the Spellcaster moniker: ‘Inventory’ (Visage, 2019) and ‘memo’ (Anyines / Forlaget Virkelig, 2022), both told from the perspective of the character anybard – a bard character who tries to invent their memory, bend time through song and establish connections. ‘memo’ ends in the hope of collective action, when Anybard, together with the character Companion, transmits an invitation to a “role-play musical”. Since the release of the opera ‘memo’ in march 2022, Spellcaster has toured it in 10+ shows spread over Switzerland, Portugal, Denmark, Sweden, Germany and Ireland. website: https://hhspell.pb.online/

If every rock is a hole

If every rock is a hole, then every absence is a presence. If every hole is a rock, then vulnerability is a force.

If every rock is a hole is a subtle and contemplative dance performance in which the audience is invited to slow down and look beyond the visible. In this work Argentinian choreographer Amparo González Sola challenges the borders between visibility and invisibility, resisting and surrendering, presence and absence. The piece summons hidden memories, images, movements and sounds of deserted landscapes.

What do we encounter when we give attention to the quiet resonances and the still movements that are often overlooked?

as part of Protozone12: Syncretic Sites

Amparo González Sola (Argentina, 1984) is a choreographer, dancer and researcher. She currently lives in Amsterdam where she did her master at DAS Choreography (AHK). Her research of the last few years has developed around the notion of “reciprocity”. This research has taken the form of performances and also of participative practices, workshops and texts. Her work is affected by her experience within feminist activism, the ongoing process of contact with the cosmology of her ancestors and her experience of migration. In 2022 she premiered “If every rock is a hole” and this year “The conspiracy of forms”, both within the SPRING Performing Arts Festival (NL). She constantly collaborates with other artists and researchers both in Argentina and Europe.

Credits:

DANCER, CHOREOGRAPHY & DIRECTION Amparo González Sola / LIGHT & SPACE Vinny Jones / SOUND Nahuel Cano / ARTISTIC COLLABORATION Jimena Perez Salerno / SCENOGRAPHIC ADVICE Charles Chauvet / ADVISORS Diana Szeinblum & Kadiatou Diallo / CONCEPTUAL DIALOGS Laura Cull Ó Maoilearca & Marie Bardet

COPRODUCTION: SPRING Performing Art Festival Utrecht (NL) SUPPORT (2021-22): Pro Helvetia – Coincidencia (CH), Program Residenties in Utrecht (NL), Institut Français d’ Argentine (FR), Próximamente Festival (BE), KVS Theater (BE), El Asunto de lo Remoto (AR), Young Art Support Amsterdam (NL); Jan Kassies Grants (NL), ATD-Aart Janszen Fonds (NL), DAS Choreography & DAS Graduated School AHK (NL)RESIDENCIES: Rote Fabrik (CH), Workspace Brussels (BE), Los Vidrios (AR), Dansateliers (NL)

Soot Breath / Corpus Infinitum is a film dedicated to tenderness. It reproduces a radical sensibility we learned from listening to the blues, from listening to skin, to heat, and from listening to echoes, listening itself.

We ask, could tenderness dissolve total violence? Could tears displace total extraction?

Towards this we reimagine the human and its subject-formation away from predatory desire and lethal abstraction, away from the mind and eyes and noble senses, away from total extraction and its articulations as ethnography, border regimes, slavery, sexual abuse, trade and mining.

Instead we turn to skin, resonance, and tenderness as the raw material of our reimagined earthy sensibility. Remembering that to be tender is to soften like supple grass, and to attend to is to care for, to serve. Serving, we know is the opposite of slavery just as violence dissolves with care.

as part of Protozone12: Syncretic Sites

Arjuna Neuman is an artist, filmmaker and writer. His films and installations have been shown internationally, including in Berlin Biennial, Manifesta, Sharjah Biennial and in museums such as Centre Pompidou, Madre Museum, MAAT and Jamee Art Centre. As a writer he has published essays in Relief Press, Into the Pines Press, The Journal for New Writing, VIA Magazine, Concord, Art Voices, Flaunt, LEAP, Hearings Journal, Umbau and e- flux. He studied at California Institute of the Arts. He works with the essay form with a multi-perspectival and mobile approach where ‘essay’ is an inherently future-oriented and experimental mode, becoming the guiding principle for research and production, which shifts between the bodily, haptic and affective through to the geopolitical, planetary and cosmological. He has mixtapes essays on Dublab, Radio Alhara and NTS. He is also a co-founder of www.archiveofbelonging.org – a resource database for migrants and refugees.

Denise Ferreira da Silva is a practicing artist and philosopher. She is the Director and a professor at the Institute of Social Justice-GRSJ at University of British Columbia (Vancouver, Canada), adjunct professor at the Monash University School of Art, Architecture and Design (Melbourne, Australia). In spring 2023 she is also occupying the International Chair of Contemporary Philosophy of the Department of Philosophy of the Paris 8 University.

Denise is the author of Toward a Global Idea of Race (University of Minnesota Press, 2007), Unpayable Debt (Stenberg / MIT Press, 2022) and co-editor (with Paula Chakravartty) of Race, Empire, and the Crisis of the Subprime (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013). Her several articles have been published in leading interdisciplinary journals, such as Social Text, Theory, Culture & Society, Social Identities, PhiloSOPHIA, Griffith Law Review, Theory & Event, The Black Scholar, to name a few. Her work addresses the ethico-political challenges of the global present. She is a member of several boards including Haus der Kulturen der Welt (Berlin), International Consortium for Critical Theory Programs and the journals Postmodern Culture, Social Identities and Dark Matter.

Arjuna Neuman and Denise Ferreira da Silva’s collaboration includes the film Serpent Rain (2016), 4 Waters-Deep Implicancy (2018), Soot Breath//Corpus Infinitum (2020). Their films have been exhibited at major art venues, such as the Pompidou Center (Paris), Whitechapel Gallery, The 56th Venice Biennale, The Haus der Kulturen der Welt (Berlin), Centre for Contemporary Art (Glasgow), Julia Stoschek Collection (Dusseldorf), Arnhem Museum (Netherland) and more. Their films have been screened at Berlinale Forum Expanded, Images Festival Toronto, Doclisboa, Pravo Lujdski and more. They were the 2021 feature artists at the Flaherty Seminar and their work is held in the Belkin Museum Collection. In 2023, they are showing the ensemble of their films at the MACBA (Barcelona) and they will premiere their new film Ancestral Clouds, Ancestral Ghosts in October at the Kunsthalle Wien.

In 2021, “Serpent Rain” and “4 Waters-Deep Implicancy” were presented at Shedhalle within Denise Ferrerira da Silva’s “Elemental Study Room”, her contribution to Protozone2: Continuity/Transpassing -. making histories together in more-than-human words.

The Sequesterers (2023)

site specific study scenario + performance practice

A trio of Redwood trees live and labour at the edge of the Zurich Lake, neighbouring the site of Rote Fabrik. A.Livingstone sees these 100 year old Sequoia Sempervirens species as a site of study, as « always living » collaborators.

This tightly knit family of trees offer an exceptional performance of carbon sequestration and a spectacular installation of biodiversity.

Serious survival strategies in a troubled ecotone –

Insight for an expanded choreographic method –

The interconnected root system extends in every possible direction.

These redwoods’ anchor underneath the Zurich See

They reach for nourishment all the way to below Shedhalle Arts Space.

A living underground for the Syncretic Sites exhibition.

Via a series of short audio guides / listening scores

A.Livingstone invites visitors to encounter the unseen in various ways.

The Sequesterers score suggests a venture beyond the boundaries of the building, to study the redwoods from the lakes’ point of view. Shedhalle Team are available to support mobility and tech needs. Audio Guides / Listening scores are available by QR code scan.

subterfuge

audio + video

subterranean

score live lecture /gesture 60min

17.09.23, 13h

Below the clean concrete floor of the former factory is a dynamic entanglement of pipes and passages, fluids and fibres, electrical and vegetal intelligences. The redwoods’ roots system reigns, mycelia gossips, and the snail keeps time. This lecture reflects on « points of contact » and proposes a gesture for fine tuning our attention to forces that sustain us. A study of taking and making of refuge together. A siesta scenario.

as part of Protozone12: Syncretic Sites

A.Livingstone makes things / actions / relations, often in situ, often in collaboration. A body of work trembling on display. Post – Canadian, nomadic, self-taught, they make performance installations as research on taking and making of refuge, the somatic, social, and spatial operations of re-connection – often considering the aesthetic, architecture and consciousness of the snail as method.

A.Livingstone currently works as a researcher and artistic advisor for EXERCE Masters, Centre Chorégraphique Nationale Montpellier, France and as liason project facilitator between artists and geologists via KIAC Trondec Hwiechen First Nation, Yukon Territory. Recent works have been active at Nocturne Poétique, Louvre, Paris, Cultures D’Avenir, Centre George Pompidou, Paris, Palais de Tokyo, Paris, Martin Gropius Bau, Berlin, Barbican London, Scottish Landscape Trust, Darling Foundry, Montreal. Recent key collaborators are Dance Artist – Folklorist Sherwood Chen, Philosopher Emma Bigé, performer Kizis -Mich Cota, choreographers Lee Su-feh, and Jamila Johnson Small.

“Exhalation” (2021) was first conceived by Ponzini upon Carico Massimo’s invitation to participate in On Air, a collaborative project that functions as an online-offline hub on air, atmosphere, environment, and breath.

Ponzini writes: “My thought, in relating to the concept of breath, was to approach it from a visual point of view, opposing its totally non-visual nature, to then render a sonic impression that could then evoke a mental image.

At that time, I was working on sampling sounds and music from films and, in a broader sense, from images, by means of field recording. An unorthodox approach that overcomes the smoothness of the source device, but also the cleanliness of sophisticated sound recording. Breath, therefore, came to be configured as raw, primordial matter to be sculpted and moulded.

The piece invites us to close our eyes and visualize several iconic breaths from cinema such as:

>Paul Verhoever’s 1990 film Total Recall starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, based on a short story by Philip K. Dick. The struggle for power and freedom revolves around the possibility of breathing on Mars.

>Apollo 13 (1995): the movie narrates the events of the eponymous space mission, which failed due to a serious accident that put the lives of the three astronauts at risk due to a lack of oxygen.

>Red Planet (2000), about the terraforming of Mars. By 2057, Earth had become virtually uninhabitable due to overpopulation and pollution. With the intention of colonizing Mars, automated probes containing genetically modified algae were launched to the red planet to create a human-breathable atmosphere.

>The breath of the ‘dark father’ par excellence, Darth Vader from Star Wars (1977)

>The sick, drugged breath of Frank Booth in David Lynch’s Blue Velvet (1986), played by Dennis Hopper.

>Hayao Miyazaki’s Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind (1984), a milestone of Japanese animation, returns a reflection on the breath of the earth, emblematically contextualizing it with respect to the themes dear to the director, such as ecologism and pacifism.

Ramona Ponzini’s practice is inscribed in a hybrid territory: techniques from both visual and literary arts, such as collage or Burroughsian cut-up, are combined with sound experimentations and improvisation in a noise and jazz style. At the compositional level, the process adopted by Ponzini follows a purely conceptual matrix, crossing the idea of “editing” and “sampling” of coded and reprocessed elements through the use of loop machines and both digital and analog effects. They are d’apres sonori that draw on poetry, music and landscape, captured through the technique of field recording.

Ramona Ponzini’s debut dates back to 2005 with the project Painting Petals On Planet Ghost, focused on Japanese poetry as a privileged source of musicable lyrics, which landed on PSF Records, Japan’s cult label of artists such as Keiji Haino and Kaoru Abe. Over the years, Ponzini has collaborated with prominent figures such as Lee Ranaldo of Sonic Youth, Tom Greenwood of Jackie-O Motherfucker, and with industrial percussionist Z’ev. Her solo project consists of unusual DJ sets contaminated by vocal interactions and sound collages. In 2018 she was resident dj at OGR in Turin during the exhibition Dancing is what we make of falling, curated by Samuele Piazza and Valentina Lacinio.

In 2019 she realised Trees are columns with clouds on top, a vinyl and a sound performance dedicated to master Italian painter Salvo, presented by Norma Mangione Gallery and during the exhibition Autoritratto come Salvo at MACRO – Museum of Contemporary Art of Rome (2022). frogs.picus.VANNA (2021) is a three-channel installation commissioned by the Castello di Rivoli – Museum of Contemporary Art.

really weird, how it is so complicated to talk about what is weird.

And yet, today, everyone is talking about it. On Frieze Magazine, 111 results appear as articles that include the word weird in their title, even the other hot magazines of the moment in the art system offer us a non-stop list.

The interesting thing from my perspective is that the term weird condensed in itself other terms: the idea of “magic” supports it as a telamon, “ritual and ceremonial” were systematic words in many different exhibitions. Other terms were:

Spell

Divination

Sorcery

Emulation

Enchantment

Black Magic White magic

Sortilego

Witches

Incantation

Illusion Occult

Supernatural

Uncanny

Abnormal

Mysterious

Ghosts and grotesque amongst similar keywords.

Perhaps, at this point, I would prefer it if it were made clear how this long list of words and concepts is used to create formulas to detoxify us from being helpless witnesses to old hierarchical structures. but does the long list offer us a hypothesis for change?

Or could it be replaced by a long list of horror films, those that the film genre offered in the 1970s, generating the same effect? In short, in the face of these written lines, one may wonder if the short circuit is intentional, given that we are inside an exhibition entitled

P_r_o_t_o_z_o_n_e_1_1_:_ _i_t_’s_ _w_e_i_r_d_.

Its editorial area is a specific space which aims—into another space, the exhibition project itself—to build the time for an investigation, the search for otherness.

As a production space, it collects images and words in all possible stages of their being:

printed,

recorded,

handwritten, in critical form, transcribed, and drawn.

These materials are presented in a plural form, some of them are even duplicated and placed in different areas of the exhibition space in order to abide by the rule of the “good neighbour”.

This formula stipulates that in searching for a particular material, one ends up picking up the one next to it that will turn out to be much more useful than one thought. This dimension of discovery opens at the same time a discourse on the marginal and the search for the alterity.

but what is weird and what is the new weird?

can there be a definition away from fiction and narrative and closer to something simple,

almost elusive?

can something out of time be considered weird?

something that today we would never see as part of our society, our institutions?

can the weird still surprise us or better teach us to build a new praxis?

Many of these questions may seem innocent to us, but their attempt is nothing more than to shake up a visual typology that has dominated countless exhibition projects over the past few years.

This effort is fuelled by Claire Bishop’s recent essay Information Overload published in the latest issue of Artforum in April 2023.

The exercise of recognition to which the author urges us at the beginning of her text leads us to a familiar space, that of research-based art and its possible complications. Until a few years ago, I must admit that the indefatigable nerd that I am, I have felt a sense of open, sensitively touchable pleasure when faced with the endless array of showcases, technical data, documentary videos, letters and ephemera of all kinds. Even today, all these elements still constitute a glimmer of light and contentment for me, but they are increasingly lacking in immediacy.

“in the strongest examples of research-based art, the viewer is offered a signal rather than noise, an original proposition founded on a clear research question rather than inchoate curiosity. if this sounds like a crypto-academic call to apply traditional research criteria to works of art, then it is, to an extent: earlier, I differentiated between search and research, and i unabashedly prefer the latter.”

This archive, in fact, wants to show a shadow side of the weird trying to metabolize and shape a new form for its delivery. This also happens when bringing together pieces of history and documents, we discover that they are far apart and cannot be directly traced back to a common meaning.

There is a work by Max Ernst, with a monstrous aspect and a curious choice of title. It is Europa nach dem Regen (Europe after the rain).

As the painting shows us together with its title, we need a space for silence, to encounter a new form of access to content or gestures enclosed in the space of the project. Writing, which is a form of silent speech, may constitute an interruption to how the conversation about weirdness is imagined.

In this, the oblique function could be an interesting strategy, “a critique of rectitude” as the theorist and philosopher Adriana Cavarero would say, allowing us to grasp a new access to reading definitions. Perhaps in order to revise the meaning of what is weird we should run along an inclined plane, a space that forces us to awaken human abilities that lie asleep in our psyche. The eye runs along inclined surfaces and the brain is forced to continuously rework the stresses coming from destabilising support. “The function of the oblique”, the central object of the theory of architect Claude Parent and philosopher Paul Virilio, thus originates as a free hypothesis, without proposing itself as a formal method.

so let us look sideways.

An inclined self, leaning outwards, is no longer straight, i.e. it hangs over the vertical axis on which it stands and which makes it an autonomous and independent subject because it is balanced on itself.

In this editorial space, narrative lines are knotted and untied, they intertwine and intersect without ever concluding, without ever flowing into an overall plot; it is an almost experimental novel constructed as a series of interrupted incipits that captivate the reader but endlessly divert him towards other plots.

Lisa Andreani

Rome, June, 2023

Lisa Andreani is a curator and art historian.From 2020 to 2022 she has been Curatorial and Editorial Coordinator at MACRO – Museum for Preventive Imagination (Rome). In 2019 she has been a fellow of Global Modernism Studies research program at the Bauhaus Dessau Foundation (Dessau) in collaboration with the Victoria & Albert Museum (London). She coordinated the production of Romanistan (2019), a film by Luca Vitone. In 2019 she co-founded REPLICA, a curatorial and research project investigating artist books. She has collaborated with various institutions and publishers including Fondazione Arnaldo Pomodoro (Milan), Fondation Carmignac (Paris-Porquerolles), Humboldt Books (Milan), Mousse Magazine & Publishing (Milan). Since 2018 she works as an archivist and researcher for Archivio Salvo becoming part of the Scientific Committee.

IMAGES: It is weird (2023) Lisa Andreani. Installation view. The Weird Reader, “Protozone11: it’s weird” at Shedhalle. Image by Irem Güngez.

A collaborative obsession by Michelangelo Miccolis & nick von kleist

For AUDIO, please play & shuffle the audio from the PLAYLIST HERE or from the button below titled “playlist for sh!tfictions”.

Suffice it to say, quarantine has been a pain in the ass.

We have assumed and reassumed roles and duties outside of our ideas of artistic development, caretaking, and community. We have been physically silent, walled inside, able to exploit our virtual privilege to connect, entertain ourselves and remember life before 2020.

Stuck in quarantine we, Michelangelo and myself, have kept ourselves occupied with a deluge of cinematic nostalgia—a collection of movies and series from before quarantine. We found simply rewatching tedious, so we began watching movies with subtitles we had downloaded from other films & tv. One of our first experiments was watching Lost in Translation with subtitles from Bergman’s Persona. The moment Scarlet Johansson’s face came on screen with the subtitle: “Elisabet Vogler”––we immediately paused it, took multiple screenshots, & burst into laughter at the random synchronicity and absurdity in the new image/collage. This began a daily growing archive with this and more subtitles from Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, The Devil Wears Prada, Inland Empire, Scenes from a Marriage, Crimes of the Future, and many more. Even with this expanding incidental archive, we keep returning to Elisabet Vogler.

Looking back through our screenshots one figure emerged—Elisabet Vogler; she was on everyone’s lips. Elisabet vogler––while talking to a partner, walking down the street, planning to save the world, looking over a seaside cliff in a turtleneck… This particular line happens around the fifteen minute mark in the subtitle file we have, and because of this, each image that took on this subtitle was in this same turning point in each movie. The moment where we finally progress from the prologue into the culmination of the first chapter. Foreshadowing gains weight, and the image drops the first stone for the narrative arc to ripple out.

The more we used the subtitles from Persona, the more we came to know the script. Persona was a perfect example of a couple in quarantine, a magnification of their differences and polarities inflamed through isolation. Elisabet Vogler became our drag mother for quarantine—this diva who just couldn’t be fucked with the world, who is placed in quarantine, while her nurse, Sister Alma, follows closely behind her and seemingly cannot stop oversharing with the faintly responsive Elisabet.

We then tried to understand what was the narrative we have created through these screenshots, who is our Elisabet Vogler? We went through the screenshots in the order we had taken them and then again randomized, screen-recording this process. Through this we began selecting moments that worked, i.e. made us laugh, and began placing them together. Testing them each time with the music we had been listening to in quarantine.

The character Elisabet seems to always be in control, performing silent, performing therapist—enviable out of the two characters. However when her name is misplaced and taken out of the seclusion of Persona and woven with images from very different films, we begin connecting the Vogler we’ve seen with the moments of Vogler we see.

This process centers on seeing. Extracting and blending what we choose to remember and to archive, and how that frames what we can convey. Our screenshots resemble our virtual experience over the past few months—emphasizing “our”. At first this felt like the most laborious inside joke between us, but our insistence on watching and archiving and the skill we developed in this feels worth investigating. We were able to revise narratives that feel surprising, moreso appalling, to ever be presented—with the language of another film.

This random fan fiction is really just that, a reimagining and record of our experience, while we tossed the title Elisabet Vogler between one another.

Why E. Vogler? a defence for sh!tfiction

written by nick von kleist

Tepotzotlán, MX, August 2020

Protozone11: It’s weird

Curated by Michelangelo Miccolis

Produced & Moderated by nick von kleist

Editor & Contributor Lisa Andreani

“The Weird Reader” is an open-format & in-process publication that will be developed throughout the duration of the exhibition, 9 June – 8 August, 2023.

“The Weird Reader” opens up the process of exhibition making to its audience, creating portals of exchange with the works, theoretical frameworks and processes of the participants of Protozone11: it’s weird at Shedhalle, curated by Michelangelo Miccolis. During the exhibition program, “The Weird Reader” will take shape as an in-process collection of texts on display both as an installation and online, a weekly reading group, and a series of commissioned texts & lectures.

(b. 1983, Stockholm, Sweden) is a Swedish choreographer, artist and dancer based in Stockholm. His work ranges from fortune telling, cat practicing, writing poetry to dancing. It is a love for dancing with a particular interest in made and found objects that create choreographies in between subject and object, spectator and performer, where hospitality and temporality can be seen as two major choreographic and artistic principles, as well as more open fields of study such as poetry and water.

Pontus Pettersson has throughout his career worked on situations where inviting other artists has been a crucial aspect of understanding his work in a greater whole – hospitality being one of his main conceptual concerns, seen as a choreographic principal for dance/art to emerge.

In the framework of Protozone11: it’s weird:

Pancor Poetics

Performance, July 01, 2023, 14-20h

with Aga Pędziwiatr, V Pierzyński and Tyra Wigg

Pancor Poetics is a collection of choreographic proposals interwoven (or entangled) in thoughts about artistic heritage, re-creation, repetition as displacement, text and the linguistics of dance.

“Even when they are things they fill with bodies. And just as easily bodies break down into things.”

– Andrew Beradini, Mousse Magazine

Kris Lemsalu challenges materiality, personifying and then performing alongside her sculptural works, to reveal a connectivity between object and body. Augmenting reality, at times using her complex sculptures as apparitional vehicles, her ceremoniously strange and captivating performances question the status of the material object.

Kris Lemsalu (Tallinn, 1985) lives and works between New York and Tallinn. She creates mixed-media sculptures, installations and performances with unexpected materials. Lemsalu’s pieces evoke the bestial side of human beings and civilisations, and are often underscored by feminist themes. Lemsalu has shown as part of Performa 17 (2017), DRAF performance night (2017), Bunshitu Gallery, Tokyo (2015), Ferdinand Bauman Gallery, Prague (2015) and is represented by Koppe Astner, Glasgow and Temnikova & Kasela, Tallinn. Lemsalu represented Estonia at the 58th Venice Biennale 2019.

In the framework of Protozone11: it’s weird:

Kris Lemsalu will contribute with an untitled durational performance of hers in collaboration with Maria Metsalu and will leave traces of the install until the closing of the Protozone.

Picture: Kris Lemsalu, Paloma (2020). In collaboration with Kyp Malone and Barbara Sanchez-Kane. Performance view at IMMATERIAL Vol. 4, curated by Michelangelo Miccolis at Material Art Fair. Mexico City, 2020. Courtesy the artist and CCA Estonia. Photo: Sandra Blow

Drawing from her training in theatre and the psychology of group dynamics, New York–based artist Autumn Knight makes performances that reshape perceptions of race, gender, and authority. She scrutinises institutional spaces that regulate African American subjects or that assert their absence, often putting black women at the center of the conversation to usurp the dynamics of a room with humour and with purpose.

Knight is the recipient of the Rome Prize (2022) and a Guggenheim Fellowship (2022). Her performance work, WALL is the first live performance work entered into the permanent collection of the Studio Museum in Harlem. Knight participated in the 2019 Whitney Biennial.

In the framework of Protozone11: it’s weird:

Knight will contribute to the program with a series of her vinyl drawings, recently developed for her solo exhibition, “NOTHING #26: THE POTENTIAL OF NOTHING IS EVERYTHING,” at the Wallach Art Gallery (NY). These drawings demonstrate our continued engagement and dedication to the process of an artist’s work as opposed to simply their output. Knight first developed these for the SHED, our virtual greenroom developed over the pandemic, and has since taken them from their virtual form to manifest physically.

(1971, Washington, DC, USA) is a New York-based artist. Coming from a background in dance and stand-up comedy, his performance-based work employs a variety of media: from participatory installations to sculpture, painting, writing, theater, video and curation.

Portnoy is largely concerned with manipulating language and behavior as a tool for world-bending – either in his “Relational Stalinist” game structures in which confusion, complication, and ambiguity are used to stretch participants’ speech and movement; or his quest to “improve” existing breeds of art through re-engineering.

He has presented internationally in museums, art galleries, theatres and music halls, including Steirischer Herbst, Graz, Austria (2019 & 2018); Witte de With, Rotterdam, the Netherlands (2016); the Centre Pompidou, Paris, France (2015); Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, the Netherlands (2014); Cricoteka, Krakow, Poland (2014); Palais de Tokyo, Paris, France (2013); KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin, Germany (2013); The Kitchen, New York, USA (2013); dOCUMENTA 13, Kassel, Germany (2012); 11th Baltic Triennial (co-curator), Vilnius, Lithuania (2012); and the Taipei Biennial, Taipei, Taiwan (2010).

In the framework of Protozone11: it’s weird:

Progressive Touch (2020)

12 min, HD video

Progressive Touch depicts three futuristic, absurdist love scenes
in which the goal is to “improve” sex by complicating its rhythm and choreography. Sex as dance as comedy. Enacted by three real life couples, the dancers’ every explicit move is synchronized to the propulsive, unpredictable score which borrows elements from progressive rock, trap and math metal.

Director: Michael Portnoy
Cast: Tizo All, Ilona Bankiraj, Marc Philipp Gabriel, Juan Felipe Amaya González,

Astrid Panaken, Deva Schubert
Director of Photography: Darja Pilz
Music: Stefan Maier and Michael Portnoy
Producer, Berlin: Esther Niemeier
Producer, New York: Julia Simpson
Assistant Choreographer: Moss Beynon Juckes

Editor: Camila Mercadal
Focus Puller: David Kizner
Gaffer: Jens Thurmann
Sound recordist: Camilo Garcia Castro
Hair & Make-up Design: Servulo Mendez
Production Design: Ran Chai Bar-zvi and Leonard Mandl

Coproduction by steirischer herbst ’19 (Graz, Austria), Vleeshal Center for Contemporary Art

(Middelburg) and supported by Chris Fitzpatrick

is an artist who works with dance and choreography. Her work is presented in contemporary art contexts and traditional performance spaces. Most recently Goh’s work has been performed at the Sydney Opera House, the Art Gallery of New South Wales, the National Gallery of Victoria, the Museum of Contemporary Art Sydney, and a range of venues in Australia, Asia, Europe and North America including Performance Space New York, Auto Italia, Baltic Circle, Shedhalle, and Taipei Performing Arts Center. Angela lives and works on Gadigal Land in Sydney, Australia.

In the framework of Protozone11: it’s weird:

Pattern Recognition

Performance, 18.06.23, 17h

Pattern Recognition is a new work by Angela Goh that brings into proximity recurring gestures of the mouth from her previous works, specifically Desert Body Creep (2016), Body Loss (2017), Uncanny Valley Girl (2018) and Sky Blue Mythic (2021). Across these works the mouth has represented an uncanny passageway between the inside and outside of the body. Through the mouth, the body is rendered as both flesh and void, and as a threshold breached—an alien-like tongue escapes, a voice erupts and is sucked back in, liquid is ingested or seeps out, hands reach in only to reemerge as another image of a mouth. The mouth is also a hole, and a hole is necessary to weave, loop, reproduce, channel something through, emerge out of or disappear into. A hole is a topological necessity for turning things inside out. By looping back and collecting these gestures together, Pattern Recognition highlights an evolution of form as well as expanding and entangling a body of work into new territories and trajectories formed by processes of recursion and deviation. Pattern Recognition is originally created as an exhibition of performances at Fine Arts, Sydney in May 2023.

Open Rehearsal of a new work
Performance with Sound by Corin Ileto,

25.06.2023, 17-19h

The Concert
Film, 2022, starts every hour on the half hour

Full colour, sound

36 minutes duration

Unfolding in nine parts, The Concert depicts a series of worlds and characters that appear to span time and space, and which are woven together by a reoccurring object—a large, mysterious, glass-like ring. These recurring rings are in fact the iconic acoustic reflectors that hung in the Sydney Opera House’s Concert Hall from its opening in 1973 until 2020, when they were decommissioned to make way for new acoustic technology. In The Concert, Goh places this historical artefact inside dreamlike sequences and surreal worlds, to explore how mythology carries memory and meaning through time.

The Concert was commissioned by the Sydney Opera House, as part of New Work Now, enabled by Tonkin Zulaikha Greer Architects.

PAST

Body Loss

Performance, 09.06.23, 18h & 11.06.23, 17h

Beginning at the site of the mouth and expanding out to encompass the entire architecture, Body Loss transforms the limits of the body and the structures that contain it.

A single utterance grows into an endless, ethereal chorus. The voice becomes a sea on which the body is set adrift. Climbing, scaling, bearing down and floating upwards, the body is both freed and constrained. The mouth, fixed open, becomes a gaping hole, a channel, a cipher, through which something might creep in, or out. Through the mouth, the body empties and devours at the same time.

Body Loss is a performance concerned with breaching limitations—bodily, architectural, and cultural—in order to disturb what is constrained, and leak what is uncontainable.

melanie bonajo (they/them/theirs) is an artist, filmmaker, sexological bodyworker, somatic sex coach and educator, cuddle workshop facilitator and activist. Through their videos, performances, photographs, and installations, they examine current conundrums of co-existence in a crippling capitalist system, and address themes of eroding intimacy and isolation in an increasingly sterile, technological world. They research how technological advances and commodity-based pleasures increase feelings of alienation, removing an individual’s sense of belonging. Their works present anti-capitalist methods to reconnect and to explore sexualities, intimacies and feelings. bonajo’s experimental documentaries often feature communities living or working on the margins of society, either through illegal means or cultural exclusion, and the paradoxes inherent to ideas of comfort with a strong sense for community, equality and body-politics.

bonajo studied at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy and completed residencies at the Rijksakademie voor Beeldende Kunst in Amsterdam (2009-10) and at ISCP in New York (2014).

TouchMETell

The video installation called TouchMETell allows children (and adults) to think and talk about intimacy, their limits and body awareness. melanie bonajo and a group of children aged 6-8 investigate how they experience their own body and physical contact with others. melanie uses open interview techniques and kinaesthetic forms of play which take place in a soft, fuzzy, cuddly and multi-coloured landscape of different formed objects. ‘What is sex? Does love have anything to do with sex? Can you feel emotional pain in your body? What are feelings? Are you ever lonely?’ Is a selection of the many questions bonajo asks the children while they push, hug, paint or stroke each other.

With TouchMETell bonajo wants to initiate a discussion about boundaries, gender roles, physical autonomy and intimacy and the lack of physical contact in this digital age. We seem to have forgotten the language of the body. In a world where digital contact predominates, many of us are increasingly struggling with intimacy and defining boundaries and needs. What does the lump in my throat or the knot in my stomach tell me? Our proverbial language reveals the wisdom of the body, but how can we really learn to listen to it? TouchMETell offers a counterbalance in our digital culture and the current taboo around physical intimacy. What are limits? How do I discuss this with the other person? What is physical autonomy? What is love? All topics that are discussed and that help the children learn to trust each other. They discover the difference between giving and receiving.

INCHOATE BUZZ (2022)

a film by Leah Walker
conceived and commissioned by Fernanda Muñoz-Newsome

Leah Walkers film expands on artist and choreographer Fernanda Muñoz-Newsome’s performance project INCHOATE BUZZ. The film is both documentation and extension of the live event, performed in summer 2022 at the London Contemporary Music Festival and features live works from Fernanda Muñoz-Newsome, SERAFINE1369, Mica Levi, Isabel Rosa Muñoz-Newsome, Nkisi and Eve Stainton.

INCHOATE BUZZ project merges Muñoz-Newsome’s practices of performance, collaboration and curation. Core collaborators are sound designer/ new media artist Josh Anio Grigg, artist and researcher India Harvey and light designer Charlie Hope, who create an immersive environment for the live work.

Fernanda Muñoz-Newsome’s practices involve dancing, choreography, collaboration, curation, facilitation and research. She creates work that shifts perspectives, crafting spaces of potential where tuning perception, action and voice can resituate experience within our environments, stimulating kinaesthetic response, as well as innate gut, bodily and imaginative intelligence. Embracing different types of experiencing/ neurodivergence within her projects challenges traditional performance set-ups.

Leah Walker is a filmmaker and artist who works across food, events, sculpture and sound. Their work grows out of collaborations within their community and focuses on consensual, queer and love-oriented ways of viewing the world. Leah is best known for making music videos with Tirzah and the extended family, Curl etc. and feeding affordable up-cycled food in South East London galleries as part of ChatsCafe.

screening: May 20-21, 2023 as part of Proto-Club4

In the framework of ProtoClub4: Timing-Out

Emergency in favor of twice

> yoga practice & talk: Sunday 16.04. 11–12:30am

with Frank Hesse

„Emergency in favor of twice“ is the working title of Frank Hesse’s contribution to Protozone 12 in fall 2023. This new work is centered around the question of the spiritual heritage of the readymade. Aspects of labour and repetion on a daily basis are foregrounded when it comes to artistic, somatic and aesthetic practices. The notion of spirituality is at question itself and in a process of ambivalent negotiation.

We start with sharing a specific yoga practice intended to serve as an anchor in daily life. In the conversation afterwards, the artist will talk about some of his research on the fabrication of modern yoga and how the readymade may be considered a spiritual practice in itself.

In the framework of Proto-Club4: Timing-Out

2+ hours of critically queer somatic scenarios : Micro & Macro Hydrofeminist Studies : Sweating and Secret Secretions.

consciencescargot*

Post – Canadian works in France

A. Livingstone

makes things / actions / relations.

often in situ, often in collaboration.

A body of work that trembles on display and considers choreography for a co-creation of refuge.

In the framework of Proto-Club4: Timing-Out, 16.04.2023

Rehearsing Horizontalities by Eliana Otta (moderated by Engy Mohsen)

How much effort do we put into standing still? Why do our daily activities demand that we detach ourselves from lying on the ground? The ground is only for the defeated or for resting, to recharge forces for the next quotidian battles. What if the ground is the best place to reflect on such battles? What if sharing the same ground, at the same time, is the only way we can discover other ways to share what comes after getting up?

“Falling in Love with the World” and “Rehearsing Horizontalities” are two games out of ten that makeup How to Love Many in Many Ways, a project by Engy Mohsen and Gabriel Hensche. Texts were edited by Ismail Fayed, copy edited by Jenifer Evans, and the games were designed by Engy Aly and Engy Mohsen. How to Love Many in Many Ways is supported by Warehouse421’s Homebound Residency (2020), Pro Helvetia Cairo (2021), and the School of Commons (2022).

Picture: “How to create comfortable resting positions with _____”, Engy Mohsen and Gabriel Hensche, 2022, game session at Iron Velvet, New York. Photo: Cristian Chironi

In the framework of Proto-Club4: Timing-Out

15.04.2023 & 22./23.04.2023

Screening

Army of Love by Alexa Karolinski & Ingo Niermann, 42 min, 2016, commissioned by the 9th Berlin Biennale

Situated in a Berlin Spa, a group of volunteers expresses and exercises its commitment to a need-oriented redristribution of sensual love. With backgrounds in disability activism, sex work, dance and art, the group presents utopian proposals on the basic premises of love and justice. This video marks the initial manifestation of the Army of Love.

The Army of Love is a solidarity in-the-making that offers training, recruitments, discussions, manuals, and testimonial videos to promote the redistribution of sensual love to all who need it. Since its founding in 2016, the Army of Love has recruited and trained people of diverse age, gender, ethnicity, and appearance all over Europe.

15.04.23 19h

Falling In Love With the World

Performance of the game with Michelangelo Miccolis, Ingo Niermann & Maria Sabato

How can we develop affections to someone or something that we dislike? The audience is invited to express personal aversions that hinder them in performing encompassing love. Collectively, we will develop and test playful exercises to overcome these aversions.

Falling in Love with the World challenges our limited concepts of attraction and beauty. It helps us learn to appreciate the plurality in the world, not just as an abstract philosophical principle, but in our daily lives and make love the world’s predominant feeling and action. Falling in Love with the World has been developed by Ingo Niermann for Engy Mohsen and Gabriel Hensche’s collection of games How to Love Many in Many Ways.

Falling in Love with the World is a game that aims to help its players develop a strong affection for someone or something they dislike or are indifferent to. The game is provided by the Army of Love, which offers solidarity trainings, discussions, manuals, and testimonial videos to promote the redistribution of sensual love to all those who need it. The game enables people who do not yet belong to the Army of Love to autonomously expand their techniques and experiences.

“Falling in Love with the World” and “Rehearsing Horizontalities” are two games out of ten that makeup How to Love Many in Many Ways, a project by Engy Mohsen and Gabriel Hensche. Texts were edited by Ismail Fayed, copy edited by Jenifer Evans, and the games were designed by Engy Aly and Engy Mohsen. How to Love Many in Many Ways is supported by Warehouse421’s Homebound Residency (2020), Pro Helvetia Cairo (2021), and the School of Commons (2022).

With their base in contemporary dance, somatic practices, and massage therapy Tyra Wigg makes performances that reinforce and expand their audiences’ subjective corporeal perceptions. Tyra believes that only by being in an intimate and curious relationship with one’s physicality, concepts like ecology and queerfeminism can be fully embodied.

To expand the notion of massage during the pandemic, Tyra developed the 1-on-1 interactive performance phone massage, presented at BONE Performance Art Festival and Young Urban Performance festival. Their piece Physical Empathy (2021) in co-production with ROXY Birsfelden and Weld, further explored touch and care work in a stage context. Tyra presented their solo The Hand, the rock, your shoulder and my mouth at the protozone “Zones of Kinship, Love & Playbour” curated by Lucie Tuma in Shedhalle spring 2022, and is currently continuing their choreographic research in relation with massage and care work.

As a dancer, performer and co-creator Tyra work with artists such as, Gisèle Vienne, Shu Lea Cheang, Heiner Goebbels, Ernestyna Orlowska, Marina Abramovic, Alexandra Pirici and Inga Gerner Nielsen, and the Zürich-based performance network DIVAS.

Nina Emge was born 1995 in Zurich. Today she lives and works in Zurich and Berlin. In Emge’s artistic practice, the question “How do we listen to each other? To whom am I listening?” is raised in every work. These questions result in spatial installations, sculptures and audio works. The focus is on the moment of interface/overlap. This is evident, among other things, in her research and archive work, drawings, as well as in the often collaborative working and creation processes of the works. Nina Emge studied at the Zurich University of the Arts, where she completed her Bachelor’s degree with distinction in 2019. The works have been shown at the Halle für Kunst Lüneburg, Uferhallen Berlin, Istituto Svizzero in Roma, La Becque, Shedhalle Zurich, Kunsthalle Zurich, Helmhaus Zurich and other national and international exhibition spaces.

Josephine Baan (also goes by the names Joseph, Jo, or any variation thereof) is an artist and educator based between Zurich and Rotterdam. Their practice engages in art, education and collaboration as ways to forge creative resurgence. They’re interested in the complexities of collectivity and in the possibility of establishing a solidarity that does not homogenise, but affirms difference.

They perform with their body and voice, and make installations, props, scripts and choreographies that explore the spaces and relationships between the flesh and the word, human and non-human bodies, and change and preservation. Materially and performatively thinking between things, beings and situations, they consciously switch perspective to influence roles and readings of power and control in relation to affection and gestures of care.

Their practice is closely linked to their work as an educator, which is influenced by radical pedagogy and non-hierarchical collaborative methods. They are a founding member of Rotterdam based educational collective sohere, and since 2019 they co-run Zurich based School of Commons; a grassroots initiative dedicated to the study and development of decentered knowledge, with a focus on practices of peer learning and commoning. Their current research engages in developing a performance-based pedagogy which incorporates embodied learning, incoherence, and queerness as tools for collective worlding.

They obtained their MFA at Goldsmiths, University of London in 2015. They are a resident of the ENOA Immersive Opera residency 2021-2022 and a recipient of the Werkbeitrag Fachstelle Kultur prize of the province of Zürich 2021. Recent exhibitions and performances include; Burner at LIFE, Rotterdam (2022); Weathering at Titanik Galleria in Turku (2021); Werkschau at Haus Konstruktiv in Zürich (2021); Weathering at SIC in Helsinki (2021); The Opposite of a Cynic [Tongue] at Nieuw & Meer in Amsterdam (2020); inter:archive at OnCurating in Zürich (2020); Here Not Here at Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo in Turin (2019); MOTH at Museum KKLB in Beromünster (2018 – 2019); A Brief History of Becoming Rock at Art Rotterdam in Rotterdam (2018); Nothing 2 C Here at Alkovi Galleria in Helsinki (2017).

https://josephinebaan.com/

Izidora L. LETHE is a transdisciplinary and conceptual artist. Their practice spans choreography, sculpture and video accompanied by correspondent drawing and writing processes. Their research-based work aims at expanding or eroding canonical histories and situating the body as epistemological orientation.
LETHE received their MFA at the San Francisco Art Institute (SFAI, 2015-2017) and their BFA at the Zürcher Hochschule der Künste (ZHdK, 2010-2013). Their most recent exhibitions include COURONNE (Biel) (2022), SHEDHALLE (ZH, CH) (2021), Cabaret Voltaire on Monte Verità (TI, CH) (2021), the Leslie Lohman Museum (NYC, USA) (2021-22), the Contemporary Jewish Museum (CA, USA) (2019-20) et al. LETHE received the merit-based full fellowship for their MFA at SFAI, as well as the IMA-Fellowship of the New York Foundation for the Arts (2018). LETHE is a BANFF Centre for the Arts resident fellow (Banff, Canada, 2018) and current BINZ39 studio resident (Zurich, 2022-24).
Transmitting their practice into educational frameworks, LETHE teaches embodied classes, art history and theory and critique seminars as visiting faculty at the University of Washington (UW, Seattle, 2020), the San Francisco Art Institute (SFAI, 2017-2020) et al – and currently at ETH Zürich Architektur und Kunst.

www.izidora-l.com

​​Ceylan Öztrük is an artist living and working in Zürich. She completed her practice-based PhD (2016) in Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University (Istanbul) that she initiated her subject in Vienna in Academy of Fine Arts on Post Conceptual Art Practices in 2014. She received her graduate (MFA-2011) and undergraduate (BFA-2006) degrees from the Fine Arts Faculty at Anadolu University. Some of her exhibitions and performances are Matter of non, FriArt Fribourg Kunsthalle, Fribourg (2021); Orientalien, Gessnerallee Theater , Zürich (2020); Am a Mollusk, too; re/producing Tangents, Longtang, Zürich (2020), IV. Berliner Herbstsalon, Berlin (2019); Oriental Demo, My Wild Flag Festival, Stockholm (2019), Building Poems, 1.1, Basel (2018); Speculative Domestics: Ai (Artificial Intimacy) Showroom, Alienze, Lausanne (2019); Call me Venus, Mars, Istanbul (2016).

Ceylan Öztrük opens up accepted forms of knowledge and focuses on how it was built to shift a specific flow and thus become tools of the structures of power. She aims to break the flow of information in the mainstream with a multi-disciplinary approach, offering to set up new channels that co-exist with and sometimes replace the existing ones. She creates Autotheory and employs interventions in her practice as a methodology with which she tries to transform existing situations and frameworks. Writing, the core of her work, takes various forms and formats in Öztrük’s work. Her autotheory writings find bodies not only in prosa but also in sculptures, installations, performances and so on.

http://ceylanoztruk.com/

Sobczak’s practice combines painting, video and performance art. In his performative work – frequently in collaboration with Germany based artist Nicholas Grafia whose work is informed by his Filipino and African-American background – Sobczak employs avant-garde concepts of postwar Polish theatre (such as Tadeusz Kantor) for his contemporary concerns about queerness in a time of political radicalisation.

His paintings are equally invested with theatricality, complex figuration staged in dense tableaux, often based on the compositions of 19th century paintings, juxtaposed with popular culture subjects. Sobczak’s central project is to create contemporary history paintings by populating his paintings with representations of outstanding protagonist of LGBTQ activism, queer and emancipatory countercultural milieus and resistance movements, in imaginative company with provocatively phantasmic characters and creatures representing Sobczak’s genuine vision of transgressive utopia. Simultaneously, these new visionary communities are mirrored in the distorted images of an underworld of regressive and ambiguous political narrative depicted in mannerist and infernal mise-en-scenes.

Mikołaj Sobczak (b. 1989) graduated the Academy of Fine Arts Warsaw (PL) in the Studio of Spatial Activities, followed by a scholarship at Universität der Künste Berlin (DE), and studied as well at Kunstakademie Münster (DE). He is also a resident artist at Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten in Amsterdam (NL). He works in video, paintings and ceramics, often including performative collaborative actions as well. His most recent exhibitions include shows at Kunsthalle Münster (DE), Haus der Kulturen der Welt (Berlin), MUDAM (Luxembourg), Museum of Modern Art (Warsaw), Museum Ludwig (Cologne).

In his work, Sobczak is focused on political issues and historical policy. Emphasizing the perspective and life of marginalized subjects, he builds narratives, and tracks down the reasons for current global and social issues.

Nicholas Grafia (b.1990, Angeles City; based in Düsseldorf, Germany, and Paris, France, holds an MFA from the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf (DE). He has previously studied at the School of Arts and Cultures in Newcastle (UK), the Kunstakademie Münster (DE), as well as the University of Münster (DE).

His paintings, videos and performances negotiate processes of memory formation, as well as the in- and exclusion of subjects from history writing.

His work has been recently exhibited at KW (Berlin, DE), CAPC (Bordeaux, FR), Silverlens (Manila, PH), Shoot the Lobster (New York, US), MoMa (Warsaw, PL), HKW (Berlin, DE), NS-Documentation Center (Munich, DE), Kunsthal Aarhus (Aarhus, DK), Peres Projects (Berlin, DE), Bergen Kunsthall (Bergen, NO), K21 Museum (Düsseldorf, DE), Capitain Petzel (Berlin, DE), 7th Moscow International Biennale For Young Art (Moscow, RU), Shedhalle (Zurich, SUI), Koenig2 (Vienna, AT), Harkawik (New York, US), Künstlerhaus Bethanien (Berlin, DE), Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen (Düsseldorf, DE), Museum Ludwig (Cologne, DE), Bundeskunsthalle (Bonn, DE), Dortmunder Kunstverein (Dortmund, DE), Tramway (Glasgow, UK), MUDAM (Luxembourg, LU) and Steirischer Herbst (Graz, AT) amongst other venues.

“My works alternate between sensitive, harsh and ironic gestures revealing discriminatory identity attributions, role expectations and stereotypes. Thereby my body and identity becomes a medium for capturing civic and personal themes that articulate political resistance and feminist empowerment.

Repeatedly evoking the motif of scrap metal collecting and recycling, I question the ways in which we assign value to material objects, labor, and how we relate to both. In my works I carve out separate pieces from vehicles that reside between the painterly and the sculptural. Having had a very personal rapport with metal since childhood, my works fuse impressions of everyday life, art history, colloquial language and my own personal experiences.

Through performances, I expose the connectivity of all beings through the specificities of my personal experiences. It is important to me that my work communicates to different kinds of audiences; both to those who are part of the art world and those who are not.

Both artistic practices encourage and enable re-evaluation of what is assumed to be unchangeable, impossible or unnegotiable – pointing at the indefinition and dream-like nature of the reality we live in.”

Selma Selman (b. 1991 in Ružica, BIH) currently lives and works in Amsterdam. Recently she had solo exhibitions at: Documenta 15, Kassel (2022), Manifesta 14, Pristina (2022), Kunstraum Innsbruck, Innsbruck (2022), MO Museum Vilnius, Vilnius (2022), Kasseler Kunstverein Museum Fridericianum, Kassel (2021), National Gallery, Sarajevo (2021), Acb Gallery, Budapest (2021), SU Art Gallery, Syracuse, USA (2018) and many more. She has participated in numerous group exhibitions and festivals, such as URBAN TEXT, Institutes des Cultures d’Islam, Paris, EVROVIZION, ifa Stuttgart, Mediterranea 19 Young Artists Biennale School of Waters, 58th Venice Biennale, Kunstquartier Bethanien in Berlin, Kunsthalle Wien in Vienna, New Children Gallery in New Orleans, L’Onde Center for Art in Paris, Queens museum in New York, The Creative Time Summit in Miami, Museum of Contemporary Art in Banja Luka, Villa Romana in Firenze, Maxim Gorki Theatre in Berlin, Galerie Boutique in New York and many more. Selma Selman is the founder of the organization ”Get The Heck To School”, which aims to empower Roma girls all around the world who face ostracization from society and poverty.

Artificial Hells

by Claire Bishop

Chapter 6

Incidental People: APG and Community Arts

12.07.2022 – 12.09.2022

*See buttons below for all up to date episodes*

To reflect on the current state of so-called ‘immaterial practices’, Galerie (an immaterial art gallery) proposes to start with remembering a book––Claire Bishop’s Artificial Hells. Back in 2012, this essay proposed a historical and theoretical critique of ‘participatory art’, also known as “social practice”, by challenging the emancipatory claims proposed by these projects.

Over 11 episodes, each corresponding to a chapter, Galerie will read aloud Claire Bishop’s Artificial Hells (with the kind agreement of the author). So, lean back out there in the summer country. Every week we will share a new chapter, and whether you are at the seaside, in the mountains or working for the money to keep up with the inflation––we’ve got you covered with last year’s critique.

Artificial Hells

by Claire Bishop

Chapter 5

The Social Under Socialism

12.07.2022 – 12.09.2022

*See buttons below for all up to date episodes*

To reflect on the current state of so-called ‘immaterial practices’, Galerie (an immaterial art gallery) proposes to start with remembering a book––Claire Bishop’s Artificial Hells. Back in 2012, this essay proposed a historical and theoretical critique of ‘participatory art’, also known as “social practice”, by challenging the emancipatory claims proposed by these projects.

Over 11 episodes, each corresponding to a chapter, Galerie will read aloud Claire Bishop’s Artificial Hells (with the kind agreement of the author). So, lean back out there in the summer country. Every week we will share a new chapter, and whether you are at the seaside, in the mountains or working for the money to keep up with the inflation––we’ve got you covered with last year’s critique.

Artificial Hells

by Claire Bishop

Chapter 1

The Social Turn: Collaboration and Its Discontents

12.07.2022 – 12.09.2022

*See buttons below for all up to date episodes*

To reflect on the current state of so-called ‘immaterial practices’, Galerie (an immaterial art gallery) proposes to start with remembering a book––Claire Bishop’s Artificial Hells. Back in 2012, this essay proposed a historical and theoretical critique of ‘participatory art’, also known as “social practice”, by challenging the emancipatory claims proposed by these projects.

Over 11 episodes, each corresponding to a chapter, Galerie will read aloud Claire Bishop’s Artificial Hells (with the kind agreement of the author). So, lean back out there in the summer country. Every week we will share a new chapter, and whether you are at the seaside, in the mountains or working for the money to keep up with the inflation––we’ve got you covered with last year’s critique.

Artificial Hells

by Claire Bishop

Introduction

12.07.2022 – 12.09.2022

*See buttons below for all up to date episodes*

To reflect on the current state of so-called ‘immaterial practices’, Galerie (an immaterial art gallery) proposes to start with remembering a book––Claire Bishop’s Artificial Hells. Back in 2012, this essay proposed a historical and theoretical critique of ‘participatory art’, also known as “social practice”, by challenging the emancipatory claims proposed by these projects.

Over 11 episodes, each corresponding to a chapter, Galerie will read aloud Claire Bishop’s Artificial Hells (with the kind agreement of the author). So, lean back out there in the summer country. Every week we will share a new chapter, and whether you are at the seaside, in the mountains or working for the money to keep up with the inflation––we’ve got you covered with last year’s critique.

Artificial Hells

by Claire Bishop

Chapter 4

Social Sadism Made Explicit

12.07.2022 – 12.09.2022

*See buttons below for all up to date episodes*

To reflect on the current state of so-called ‘immaterial practices’, Galerie (an immaterial art gallery) proposes to start with remembering a book––Claire Bishop’s Artificial Hells. Back in 2012, this essay proposed a historical and theoretical critique of ‘participatory art’, also known as “social practice”, by challenging the emancipatory claims proposed by these projects.

Over 11 episodes, each corresponding to a chapter, Galerie will read aloud Claire Bishop’s Artificial Hells (with the kind agreement of the author). So, lean back out there in the summer country. Every week we will share a new chapter, and whether you are at the seaside, in the mountains or working for the money to keep up with the inflation––we’ve got you covered with last year’s critique.

Artificial Hells

by Claire Bishop

Chapter 3

Je participe, tu participes, il participe…

12.07.2022 – 12.09.2022

*See buttons below for all up to date episodes*

To reflect on the current state of so-called ‘immaterial practices’, Galerie (an immaterial art gallery) proposes to start with remembering a book––Claire Bishop’s Artificial Hells. Back in 2012, this essay proposed a historical and theoretical critique of ‘participatory art’, also known as “social practice”, by challenging the emancipatory claims proposed by these projects.

Over 11 episodes, each corresponding to a chapter, Galerie will read aloud Claire Bishop’s Artificial Hells (with the kind agreement of the author). So, lean back out there in the summer country. Every week we will share a new chapter, and whether you are at the seaside, in the mountains or working for the money to keep up with the inflation––we’ve got you covered with last year’s critique.

Artificial Hells

by Claire Bishop

Chapter 2

Artificial Hells: The Historic Avant-garde

12.07.2022 – 12.09.2022

*See buttons below for all up to date episodes*

To reflect on the current state of so-called ‘immaterial practices’, Galerie (an immaterial art gallery) proposes to start with remembering a book––Claire Bishop’s Artificial Hells. Back in 2012, this essay proposed a historical and theoretical critique of ‘participatory art’, also known as “social practice”, by challenging the emancipatory claims proposed by these projects.

Over 11 episodes, each corresponding to a chapter, Galerie will read aloud Claire Bishop’s Artificial Hells (with the kind agreement of the author). So, lean back out there in the summer country. Every week we will share a new chapter, and whether you are at the seaside, in the mountains or working for the money to keep up with the inflation––we’ve got you covered with last year’s critique.

Artificial Hells

by Claire Bishop

Chapter 8

Delegated Performance: Outsourcing Authenticity

12.07.2022 – 12.09.2022

*See buttons below for all up to date episodes*

To reflect on the current state of so-called ‘immaterial practices’, Galerie (an immaterial art gallery) proposes to start with remembering a book––Claire Bishop’s Artificial Hells. Back in 2012, this essay proposed a historical and theoretical critique of ‘participatory art’, also known as “social practice”, by challenging the emancipatory claims proposed by these projects.

Over 11 episodes, each corresponding to a chapter, Galerie will read aloud Claire Bishop’s Artificial Hells (with the kind agreement of the author). So, lean back out there in the summer country. Every week we will share a new chapter, and whether you are at the seaside, in the mountains or working for the money to keep up with the inflation––we’ve got you covered with last year’s critique.

Artificial Hells

by Claire Bishop

Conclusion

12.07.2022 – 12.09.2022

*See buttons below for all up to date episodes*

To reflect on the current state of so-called ‘immaterial practices’, Galerie (an immaterial art gallery) proposes to start with remembering a book––Claire Bishop’s Artificial Hells. Back in 2012, this essay proposed a historical and theoretical critique of ‘participatory art’, also known as “social practice”, by challenging the emancipatory claims proposed by these projects.

Over 11 episodes, each corresponding to a chapter, Galerie will read aloud Claire Bishop’s Artificial Hells (with the kind agreement of the author). So, lean back out there in the summer country. Every week we will share a new chapter, and whether you are at the seaside, in the mountains or working for the money to keep up with the inflation––we’ve got you covered with last year’s critique.

Artificial Hells

by Claire Bishop

Chapter 9

Pedagogic Projects: ‘How do you bring a classroom to life as if it were a work of art?’

12.07.2022 – 12.09.2022

*See buttons below for all up to date episodes*

To reflect on the current state of so-called ‘immaterial practices’, Galerie (an immaterial art gallery) proposes to start with remembering a book––Claire Bishop’s Artificial Hells. Back in 2012, this essay proposed a historical and theoretical critique of ‘participatory art’, also known as “social practice”, by challenging the emancipatory claims proposed by these projects.

Over 11 episodes, each corresponding to a chapter, Galerie will read aloud Claire Bishop’s Artificial Hells (with the kind agreement of the author). So, lean back out there in the summer country. Every week we will share a new chapter, and whether you are at the seaside, in the mountains or working for the money to keep up with the inflation––we’ve got you covered with last year’s critique.

Artificial Hells

by Claire Bishop

Chapter 7

Former West: Art as Project in the Early 1990s

12.07.2022 – 12.09.2022

*See buttons below for all up to date episodes*

To reflect on the current state of so-called ‘immaterial practices’, Galerie (an immaterial art gallery) proposes to start with remembering a book––Claire Bishop’s Artificial Hells. Back in 2012, this essay proposed a historical and theoretical critique of ‘participatory art’, also known as “social practice”, by challenging the emancipatory claims proposed by these projects.

Over 11 episodes, each corresponding to a chapter, Galerie will read aloud Claire Bishop’s Artificial Hells (with the kind agreement of the author). So, lean back out there in the summer country. Every week we will share a new chapter, and whether you are at the seaside, in the mountains or working for the money to keep up with the inflation––we’ve got you covered with last year’s critique.

The Institute for embodied creative practices

The Institute for Embodied Creative Practices is an ambulatory corpus of particular concerns and the sensorial methodologies for addressing them founded by artist and choreographer Isabel Lewis. The idea of a research center imagined as a fictional institute called “The Institute for Embodied Creative Practices” was originally conceived by Lewis in 2016 as her response to an invitation for a solo exhibition at the Ming Contemporary Art Museum in Shanghai that never happened. Lewis has since been modelling the Institute under various names and different formats, most recently a 3-room installation with an 8-week program of workshops, talks, screenings, and contemporary tea ceremonies at Gropius Bau as part of the exhibition entitled Welt Ohne Aussen, as free once-per-month 4-hour sessions with guest artists at her studio in Callie’s Berlin as well as Galerie Wedding’s Movement Research Center, and since 2021 at HGB Leipzig. Considered a continuous work-in-process and extension of her studio practice the experimental Institute and research center reimagines the format of “institution” and speculates what a cultural/educational institution of the future can and could be. The Institute focuses primarily on the analysis and adaptation of existing formats as well as the creation of new formats for public addressal and experience. It works toward innovation on the structural, organizational and sensory levels in order to make fertile ground for the emergence of new forms of cultural production, reflection, and critique. Key collaborators over the years have been tea artist Dambi Kim, smell researcher Sissel Tolaas, visual artists Dirk Bell and Matthew Lutz-Kinoy, curator and DJ Lou Drago, sound artists LABOUR and artists/directors Thea Reifler and Philipp Bergmann.

The Institute for Embodied Creative Practices at Shedhalle is co-hosted by Isabel Lewis together with artists Josephine Baan, Nina Emge, Izidora l LETHE, Ceylan Öztrük, Tyra Wigg and international academies. (more info on program and participation coming soon)

The Institute of Embodied Creative Practices is supported by Kanton Zürich Fachstelle Kultur

Isabel Lewis, born in Santo Domingo in 1981, is a US artist with Dominican roots. She studied literature, dance and philosophy and is now active in theater, dance and music. Her work expanded the field of contemporary art to include the format of Occasions. With persistent experimentation and research methods that emerge from bodily experiences, Lewis creates alternative forms of sociality between human and non-human actors. The artist’s body of work to date includes the formats Occurrences, Arrangements, Activations, Expanded Viewings, Sensory Parcours, as well as workshops, listening sessions, and lecture performances. The focus of her fundamentally collaborative practice is on affective bodily experiences that engage all the senses. Her work has been shown in numerous museums as well as biennials and festivals worldwide: Martin Gropius Bau Berlin, Tanz im August Berlin, Kampnagel Hamburg, Kunsthalle Basel, Kunsthalle Zürich, Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Gothenburg International Biennial for Contemporary Art, Tate Modern, Liverpool Biennial, Serpentine Galleries, Palais de Tokyo, Dia Art Foundation, Sharjah Biennial, Karachi Biennial, Ming Contemporary Art Museum Shanghai.

In 2021, she began her long-term collaboration with TBA21 Academy, creating the work “O.C.E.A.N.I.C.A. (Occasions Creating Ecologically Attuned Narratives in Collective Action)” at Ocean Space Venice. That same year, she co-curated the twelve-month program “Existing Otherwise” at Berlin’s Galerie Wedding. Isabel Lewis lives and works in Berlin. She already succeeded Alba D’Urbano in the winter semester 2021/22 in the media art program and is the first professor for performative arts at HGB Leipzig.

Josephine Baan (also goes by the names Joseph, Jo, or any variation thereof) is an artist and educator based between Zurich and Rotterdam. Their practice engages in art, education and collaboration as ways to forge creative resurgence. They’re interested in the complexities of collectivity and in the possibility of establishing a solidarity that does not homogenise, but affirms difference.

They perform with their body and voice, and make installations, props, scripts and choreographies that explore the spaces and relationships between the flesh and the word, human and non-human bodies, and change and preservation. Materially and performatively thinking between things, beings and situations, they consciously switch perspective to influence roles and readings of power and control in relation to affection and gestures of care.

Their practice is closely linked to their work as an educator, which is influenced by radical pedagogy and non-hierarchical collaborative methods. They are a founding member of Rotterdam based educational collective sohere, and since 2019 they co-run Zurich based School of Commons; a grassroots initiative dedicated to the study and development of decentered knowledge, with a focus on practices of peer learning and commoning. Their current research engages in developing a performance-based pedagogy which incorporates embodied learning, incoherence, and queerness as tools for collective worlding.

They obtained their MFA at Goldsmiths, University of London in 2015. They are a resident of the ENOA Immersive Opera residency 2021-2022 and a recipient of the Werkbeitrag Fachstelle Kultur prize of the province of Zürich 2021. Recent exhibitions and performances include; Burner at LIFE, Rotterdam (2022); Weathering at Titanik Galleria in Turku (2021); Werkschau at Haus Konstruktiv in Zürich (2021); Weathering at SIC in Helsinki (2021); The Opposite of a Cynic [Tongue] at Nieuw & Meer in Amsterdam (2020); inter:archive at OnCurating in Zürich (2020); Here Not Here at Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo in Turin (2019); MOTH at Museum KKLB in Beromünster (2018 – 2019); A Brief History of Becoming Rock at Art Rotterdam in Rotterdam (2018); Nothing 2 C Here at Alkovi Galleria in Helsinki (2017).

Nina Emge was born 1995 in Zurich. Today she lives and works in Zurich and Berlin. In Emge’s artistic practice, the question “How do we listen to each other? To whom am I listening?” is raised in every work. These questions result in spatial installations, sculptures and audio works. The focus is on the moment of interface/overlap. This is evident, among other things, in her research and archive work, drawings, as well as in the often collaborative working and creation processes of the works. Nina Emge studied at the Zurich University of the Arts, where she completed her Bachelor’s degree with distinction in 2019. The works have been shown at the Halle für Kunst Lüneburg, Uferhallen Berlin, Istituto Svizzero in Roma, La Becque, Shedhalle Zurich, Kunsthalle Zurich, Helmhaus Zurich and other national and international exhibition spaces.

Izidora I LETHE is a transdisciplinary and conceptual artist. Their practice spans choreography, sculpture and video accompanied by correspondent drawing and writing processes. Their research-based work aims at expanding or eroding canonical histories and situating the body as epistemological orientation.

LETHE received their MFA at the San Francisco Art Institute (SFAI, 2015-2017) and their BFA at the Zürcher Hochschule der Künste (ZHdK, 2010-2013). Their most recent exhibitions include COURONNE (Biel) (2022), SHEDHALLE (ZH, CH) (2021), Cabaret Voltaire on Monte Verità (TI, CH) (2021), the Leslie Lohman Museum (NYC, USA) (2021-22), the Contemporary Jewish Museum (CA, USA) (2019-20) et al. LETHE received the merit-based full fellowship for their MFA at SFAI, as well as the IMA-Fellowship of the New York Foundation for the Arts (2018). LETHE is a BANFF Centre for the Arts resident fellow (Banff, Canada, 2018) and current BINZ39 studio resident (Zurich, 2022-24).

Transmitting their practice into educational frameworks, LETHE teaches embodied classes, art history and theory and critique seminars as visiting faculty at the University of Washington (UW, Seattle, 2020), the San Francisco Art Institute (SFAI, 2017-2020) et al – and currently at ETH Zürich Architektur und Kunst.

www.izidora-l.com

With their base in contemporary dance, somatic practices, and massage therapy Tyra Wigg makes performances that reinforce and expand their audiences’ subjective corporeal perceptions. Tyra believes that only by being in an intimate and curious relationship with one’s physicality, concepts like ecology and queerfeminism can be fully embodied.

To expand the notion of massage during the pandemic, Tyra developed the 1-on-1 interactive performance phone massage, presented at BONE Performance Art Festival and Young Urban Performance festival. Their piece Physical Empathy (2021) in co-production with ROXY Birsfelden and Weld, further explored touch and care work in a stage context. Tyra presented their solo The Hand, the rock, your shoulder and my mouth at the protozone “Zones of Kinship, Love & Playbour” curated by Lucie Tuma in Shedhalle spring 2022, and is currently continuing their choreographic research in relation with massage and care work.

As a dancer, performer and co-creator Tyra work with artists such as, Gisèle Vienne, Shu Lea Cheang, Heiner Goebbels, Ernestyna Orlowska, Marina Abramovic, Alexandra Pirici and Inga Gerner Nielsen, and the Zürich-based performance network DIVAS.

I know what to do

„I know what to do“ consists of a performance, soft sculptures and a video. The performance took place on 27th of August 2022 under the Europabrücke in Zurich in collaboration with the performance series Perrformat.

The work refers to the feeling of a teenager, who poses in front of a mirror and tries to learn gestures of music videos, experimenting to find a solid material extension of themselves. Formally the sculptures portray the bodies of the performers, that support each other to stretch. The visitors are invited to lie down on them.

“Vibing is a structural matter and repetition can be brutal. It is the feeling of a teenager, posing in front of a mirror, with a blush of shame on their pretty face. Not yet in full capacity to grasp the social implications of their creation, but eager to learn. “It is easy to be with me, just for a moment” the image says. Can you stretch my ankle while I try to be myself? Yes, I know what to do.”

Credits:

Performers: Lau Lukkarila and Slim Soleded

Music: Marshall Vincent

Cinematography & Editing: Laura Nitsch

Assistance Sculptures: Nico Rueda

Supported by the Federal Ministry of Arts, Culture, Civil Service and Sport #bmkoes

Sunny Pfalzer is a performance artist, a Surfer Boy, a Go-Go-Girl and a Slug. They love to cuddle on the street. Whether they perform on stage, sew textile sculptures, hold a camera, or choreograph for public spaces, their approach is always bodily and felt. Through protest methodologies, poetry and pop culture, Sunny depicts how body language can construct statements. Facilitating workshops and collaborating is an integral part of Sunny’s processes. Work ethics and friendship underlie Sunny’s practice. Recent presentations include, KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Germany, Kunsthalle Wien, Shedhalle and Les Urbaines, Switzerland.

Interstices

Terre Thaemlitz’ video “Interstices” (2001) visually expands audio fragments from the 2000 album of the same name, candidly investigating the interstices between genders, sexual orientations, and other identity constructs. Intersexual birth, surgical gender reassignment, sex acts, and transsexual job opportunities are among the topics processed through filters of private and public expectation.

Terre Thaemlitz (1968, JP) is an award winning multi-media producer, writer, public speaker, educator, audio remixer, DJ and owner of the Comatonse Recordings record label. Her work combines a critical, non-essentialist look at identity politics – including gender, sexuality, class, linguistics, ethnicity and race – with an ongoing analysis of the socio-economics of commercial media production. He has released over 20 solo albums, as well as numerous 12-inch singles and video works. She was a featured artist at Documenta 14, and currently has a solo retrospective at The Substation, Melbourne. As a speaker and educator on issues of non-essentialist Transgenderism and Queerness, Thaemlitz has lectured and participated in panel discussions throughout Europe and Japan.

Produced by Comatonse Recordings (JP) and Lovebytes (UK).

Lay them all down

“…In Lay them all down (2020), as Michel moves through physical frustration with humor and candor, Maurice drives the camera over the floor, amplifying all sounds, using her body as a tripod that advances and collapses. This is not mere documentation, but a video and performance laboratory that asks if mutual understanding can come from really looking at each other. Both Michel and Maurice dress and undress, follow each other, and create dichotomies around closeness, dimension, speed, and noise. Dancer, filmmaker, camera, and audience are all engaged in the simple yet elusive action of focused observation. Dana Michel and Tracy Maurice film and wear objects that propel them outside comfort and cliché. What remains is the intuitive outburst to be seen and be together, regardless of outcome.”

– Amelia Bande for Berlinale 2020

Tracy Maurice is a multidisciplinary artist based in Montréal who works in several mediums, including video, art, and design. Her research-based practice combines analog processes with new technologies. Themes often explore temporality, movement, connection, observation, and our interrelationship with the natural world. Her work has been shown at the 11th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art (Berlin), Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal (Montréal), The Lincoln Center (New York), ANTI – Contemporary Art Festival (Finland), & Nuit Blanche (Toronto). She has given talks at Berklee College of Music, Pennsylvania College of Art & Design, HFBK University of Fine Arts Hamburg and taught filmmaking at the IDFA Film Academy at the University of California at Berkeley.

https://www.studiotracymaurice.com/

BEAST!

“This performance explores bestiality as a philosophical and political concept by drawing on the stigma that historically frames queers and PoC as monstrous. Through readings of my recent romantic/radical poems accompanied by the lyrical vocals of Makeda Monet and the electronic music of Victor da Silva. BEAST! explores utopian queer passions, rituals for lost ones, dark corners to protect oneself in, erotic dreams, and… you’ll see.

All the poems are from my last poetry book LE SANG! (BLOOD!) published by Lafayette Anticipations.”

– Tarek Lakhrissi

Credits

Performance: Tarek Lakhrissi

Text: Tarek Lakhrissi

Original musical creation: Fatma Pneumonia

Singer-composer (voice): Makeda Monnet

Costume: Inner Light

External collaborators: Capucine Porphire, Mawena Yehouessi, Léuli Eshrāghi

Executive producer: Sarina Basta (BHI)

Production Assistant: Violette Morisseau

A Production by Tinguely Museum (Basel), Move Festival, Centre Pompidou (Paris), Haus der Kulturen der Welt (Berlin), Shedhalle (Zürich), Bureau des Heures Invisibles (Aubervilliers)

With the support of La Maison Populaire (Montreuil) and the Lafayette Anticipations Foundation (Paris)

Tarek Lakhrissi (lives and works in Paris) is a French artist and poet with a background in literature. He works across installation, performance, film, text and sculpture, engaging with transformative narratives within language, magic, codes and affects. His background in literature draws influence from feminist and queer writers providing his work with a critical atmosphere and an interest in queer of color experience. He currently teaches at CCC Research Master Program of the Visual Arts Department at HEAD (Geneva School of Art and Design).

Lakhrissi has been exhibited internationally at galleries and institutions including Palais de Tokyo (Paris), Museum of Contemporary Art; 22nd Biennale of Sydney (Sydney), Wiels (Brussels), Palazzo Re Rebaudengo/Sandretto (Guarene/Torino), Manchester International Festival (Manchester), Mostyn, (Llandudno), Tinguely Museum (Basel), HKW (Berlin), Shedhalle (Zurich); Fondation Ricard (Paris), Quadriennale di Roma; Palazzo delle Esposizioni (Roma), High Art (Paris), La Verrière, Fondation Hermès (BE), Kevin Space (Vienna), Hayward Gallery (London), Auto Italia South East (London), Grand Palais, FIAC (Paris), Fondation Lafayette Anticipations (Paris), L’Espace Arlaud (Lausanne), Zabriskie (Geneva), Fondation Gulbenkian (Paris), Veda gallery (Firenze), CRAC Alsace (Altkirch), Kim? (Riga), Artexte (Montreal), Gaité Lyrique (Paris), SMC/CAC; (Vilnius). Lakhrissi’s artworks are part of different private and public collections like Defares, Sandretto Foundation or CNAP. He is represented by VITRINE Gallery (London/Basel).

Leave No Trace (Athens) I-VIII

plays with the memory of lived and shared experience, transforming manipulated images of performance documentation (specifically, SULK performed at the 6th Athens Biennial in 2018), into a modular set of transparent screens. The work focuses on the idea of embodied text—becoming together with text, in physical and digital spaces. It also deals with the idea of documentation (in its various forms) and its implications with surveillance, collection, quantification and distribution of shared experience. The screens here form a spatial installation which is activated by the movement of the audience; the stretched chiffon textiles acquire and lose saturation viewed at different angles, becoming a ghostly presence in the space.

RYXPER1126AE 02:60

emits a perfume that exists as a molecular imprint of the SULK performance. Produced in collaboration with IFF Inc. on the basis of the air samples captured with the use of headspace technology on site of the aforementioned performance, RYXPER1126AE 02:60 can be understood as an olfactory method of documentation of performance and space. RYXPER1126AE 02:60 bears a poetic sign or memory of belonging to a certain intimate collective experience, conceived through olfactory acts, contractual, ritual-like gestures carried out, as part of the choreography of the SULK performance.

Votive Flowers and Freestanding Votive Flowers

are situated in different places throughout the exhibition space, sometimes blocking the way like stumbling blocks. This sculptural series focuses on the collective and ritualistic moments of grief while referring to the votive offerings. Here the plastic fiber-optic flowers are positioned in the place of an offering, thus, bearing a pledge that rejects nostalgic wallowing in bygone times and points to a new future worth living. Unlike living flowers, they do not wither and thus are at once a reminder, a memorial, and a new beginning.

Dorota Gawęda (PL) and Eglė Kulbokaitė (LT) are an artist duo living and working in Basel. Both graduated from the Royal College of Art in London in 2012. Their work spans performance, sculpture, photography, painting and video. They are the founders of the YOUNG GIRL READING GROUP (2013–2021). They have exhibited internationally including at: Kunstraum Niederoesterreich, Vienna (2022); Centre Culturel Suisse, Paris (2022); Kunstverein Hamburg (2021); Istituto Svizzero, Palermo and Milan (2021); Kunstverein Leipzig (2021); Swiss Institute, New York (2020); Julia Stoschek Collection, Düsseldorf (2020); Fri Art – Kunsthalle Fribourg (2020); Futura, Prague (2019); Lafayette Anticipations, Paris (2019); Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2018); Cell Project Space, London (2018); 6th Athens Biennale (2018); Kunsthalle Basel (2017); ICA, London (2017); MOMA, Warsaw (2016); Berlin Biennale 9 (2016); MaM, Paris (2015) among others. They are the recipients of CERN Collide Residency 2022 and laureates of the Swiss Performance Art Award 2021.

(artist-in-residence)

THE SCHENECTADY REPORT

HELLO…we are allowed to exist.
all that stuff we stuff down and tuck away and repress repress just comes out and back to choke and suffocate us and those around us anyways.
ANYWAYS.
maybe you don’t recognize that b is happening ’cause of a, but that is what is up. i’m just trying to have us look at our abc’s. learn ’em.
so we can move in less mysterious ways.
mystery is hot, but damn.
also: all these unsolved mysteries take up a lot of blazing space in our all together now space.

“An amalgam of intuitive improvisation, choreography, and performance art, my practice is rooted in publicly exploring the multiplicity of being. I work with notions of performative alchemy and lucid dreaming – using personal history, current preoccupations, and future desires to create an empathic centrifuge of live moments between myself and those present.

Today, my work can perhaps be described by some of its influences and inhabitations: sculpture, comedy, hip-hop, cinematography, techno, poetry, psychology, dub and social commentary.

In research, I alternate between the work that takes place in and out of the studio. I weave in and out of pouring over a subject — via writing, reading, video, and discussion — and relaxing my focus, letting the body take over. I feed myself with sound, silence, and dissonance – at times over-stuffing my body and psyche with stimulation to encounter its response. Minute details pop into my kinetic vision ‑manifesting movements, resonations, colours, textures, and certain experiences of light. These details clarify the trajectory of the work.

Using difficulty as a navigational methodology comes naturally and coerces my performances into places of vulnerability and discovery. This is where I am able to listen at closest range, and to share with the least hesitation. Thinking about beings as mathematical proofs or portals, made up of billions of possibilities, deepens this listening.

My offering is a repository that remains open to interpretation, a vast space for encountering and broadening one’s own logic of seeing and experiencing.” – Dana Michel

Credits

General Coordination: Viva Delorme

Dana Michels residency at Shedhalle is kindly supported by: Tanzhaus Zürich, Embassy of Canada

Dana Michel is a live artist. Her works interact with the expanded fields of improvisation, choreography, sculpture, comedy, hip-hop, cinematography, techno, poetry, psychology, dub and social commentary to create a centrifuge of experience.

Before graduating from the BFA program in Contemporary Dance at Concordia University in her late twenties, Michel was a marketing executive, and a competitive runner and football player.In 2014, she was awarded the newly created ImPulsTanz Award (Vienna) in recognition for outstanding artistic accomplishments, and was highlighted among notable female choreographers of the year by the New-York Times. In 2017, Michel was awarded the Silver Lion for Innovation in Dance at the Venice Biennale.

In 2018, she became the first ever dance artist in residence at the National Arts Centre, Canada. In 2019 she was awarded the ANTI Festival International Prize for Live Art (Kuopio, Finland).

Michel is currently touring three solo performance works: YELLOW TOWEL, MERCURIAL GEORGE and CUTLASS SPRING. Based in Montreal, Michel is an artist supported by Parbleux.

Garden Amidst the Flame is commissioned and produced by Auto Italia, London in partnership with La Becque, Tour-de-Peilz, Stroom Den Haag, The Hague and Shedhalle, Zurich.

Garden Amidst the Flame is also shown concurrently with Protozone8 Queer Trust in a solo exhibition at Auto Italia, London, 16.09.-04.12.22, as part of the group exhibition From the Sea to the Clouds to the Soil at Stroom Den Haag 01.10.-18.12.22 and as part of a screening at La Becque, La Tour-de-Peilz, Switzerland on 20.09.22 at 19:00 (with Natasha Tontey).

As part of Queer Trust’s Hi-Intensity phase, Natasha Tontey hosts a reading and listening session on Sunday afternoon, 18.09. at 15:30 at Shedhalle.

“Expanding my artistic research in Minahasan cosmology, in this new film work, Garden Amidst the Flame, I will develop a queering approach in understanding one of the main ritual ceremonies in Minahasa society, Karai. Karai is a ritual in which Minahasan warriors are “dressed” with invincible armour to make them invulnerable to tribe war.

In contemporary Minahasa, Karai is mostly understood as a hyper-masculine ritual as most of the participants are male tribesmen. However, in this work, based on my research and experience, I will explore the potential idea of speculative care in Karai. As this ritual is closely connected to the notion of wear, symbols, and clothes, and considering that in the mythology of Minahasan cosmos that the world is not a heternormative playground, I will observe the possibility of destabilising and reconfiguring the assumption of Karai in relation to the idea of care and invulnerability instead of aggression and masculinity.” – Natasha Tontey

Credits:

Garden Amidst the Flame is commissioned and produced by Auto Italia, London in partnership with La Becque, Tour-de-Peilz; Stroom Den Haag, The Hague and Shedhalle, Zurich; with additional support from the Governance of North Sulawesi, Bank SulutGo, and the Department of Tourism and Culture of North Sulawesi.

Written and Directed by Natasha Tontey

Produced by B.M. Anggana

Director of Photography and Lighting Director Aditya Krisnawan

Production Designer Arda Awigarda

Art Director Agge Akbar

Music Director Harsya Wahono (Divisi62)

Sound Recordist Alan Daru Wicaksana

Make-up Artist Jacky Armando Kabo

Line Producer Jein Byl

Assistant Director Yusuf Breyvi Talanggai

Cast:

Kawasaran Wulan Lengkoan, Yoppy Pesik, Filadelfia Lolowang, and M.T. Kembuan.

Natasha Tontey is a multidisciplinary artist of Minahasan ancestry based in Yogyakarta, Indonesia. Her work reimagines the ancient knowledge and technologies of Minahasan cosmology. Based on these pre-colonial and non-Western viewpoints and through experimental digital technology, Tontey presents proposals for new environmental and ecological worldviews.

She explores fiction as a method of speculative thinking, investigating how fear, horror, and terror can be manifested through media to control the general public. She works with 3D design, modeling and animation to create moving image works, alongside sculpture and performance.

Tontey has exhibited internationally at Transmediale, Berlin (2021), Center for Art and Media, Karlsruhe (2020), Cemeti Institute for Art and Society, Yogyakarta (2019), Liquid Architecture, Melbourne (2019), K4, Oslo (2019), Contemporary Art Tasmania, Hobart (2019), Kyoto Art Center (2018), Indonesian Dance Festival, Jakarta (2018), Next Wave Festival, Melbourne (2016) and Koganecho Bazaar, Yokohama (2015) amongst others.

She was awarded prizes including the Human Machine Fellowship at Akademie der Künst, Berlin (2021), the Young Artist Award ArtJog MMXIX, Yogyakarta (2019) and the HASH Award (2020) for Net-Based Projects at Center for Art and Media, Karlsruhe (2019).

Give a shit (2022)

Give a shit (2022) is a participatory performance to trigger micro-actions to respond to the current systemic crisis, functioning as an open kitchen/restaurant at Shedhalle.

Inviting various experts working in the canton of Zurich such as fermentation experts, food rescue activists, dry toilet experts, vegan chefs, organic farmers, fermented beverage experts, etc, this performance piece creates an open platform to share knowledge, experiences, and emotions.

It consists of an on-site workshop to ferment the bio vegetables from the food rescue, an open cooking session where participants voluntarily cook, and a CARE program including a dry toilet.

Those who wish to participate in the whole evening can register for free by applying in advance, and there is also space for spontaneous short-term participation on the site.

Drinks and food (gluten-free, vegan, and bio) will be distributed for both participants and visitors, and those taking food/drink can voluntarily donate money or exchange food/drink with participation in the CARE program.

Byungseo Yoo is a Korean artist/researcher/educator/mediator/writer/cook, living and working in Geneva (Switzerland). His main practice is action research on fermentation and cultural revival in art/institutional context to create tools to exit from the current systemic crisis.

His works and projects have been introduced through the exhibition, place, institution, artist in residency, gallery such as Musée d’ethnographie de Genève (Geneva, Switzerland), DOCK 11 (Berlin, Germany), ZK/U (Berlin, Germany), L’Assaut de la Menuiserie (Saint-Étienne, France), Gallery Ygrec, (Paris, France), Public Storage (Vancouver, Canada), Asia Culture Center (Gwangju, Republic of Korea), Seoul Museum of Art (Seoul, Republic of Korea), Art Center Ongoing (Tokyo, Japan).

Shedhalle Zurich on May 13th 1902, 7pm: Workers of the mechanical silk weaving factory are leaving after their shift. They head towards home or possibly somewhere else, wherever their leisure time calls them.

Playbour describes activities between play, leisure and labour. Originating in contexts of the Gaming industry, this particular mode of creating value during play actually affects a much wider group. Looking back as far as early communist dreams of liberation from waged work through automatization where activities of play are brought into every workers’ life may seem a far stretch. Yet the question remains as to who may have access to modes of production that are labeled as free, creative and meaningful activities. While ‘playbour’ is built around the work places of so-called immaterial labour it is tightly interwoven with the material extraction and exploitation of both workers and more-than-human resources on a global scale.

Love, just like care, is no innocent word. Calling upon a site of non-work in this context may seem like a faint and tired sigh. Mind you, this zone does find itself in Zurich, Switzerland. The wealth of this city partly stems from textile industries and its multiple implications with colonial, racialized, classist and gendered violence. We remember the past of this place in order to ask the same old questions, repeatedly: What activities are considered valuable enough to be called “work”? Who does the never ending and always invisible labor of love, emotion and care? What is the prize of this invisibility and who pays for it? What infrastructures need to be built in order to keep the most vulnerable safe?

With work being at the center of marking and making a persons’ identity, governing the feelings around one’s activity has become an important skill, if not a whole range of skills to bring onto the job. Soft skills. Love as well as care are key to this. Kathie Weeks wrote an essay titled “Down with Love” where she draws on 1970s feminist critiques of romance to investigate the contemporary management discourses of love and happiness at work. Here is an extract. Enjoy.

“Do what you love, they preach; learn how to love your work in ten easy steps. Fall back in love with your job. Learn even to love the work you hate. The future of work is happy.

(…)

In the end it is not really about loving work so much, it would seem, as it is about fashioning oneself into someone who can love one’s work, or at least has the infective aura of someone who does.”

Kathi Weeks: “Down with Love: Feminist Critique and the New Ideologies of Work” in; WSQ: Precarious Work, vol. 45, no. 3&4, 2017.

Kinship can take many forms. The expression speaks of a particular kind of mutual care. Rather than blood lines, chosen and embodied lines of ancestry open up to a wide range of relationships and partnering. There are multiple ways to engage in loving and supportive ways. Kinships are never a means to an end, but a means to itself. The artists invited developed their work within the pandemic. In times of distancing and isolation, questions around relations pose themselves in another light. As many of us, they went through moments of crisis, depression, illness, loss, deprivation. They all found ways to foster kinships that supported these works, building ecologies in and of themselves. This zone is dedicated to their specific and often slow practices, their ongoing engagements and meticulous care towards materials.

Please take a cape* and wear it however suits you best. For the duration of your visit in the exhibition you can either keep the same cape* or you can choose another one. There are up to five changes possible. After wearing the cape*, please return it to the person at the main entrance.

We thank you.

Capes, gowns, protective suits, uniforms maybe. 80 m of pure silk, then maybe flags after all? It should comfort us, protect us, and immunize us.

Over all the contradictions, which result from the close-meshed interweavings of the daily to do`s and the end of work. Do we always work, or never? Maybe the capes* will be for future heroes and heroines of non-work, or something like that. They look good anyways.

The handmade individual pieces are all covered by a small breeze of the eau de parfum “fragrance for museums, 2021” by Nils Amadeus Lange.

Nils Amadeus Lange (* 1989 Cologne, Germany) works as an artist, performer and lecturer in Zurich. After studying theatre at the Bern University of the Arts he expanded his practice to various media, keeping a focus on dance and performance, developing numerous international projects. At the center of his practice is the body, which functions as a means of deconstructing social conventions and gender stereotypes.

For the past six years he has been teaching, developing curricula in various universities, within departments varying between fashion, acting, fine arts, photography and performance; implementing alternative forms of learning and experimental approaches.

His works have been shown at various institutions such as Kunsthalle Basel, Kunsthalle Zürich, Manifesta Zürich, Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art Warsaw, Istituto Svizzero Rome, Belvedere 21 Vienna, Centre d‘Art Contemporain Genève, Swiss Dance Days, Zürich moves!, Gessnerallee, Frascati Amsterdam, ZÜRICH TANZT, Berliner Festspiele, Kunsthalle Bern, Les Urbaines Lausanne, Südpol Luzern, Tanzhaus Zürich und CounterPulse San Francisco, Cabaret Voltaire Zürich.

What kinds of tools can we incorporate into a situated more-than-human practice? The collaborative project River Oracle by Paloma Ayala, Melody Chua, Anne-Laure Franchette, Riikka Tauriainen und Kay Zhang is envisioned as an artistic-feminist research and tool to develop methods around practices for working with oracles and to speculate on what kind of meaning a shift in antropocentric thinking can have.

The River Oracle is intended as a situational tool for self-reflection as well as for raising awareness of ecological and political issues. Sounds were collected from different places connected to the Rhine: in the riverbed, in hydroelectric power plants, in the harbor and in boats. These sounds are transformed into a composition reflected in a sound installation representing the Oracle. In the space there are cyanotype textiles imbued with stories of the Rhine.

Riikka Tauriainen (*1979, Finland) is a visual artist and lecturer engaging in historical narratives, postcolonial theories and gender issues through installations, videos and performances. She navigates on the boundaries between art and science, between fact and fiction. Since 2018, she has been working on the series of works Hydrocommons which operates in a posthumanist world of ideas. It explores to what extent our kinship with other bodies can be understood as a deeply materialistic relationality.

Paloma Ayala (*1980, Mexico) is a visual artist interested in empowering the relationship between domestic and political contexts. Her work fictionalizes historical, ecological or social problematics as means of analysis and critique. Paloma Ayala’s projects nourish visions of connection between human and more-than-human spheres, they dream of emancipation from marginalizing dominant structures, and emphasize practices of care across different topographies and borders.

Anne-Laure Franchette (*1979, France) is a visual artist working with urban nature and the circulation of plants and industrial materials. She is interested in the intersections between botany and industry, between wilderness and civilized world, between authorized or sanctioned migration and spontaneous settlement. Her work focuses on labor, representations and hierarchies of dignity (related to beings, objects and practices), as well as strategies of self-organization and maintenance within artistic practices.

Kay Zhang (*1990, Australia) is a founding member of several collectives and works in the field between sound, curation and artistic research. Kay is concerned with intercultural identity, gender issues and ecology. Through improvisation, transdisciplinary forms of curation, and the integration of cultural studies, Kay aims to explore the boundaries of the performance experience and expand access to her instrument, the saxophone.

Melo (Melody) Chua (b. 1994, USA) is an interdisciplinary artist with a specialization in the application of interactive technologies in performance and installation settings. With a portfolio spanning works for 360° touchscreens, 360° videos, Ambisonics/3D audio, motion capture systems, live-coding, pressure-sensitive shoes, real-time projection visuals, and sensor-augmented instruments, she investigates such technologies as both vehicles of narrative expression and as opportunities to destabilize the norms present in one’s relationship with technology. Currently a PhD candidate at the Künstuniversität Graz and Zürich University of the Arts, Melody has performed and guest lectured internationally at various festivals and institutions, in addition to being awarded a Fulbright-Swiss Government Excellence grant for the development of a sensor-augmented flute.

Supported by the Ernst and Olga Gubler-Hablützel Foundation, Verein Kulturbrücke Kaiserstuhl, SVFF Kultur, Stadt Zürich

Entangled by the multitude of desires and differences that rip apart our physical and psychical wellbeing, we surrender to an emotional mixture of hopelessness, despair, depression and anxiety. To formulate an answer to the roots of the entire social and natural catastrophe has become futile, since the issues at core have been acknowledged in the professional network of art and culture for decades. Not only institutional critique has become normalized. As artists, it seems even more irresponsible to continue producing artefacts and images to which one can attach a minimal intention of hope for a reasonable outcome out of the crisis that suffocate and pollute us, our being here. Small sensible steps have become powerless in the face of “the end’s” acceleration.

Procrastinating joy and togetherness for a future that will never materialize, we seem destitute to lose our time, therefore youth, to a continuous struggle for economic subsistence while having our mental health weakened by the continuous flow of material desires. Where to find refuge other than in ourselves and in the small community of ours, of being in common, together? Only if we wouldn’t be constrained by money.

SABA – Silvia Amancei and Bogdan Armanu (b. 1991, Iași and Timișoara) is an artist couple working together since 2012. They are the residency artists of Protozone 7 and have produced their latest work “Wish we were free” in coproduction with Shedhalle and with the kind support of DOGO Residenz für Neue Kunst (Lichtensteig).

Their artistic practice takes place at the border between social studies and visual art, researching for methods and examples where art and artistic means can be instrumentalized in order to overexcite the ability to look beyond capitalism and create a (common) future. Among their recent solo shows are “s.a.b.a 1979-####” (2020, Ljubljana, SI), “It was always in plain sight” (2020, Bucharest, RO), “If Then What After” (2019, Baden, AT), “What Past? What Future?” (2017, Linz, AT), while their works have been present in many group exhibitions among which “Gangwon Triennale” (2021, Gangwon, KR), “Rewriting Our Imaginations” (2020, Basel, CH), “STRIKE GENTLY AWAY ____” (2019, Salzburg, AT), “Displacement and Togetherness” (2019, Brussels, BE), “Capital’s Time Machine” (2018, Bucharest, RO), “Baywatch” (2018, Berlin, DE), “Alternative Facts” (2018, Stuttgart, DE), “Odessa Biennial” (2017, Odessa, Ukraine).

Liquid Dependencies: what does a decentralized caring society look like? (2021 – present) is a role-playing game for 10 players in which they build long-term, mutual, caring relationships. In the course of the game, the players will be assigned characters which they need to bring alive with their own experiences. Over the course of 4 to 5 hours, the players will “spend” 20 to 30 years of life together and cope with a series of personal and social events. What kind of society will these players eventually create?

Liquid Dependencies is part of the long-standing ReUnion Network project (since 2017), which researches caring relationships as the basis of a sustainable society, and how care can function as a social currency with a deliberate socio-economic system design. The game is a gamified version of the project, functioning both as a life simulation and a social experiment. It was first launched at the 13th Shanghai Biennale in collaboration with the Dinghaiqiao Mutual-aid Society, and later on in Galerie für Zeitgenössische Kunst Leipzig with the artist collective Elli Kuruş. So far, the game has had over 30 sessions in Shanghai, Beijing, Guangzhou, Helsinki, Eindhoven, Leipzig and now Amsterdam, in which more than 300 people have experienced alternative futures and taken thoughts and experience from the game into their real life.

Liquid Dependencies Theory is an interdisciplinary collective dedicated to exploring the gray zone between socially-engaged art and social innovation. It is founded by artist and design theorist YIN Aiwen, writer and academia Zoe ZHAO, and educator and community practitioner Yiren ZHAO. Their collaboration began with the LARP game “Liquid Dependencies: What does a decentralized caring society look like?”, and subsequently extends into a hybrid practice that leverages the power of art, technology and social innovation. Their practices depart from the current reality, attempting to use technology as a medium to bring people together for a common-oriented, sustainable society.

The Teams of Liquid Dependencies & ReUnion Network involves local researchers/collaborators (Elli Kuruş in GE version, Inge Hoote and Petra van der Kooij in the NL version, Trojan Horse in FI versions, etc.), active leading host members, active contributors of ReUnion Network (Genevive Costello), active team members across the two projects (Shiyue Wang, Anouk Asselineau) , and more people in the foreseeable future.

Host Community is made of the advanced players in the game: the assigned characters that collaborate to create a believable fictional society, guiding the players into it and assisting players with services. Because hosts have shared decades of in-game life, intense course work, and experiences of collaborative facilitation, hosts tend to become an intimate yet open community in the after-game hours. This community is generally referred to as the host community. The cultivation of local host communities thus supports the learning and growth process of hosts all over (community-based mutual learning) and serves as a preview of the mutual caring society supported by Liquid Dependencies and ReUnion Network at large. In the project ‘Commoning Liquid Dependencies’, the host communities from each locale will gather their own data, discuss their experiences and working together and give input to the database.

As one of its key elements, the carbon cycle assumes life as a metabolic ring of growth, reproduction, and degeneration – the conceptual foundation of prevailing biopolitics. aLifveForms consider these arrangements of life in relation to the technological procedures of maintenance and renewal.

Set in a mixed reality, aLifveForms’ cyclical cosmology suggests re-considering the self not merely as a biological body, but one also ornamented by technology and extending into our atmospheric environment. By re-subjecting the self to cycles of indefinable limits (beyond rationality and essentialism), it appears as an impossibly abstract body. aLifveForms spawn a being to embody the complexity of contemporary capital flows, global reproduction technology, and fantasies of climate control. This planetary being has different organs, a different reproduction cycle, and a psycho-reality which is different from our common reality. The installation thus opens both a physical reality with devices built by the artificial identities, and an ornamented reality, projecting Transformella cinis’ future.

Four cylindrical ceramics symbolically incubate the organs of new Transformella cinis’s impossible body. The plane of emergence unfolds through NailFont scriptures, logos and company names inscribed in the raw clay. Climeworks, metaphorically standing in for the lung, is a Swiss startup company and the world’s first commercial business specialized in filtering carbon dioxide from the ambient air, pressing it into stone and thereby terraforming planet earth. Mosa Meat, the muscle, grows in-vitro beef, a NeverLife that is nevertheless subject to decay and entropy. Ancestry determines an individual’s genetic origins through the extraction of data which endorses the stem cell as data material, breaking the cycle of reproduction. Lonité synthesizes diamonds from the carbon isolated from cremation ashes.

Text by Sarah Theurer.

Cinis’ organs serve simultaneously as containers for their AshOracles since within thermodynamics in the common reality, all processes in the universe move toward heat-death: a state of irreversible deterioration, devoid of potential. These laws trigger questions for aLifveForms’ artificial beings – How can cyclical reproduction introduce negentropy into worldmaking? Can it replenish the metabolism of a habitable world, reversing the carbon imaginary of extractivism while approaching life from its imminent catastrophic end?

aLifveForms

JP Raether’s transdisciplinary performative work attends to a group of constructed and constantly evolving identities. These aLifveforms are composed of language, technological skins, digital devices, and Raether’s fleshly body, which they embrace and from whose identity they simultaneously continue to detach themselves more and more.

The SelfSisters, or AlterIdentities, are site-specific, colorful beings interwoven with everyday objects, whose works address the constitution of reality through language. AlterIdentities emerge within a web of performative appearances, social interventions, and elaborate vocabularies as humanoid beings and full-fledged authors of their own “work.” Currently, three active lines are “alive”, dedicated to topics such as reproductive and biotechnologies (Transformella), globalized tourism (Schwarmwesen) or occult substances of contemporary technology (Protektorama).

Transformella

As part of aLifveForms, Transformellae are cared for by JP Raether and are one of three active lifelines. In their research on the capitalist lines of production and on biotechnical and socio-political reproductive technologies, they deal with artificial insemination, surrogacy in global reproductive industries or the assembly of the traditional nuclear family called IKEA. With their site-specific appearances they demonstrate that in every experienced reality there is the possibility of the existence of further realities. Thus, they work with the harvesting of human somatic cells, interventionist research journeys, and cyclical assemblies of their ReproTribe towards the realization of reprovulotion.

Alan Turing (1912-1954). Born in England to parents living in British administered India, a twenty year old Alan wrote a six-page meditation titled ‘Nature of Spirit’. Archived as among his “non-scientific” writings, the Turing Archive also holds 72 unordered pages filed under a note: “it will be difficult, in some places impossible to know exactly what the fragments are (exactly) about”. These 6 and 72 pages at the fringes of his mathematical work, become a curious and critical surface upon which to (re)inscribe a(n other) story. A piece of (speculative historical) fiction for a pioneer of (theoretical computer) science. Dreams in digital palimpsests of ethnographic, archival and choreographic layers tell tall tales of Alan’s first twenty years in colonial India and Indonesia. In a provocative (re)shaping of his mathematical mind through premodern tāntrik practices of drawing and dancing, the work offers a fragmented speculation on decolonial implications of non-dual tāntrik art-science on our present condition of binary digitality.

This work is the penultimate installment in a long-term artistic research ‘Epistolary Ancestries’, an inquiry into a personal filiation of practice, reflected through a corpus of open letters to already dead persons.

CREDITS & ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Drawings, text & video: Kiraṇ Kumār. Programming & digital visualisation: Matthias Härtig. Sound: Ulf Langheinrich (electronic score), Netai Chandra Das (voice), musicians at Istana Mangkunegaran (Carabelan), birds across India and Indonesia. Diagrams: Alan Mathison Turing, anonymous tāntrik practitioners

With support from: Library and Archives, King’s College Cambridge, Perpustakaan Rekso Pustoko, Mangkunegaran (Archiv), Akademi Seni Mangkunegaran Surakarta, Akademie Schloss Solitude, Akademie für Theatre und Digitalität, Robert Bosch Stiftung & Literarisches Colloquium Berlin, Centre For the Arts & Centre for Quantum Technologies, National University of Singapore.

This work is dedicated to the loving memory of Santha Bhaskar (1939-2022), who stimulated its beginnings in 2017.

Kiraṇ Kumār (1983) is an interdisciplinary artist, researcher and writer. His work focuses on unpacking understandings of the human body-mind through a trifold practice of dance as art, science and spi/ritual, and on proposals for change that these understandings hold for our world today. He is currently fellow at Akademie Schloss Solitude in Stuttgart. In 2021, he received a fellowship at the Academy for Theatre and Digitality in Dortmund for his research Epistolary Ancestries #9: Dear Dead Doctor. In 2020/21 he received the Performing Arts Grant for Epistolary Ancestries #9: Dear Dead Doctor, Serendipity Arts Foundation (New Delhi). The current work presented at Shedhalle is an ongoing process.

Marouf has been working with fragments from his memory of spaces in Damascus that he has been transforming into installation settings to present his work in. It is a central theme in how he deals with the concrete physical inaccessibility to his home town. The installation carries with it an architectural gesture giving the audience the possibility to inhabit and move through the space during the viewing of the work.

In the video work, the figure of the Angle is introduced as a transformative figure, both disobedient and undomesticated, revolutionary and challenging. The figure in his work is shifting between addressing a person the artist speaks to in his work and the process of thought producing as a companion to humans like an angel or a shadow in unsettling times of uncertainty. Constructed as a scenic performance for the camera, Marouf creates with the performers movement sequences taken from Ballet, intimate everyday life gestures and speech, showing a simultaneous duality of absence and presence, loss and proximity and the emotional work that comes with them.

Credits: Director: Enad Marouf. Performance and dance by: Franziska Aigner, Eren Demirel, Alyha Love, Samuel Pereira and Tiran Wilmsen. Choreography: Enad Marouf. Assistant choreographer: Samuel Pereira. Voice: Majed Shalgheen. Text: Enad Marouf. Director of Photography: Omar Zaki. Assitstant camera: Veronica Storm. Second assitant camera: Mayar Abou El Naga. Gaffer: Alfredo La Corte. Assistant Gaffer: Isabelle Schmitz. Edit: Enad Marouf. Colorgrading: Alaa Abdullatif. Cello Pieces: Franziska Aigner. Sound recording and design: Alexander Iezzi. Set: Filip Berg. Styling consultant: Emman Debattista. Hair and Make up: Guerdy Casimir. Producer: Tatianna Peckham. Production Management: Yara Seifan.

A production by Enad Marouf in co-production with TANZTAGE BERLIN SOPHIENSÆLE. Supported by the NATIONAL PERFORMANCE NETWORK – STEPPING OUT, funded by the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media as part of the NEUSTART KULTUR. Assistance Program for Dance.

Enad Marouf is a Syrian/German performance and video artist based in Berlin. His works deal with memory, loss and intimacy. Through the physical inaccessibility to certain aspects in a life, only memories and the act of remembering grant access to the challenges posed by loss and the inaccessible itself. He received his MA in choreography and performance at the Institute for Theater Studies Gießen/Frankfurt he completed in 2014. His solo works and collaborations have been shown at venues including the Athens Biennale, KunstenfestivaldesArts Brussels, 104 Paris, HAU Berlin, Babel Beirut, Centre Francais de Damas, Art Institute of Chicago, Tate Modern London, Sophiensaele Berlin.

Acknowledgment: Some quotes and anecdotes in the work are taken from: Night by Etel Adnan. Angel of History by Rabih Alameddine. On the concept of History by Walter Benjamin and Prisoner of love by Jean Genet.

“Co- Weaving” forms a correspondence between craft and participatory forms of encounter. The idea of the carpet as a transportable garden serves as a starting point in this endeavour. During the first two weekends of this Protozone, the art work will be activated: Claudia Hill and a local team invite visitors to sessions of weaving together. The pair of carpets created within this time frame builds the fifth element of a series. All weaving sessions follow the same abstract map, a guide to weaving itself as well as a help to navigates us through fundamental questions about how we want to live and work.

On view is the first pair of carpets in the series, “What’s the Matter,” woven together in a collaborative research initiated by Claudia Hill in 2021 with dance artists Shannon Cooney, Shelley Etkin, Samuel Draper, Jared Gradinger, and guests. This process was accompanied by the filmmaker Heidrun Holzfeind and is part of the garden. Claudia Hill understands the loom not only as a weaving machine, but as a somatic communication tool. Conversations held while weaving together and texts read aloud, together with site-specific fabrics, flow into the fabric as their intricate immaterial components.

Claudia Hill is a in Berlin based interdisciplinary artist working within the fields of performance, costume design, scenography and somatic practices. Her work has been internationally shown in the contexts of Fine arts and Performing arts. Amongst others this includes the Paris International’s, the Mumok in Vienna duringImpulsTanz festival and HAU Hebbel am Ufer in Berlin. Her artistic practice roots in the intertwined relationship between textiles and different kinds of crafts and manual labour performed by women. As Claudia Hill describes in her book Social Fabric Earth Return, she explores different collective forms of communication through multi sensory experiences. The book was released by the publisher BOM DIA BOA TARDE BOA NOITE on the occasion of her solo show in the Efremidis Gallery in Berlin. Claudia Hill has a background in contemporary dance and fashion design. Her collectionshave been presented internationally including Japan and New York, where she spent several years of her life. She designed costumes for the choreographer William Forsythe, The Wooster Group, and the choreographer Meg Stuart. Over the last years, her work has been focused around the healing potential of textile objects and transforming rituals. At the moment her exhibition Weaving Roots is in the Bärenzwinger in Berlin on display.

The Co-Weaving research was supported by the National Performance Network – Stepping Out, funded by the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and Media within the framework of the initiative Neustart Kultur as well as the Berlin Senate for Culture and Europe.

artist in residence

Pontus Pettersson is this Protozone’s artist in residence. Throughout his time at Shedhalle for Are you coming? Pettersson will base his investigation on his ongoing project Bodies of Water, using this as an open model to invite in and connect to the larger Zurich audience.

Departing from Russian Marxist activist Alexandra Kollontai’s texts on love and Astrida Neimanis’ work with Hydrofeminism, the work attempts to embody and become water on a molecular level through language, objects stitched and worn, sound, relational tactics, and dance. Bodies of Water is part of Pettersson’s extended research ‘All Departures Are Waves’ (2019-), which brings forward the ecological, performative, political, economic, ethical, and narrative qualities that water entails and unleashes.

Pontus Pettersson (b. 1983, Stockholm, Sweden) is a Swedish choreographer and artist based in Stockholm. Working professionally as a dancer since his graduation at Skolen for Moderne Dance in Copenhagen (2007) – Pettersson embarked on a diverse and spread out career working with world class choreographers. Pettersson has throughout his career worked on situations where inviting other artists has been a crucial aspect of understanding his work in a greater whole as well as working for a broader field of expressions and inclusion. Projects like The Poeticians and My Wild Flag and his latest workshop project Delta, hospitality being one of his main conceptual concerns, seen as a choreographic principal for dance/art to emerge. Pettersson holds two masters, one in choreography from SKH, and one in visual arts at Konstfack. He is an affiliated artist at the theatre Weld in Stockholm and the research center MARC in Knislinge, Sweden and his work is supported by the Swedish Arts Grants Committee, Swedish Arts Council, and Stockholm City Council of Culture.

Sanity TV (2017 – ongoing)

May 6-7-8-14-15

Performances of Sanity TV will take place over the first weekend, on Friday 6th and Saturday 7th of May at 8pm, allowing the set-up to remain on view until the closing of the exhibition.

“Sanity TV is a performance-for-video work in development. It is an extremely experimental work for me that takes the form of a talk show in which the audience is imaginary and the “guests” – that range from objects to people- are invited into an imaginary dissociative conversational space by myself, the host.

This particular work emerged from hitting a conceptual wall while at a residency last summer. My fellow resident artists became my guests and the dialogues, which seem abstract- discussing vampires, kinetic human sculpture and flower kingdom hierarchies- revealed more intense, layered conversations about cruelty, identity on the margins, and self/hood/objecthood in the African diasporic context.

I’ve since decided to take this work further by including it in a live performance; very soon it will develop into a series produced summer 2017. This work feels important, yet effortless; it achieves my goal of working with my strengths as an improvisational performer while instantly critically engaging my ongoing inquiry into psychodynamic theory.” [Autumn Knight]

Knight privileges the rehearsal as an open space, with works like Sanity TV, she is able to rely on their structures to allow improvisation to enliven each new performance. The processes of development, the rehearsals, develop like scores––allowing future revisitations of their protocols to then allow the work itself to continue to grow.

Knight’s work first appeared at Shedhalle on the SHED in February 2021, and later these works moved into the physical Shedhalle in Protozone3: You’re So Busy. In Protozone6: Are You Coming? Knight revisits “Letto”, another performance-for-video work, that calls on collaborators to perform a loose score that reveals moments of intimacy and longing between two performers in their home and in their beds.

BIOGRAFIE:

Autumn Knight (b. 1980, Houston, U.S.A.) is an interdisciplinary artist working with performance, installation, video, and text. She has presented work at The New Museum, The Contemporary Art Museum Houston, The 2019 Whitney Biennial and Akademie der Kunste, Berlin, among other venues. Her performance work is in the permanent collection of the Studio Museum in Harlem where she was also a 2016–2017 artist in residence. Knight attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture and holds an M.A. in Drama Therapy from New York University. She is the current recipient of the Nancy B. Negley Prize at the American Academy in Rome (2021-22).

Basically (2020-ongoing)

April 22 10:30am-5:30pm open rehearsal, April 23 6-12pm performance, April 24 2-6pm installation – high intensity / in collaboration with zürich moves! Forever imbricated

Basically is an ongoing live project that includes nonlinear dance choreographies that fold in on themselves like portals through time, fugue-like contrapuntal guitar melodies, vocals and Ableton soundscapes, daily I Ching castings that locate us in a shifty universe, journal entries that become our textbook, shrine readings and unscheduled time that leaves room for contingency. Visitors are invited into this shifting constellation as the doors to the studio are often left open. They become involved in making and remaking the environment; a sociality of difference

The structure of Basically is a choreographic game with interactive and playful rules that allow for relations to develop. Dance choreographies branch from this basic structure, they revolve around themselves in varying undetermined patterns reliant on an electro-magnetic force that settles into a perpetual but shifting orbit.

Class of the 21st Century, Zürich edition: Laurel Atwell, Jordan Balaber, Lara Dâmaso, June Jenkins, Yevheniya Kravets, Michelangelo Miccolis, Ikenna Nwaogu, Cody Oyama, Chris Pawlusek, Salomon Poutsma, Lester St. Louis, Louise Trueheart, Marie Ursin, nick von kleist and Amalia Wiatr Lewis.

In partnership with Zürich Moves!, Shedhalle and Bergen Kunsthall and supported by Oktoberdans, BIT Teatergarasjen, Borealis Festival and Vlaanderen verbeelding werkt. Part of Re-imagine Europe, co-funded by the Creative Europe programme of the European Union.

Nikima Jagudajev (b. 1990) is a choreographer based in New York and Brussels. Their work, expanding formal dance into the construction of open-ended socialities has been presented in venues including Shedhalle, Kurimanzutto (Mexico City), Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève, The Whitney Museum of American Art, MoMA PS1 and Rockbund Art Museum (Shanghai) as well as in the context of Material Art Fair’s IMMATERIAL (Mexico City), 89+ at LUMA/Westbau (Zürich) and as part of the Marrakech Biennale (Morocco). Their first solo exhibition “Basically” took place in spring 2021 at Bergen Kunsthall (Norway). Published work includes ‘The Backstreet Boys’ as part of Bergen Kunsthall’s Speculative Histories text commission platform (2021), ‘Relations of Unpredictable Encounters’ in the Movement Research Performance Journal (2017) and ‘the landscape thinks itself in me’ in Asad Raza’s Root Sequence. Mother Tongue (Walther König, 2018).

in collaboration with zürich moves! Forever imbricated

Installation: 9 April 14-20h / 10 April 14-18h / 15-17 April 14-20h

Live-stream-performance at Shedhalle: 10 April 17h

SERAFINE1369 will be collaborating with Shehdalle over the next year to devise a multi-format project in direct dialogue with the Protozone. The Protozone is a process based exhibition scenario that presents accessible works and sustainable practices through different intensities, named high and low intensity phases.

As part of Are you coming? SERAFINE1369 will share an existing durational audio work, ‘I I I (something flat, something cosmic, something endless)’ and on April 10th at 17h they will premiere a newly commissioned work, ‘Episode I: Perhaps we are finally beginning to see that the direction we are moving in leads nowhere’ at Shedhalle, in collaboration with Josh Anio Grigg. SERAFINE1369 has also designed a poster campaign, which will hang around Zurich and zürich moves! partnering venues.

Episode I: Perhaps we are finally beginning to see that the direction we are moving in leads nowhere

The first in a series of oracular readings that continue SERAFINE1369’s work with the unit of one minute. A (de)composition of fragments selected in the moment of reading. Meaning is (y)ours to receive. Anything can be a map.

Quoted resources

The Map to the Door of No Return – Dionne Brand

Thirsty – Dionne Brand

The Anatomy Colouring Book – Wynn Kapit / Lawrence M. Elson

The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic – Marcus Rediker and Peter Linebaugh

The Hidden Messages in Water – Masaru Emoto

Tarot for Change – Jessica Dore

Strangers On A Train – Patricia Highsmith

Working The Roots: Over 400 Years of Traditional African American Healing Michele – Elizabeth Lee

& Assorted writings by SERAFINE1369

with Sound Design by Josh Anio Grigg and music from the archives of Last Yearz Interesting Negro and SERAFINE1369

SERAFINE1369 (London, UK) previously known as Last Yearz Interesting Negro (2016–2020), is the artist and dancer Jamila Johnson-Small. They work with dancing as a “philosophical undertaking”, as “a political project with ethical psycho-spiritual ramifications for being-in-the-world”, as they term it. Their work is informed by research into movement and dance as a tool for divination to be processed through the medium of choreography. Recent projects include Sadlers Wells, London (2022), Tate Britain, London (2021), Gropius Bau, Berlin (2021), Tai Kwun, Hong Kong (2021), Liverpool Biennial (2021), MACRO, Rome (2021), CA2M, Madrid (2020), MDT, Stockholm (2020), Silencio, Paris (2019), Transmediale, Berlin (2019), Barbican, London (2019), Café Oto, London (2019), Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2018), amongst others.

deader than dead (2020)

April 2 & 3, Opening hours 2-6pm

in collaboration with zürich moves! Forever imbricated

installation / on loop during all opening hours

DJ-Set Tracey September April 2 , 6-10pm

Conceived, choreographed and directed by Ligia Lewis for Made in L.A. 2020, deader than dead was originally a performance planned for the Hammer Museum galleries that had to be postponed due to the pandemic. The piece eventually became a film, which has since been shown in various museums and galleries.

The creation of the performance began with an investigation into the irony and emotional distance induced by the deadpan, a comically deployed impassive attitude. From this form of immobility, Lewis first developed a choreography for 10 dancers who remained expressively flat or dead, resisting any narrative or figurative hold. Following the pandemic, the cast was reduced to 4 performers and the performance moved towards a more traditionally theatrical presentation.

For this filmed version, the dancers are inspired by the final monologue of Macbeth and deploy a modular form in which each chapter illustrates death, stasis or emptiness. The performance is also a reflection on play, on familiarity with tragedy in black communities, on time and its loops, on touch as both an act of care and violence. Nevertheless, Ligia Lewis infuses her proposal with a good dose of humour and comedic springs, taking up the concept of corpsing – a theatrical term for involuntary laughter at a non-comical moment. The film does not so much document the interpretation of a play as the potential of a performance.

On the occasion of the spring program at Shedhalle, deader than dead will be shown for the first time as an installation taking over the main exhibition space.

Concept, direction, choreography, set design: Ligia Lewis

Film production: Reza Monahan Studio and Jim Fetterley

Director of photography: Sean Morris

Editing: Ligia Lewis and Steven Wetrich

Performance: Ligia Lewis, Jasper Marsalis, Jasmine Orpilla and Austyn Rich

Texts: Ligia Lewis, Ian Randolph, Shakespeare and Ian McKellen

Sound design: Slauson Malone, excerpts from S. McKenna

Song: Guillaume de Machaut, “Complainte: Tels rit au main qui au soir pleure (Le rem de Fortune),” ca. 1340s

Costumes: Marta Martino

Accessories: Gabrielle Curebal

deader than dead was created for Made in L.A. 2020 / Hammer Museum, with the support of Human Resources, Los Angeles

Ligia Lewis works as a choreographer and dancer. Through choreography and embodied practice, she develops expressive concepts that give form to movements, speech, affects, thoughts, relations, utterances, and the bodies that hold them. Her choreographic work slides between the familiar and the unfamiliar. Held together by the logic of interdependence, disorder, and play, she creates space(s) for the emergent and the indeterminate while tending to the mundane. In her work sonic and visual metaphors meet the body, materializing the enigmatic, the poetic, and the dissonant. Lewis’s work continues to evoke the nuances of embodiment.

Her recent performance trilogy includes Water Will (in Melody) (2018), a gothic tale set in black and white; minor matter (2016), a poetic work illuminated by red; and Sorrow Swag (2014), presented in a saturated blue. Her other works include Sensation 1/This Interior (High Line Commission, 2019); so something happened, get over it; no, nothing happened, get with it (Jaou Tunis, 2018); Melancholy: A White Mellow Drama (Flax Fahrenheit, Palais de Tokyo, 2015); $$$ (Tanz im August, 2012); and Sensation 1 (sommer.bar, Tanz im August, 2011 and Basel Liste, 2014). In 2020, Lewis produced deader than dead for Made in LA Biennial at the Hammer Museum, where Lewis created a film as a document of her latest performance piece. Her last stage work, Still Not Still (2021), is currently on tour.

Gloss

19. März bis 15. Mai

the SHED

Following her online residency on the SHED (Feb-March, 2022), Angela Goh will take over the project room at Shedhalle starting on March 19th, by sharing the result of a research process around her latest work Sky Blue Mythic (2021).

About this project, Angela Goh writes:

​​Gloss is an attempt at a speculative conservation practice surrounding my work Sky Blue Mythic.

It borrows the techniques and strategies of conservation practices in an effort to position conservation as a method which might keep an artwork alive and growing as multiple things, rather than as a method to fix it as one thing in time.

Sky Blue Mythic is a dance performance I started in 2020, finished in 2021, and will perform again soon in 2022. Re-rehearsing the work will be a bit like catching up with a friend you haven’t seen in a while—you chatter about shared experiences, and exchange new things until they also become shared and the relationship grows to encompass them. Gloss will happen while I’m in the process of this rehearsal, and as a way to continue working. It’s something to do—and by doing it the emphasis is placed on doing as a way to conserve the liveliness of something.

Gloss, as in glossary, but not in order to define something, rather to keep looking for what it might be.

Angela Goh is a dancer and choreographer. She lives and works in Sydney, and her work has toured across Australia and internationally to Europe, the UK, the USA and Asia. Her work poses possibilities for disruption and transformation inside the aesthetics and conditions of technocapitalism, planetarity, and the post-anthropocene. She has won awards: FBi Sydney Music Arts and Culture Best Artist Award 2017, the Keir Choreographic Award 2020; received fellowships and scholarships: Create NSW Emerging Fellowship 2019/20, the inaugural Sydney Dance Company x Create NSW Fellowship 2020/21, Impulstanz DanceWEB scholarship 2012; and has been artist in residence at: Cite Internationale des Arts (FR), Tanzhaus Zurich (CH), Critical Path (AU), Dance4 (UK), TPAC (TW), and Rimbun Dahan (MY) among others. Her works have been presented at SPRING Festival (NL), Baltic Circle Festival (FI), Performance Space New York/PS122 (US), Auto Italia South East (UK), Liveworks Festival (AU), Artspace Sydney (AU), Fusebox Festival (US), Arnolfini Arts Centre (UK), My Wild Flag (SE), Filmwinter Stuttgart (DE), Perth Institute of Contemporary Art (AU), Campbelltown Arts Centre (AU), the Asia-Pacific Triennial of Performing Art (AU), The Judson Church (US), among others, and presented by Galerie (int) at La Biennale de la Danse (Lyon); Jan Mot Gallery (Brussels); Dansehallerne (Copenhagen); Menagerie de Verre (Paris); Saal Biennial (Tallin); and Oslo Internasjonale Teater Festival (Oslo).

Performance Therapy (2021-ongoing)

March 19-20-26-27

Workshop Fri 25, 4-6pm (please register here)

Stand-Up performance Sat 26, 7pm (public)

“Performance Therapy is my most ambitious project yet.

If I can turn my therapy into my work, then I am my work.”

As part of Are You Coming? Krõõt Juurak will expand the research of this ongoing project taking over Shedhalle during two weekends in March. In addition to a selection of works from their repertoire to be experienced on site, on Saturday March 26th, Krõõt will turn Shedhalle into a comedy club with an original stand-up routine for a live audience. The previous day they will hold a workshop to continue asking the question, what is “Performance Therapy”?

So what is “Performance Therapy”?

“Something between performance and therapy? The opposite of performance? Failed therapy? Performance for ourselves, therapy for the audience or the other way round? Well, there’s no way to know. Anyhow, “Performance Therapy” is something we do when we are not doing something else, or in fact it’s like listening to a podcast, while doing something else.

“Performance Therapy” is an attempt to engage with these open and failed processes as both modes of resistance and ways to directly, and accidentally, address an audience.”

– Krõõt Juurak

Performance Therapy was originally commissioned by Shedhalle for the SHED and developed through weekly calls and conversation that took place throughout March – April 2021. From these conversations between Krõõt, the SHED’s programmer and producer, Michelangelo Miccolis and nick von kleist, Performance Therapy began to take shape online, later manifesting physically at Shedhalle as part of Protozone3: You’re So Busy.

Krõõt Juurak (1981, Tallinn, Estonia) is an artist, performer and lately a stand-up comedian, who studied dance and choreography at ArteZ Arnhem and Fine Arts at the Sandberg Institute, Amsterdam. Their work addresses both human and non-human audiences and is self-sabotaging by nature. Recent exhibitions and performances include the Baltic Triennial 14: The Endless Frontier, Vilnius 2021; “You’re So Busy” at Shedhalle, Zürich, 2021, 2022; “Thinking Like an Octopus”at Wilhelm-Hack-Museum, Ludwigshafen, 2021; “Art for Animals: A Perspective Change” Opelvillen Stiftung, Rüsselsheim (2020, 2021); “Cohabitation” Silent Green, Berlin, 2021 i.e. Juurak lives and works in Vienna.

Si Pudiera Desear Algo (If I Could Wish for Something)

video, color, 16:9, Spanish & Purépecha spoken, BE/FR/MX/NO, 2021, 68’

English subtitles and German transcript available

screening / on loop during all opening hours:

March 4-5-6-12-13-19-20; April 15-16-17-30 14-20h; May 1 14-18h

About this film, Dora García writes:

The inspiration and point of departure of this film is an old song, written in 1930 by German composer Friedrich Holländer: “Wenn ich mir was wünschen dürfte”. This song, translated into Spanish as “Si pudiera desear algo” (If I Could Wish for Something), has been in my memory for as long as I can remember. It expresses poetically a very complex concept: that the disappointment of women has been going on for so long, the promise made to them by the revolution has remained for so long unfulfilled, delayed, negated, that the sadness, the vulnerability derived from this feeling of abandonment has been turned into a shelter and a shield, perhaps even a sword.

In sadness, we overcome the temptation to feel victimized and instead use pain as a conduit to recognize another’s suffering, opening the possibility for an encounter with other struggles. With this in mind, I wanted to create a contemporary equivalent of the old song, that could function as a soundtrack to the incredible feminist demonstrations that have been taking place – modifying and appropriating public space and public discourse – in the city of Mexico in the last 5 years. The film follows two paths: one, a collective recollection of images and sounds from these feminist marches in Mexico City; two, the composition, recording and final performance of the film theme song by trans artist La Bruja de Texcoco.

The publication ‘If I Could Wish for Something’ is published by Idea Books.

Principal cinematography: Miriam Ortiz
Camera assistant: Fernanda Vázquez
Additional cinematography: Gisela Castillo, Lilian Cuervo, Luchadoras, Regina López, Esthel Vogrig, Liz Misterio & Una Pardo
Editing: Simon Arazi & Dora García
Editing assistant: Guillermo Mendiguren
Music: Jan Mech
Theme song: “Nostalgia” by La Bruja de Texcoco, 2021
Sound recording: Isis Puente
Sound mix and design: Laszlo Umbreit
Sound mix assistant: Luc Aureille at Le Fresnoy
Color grading: Baptiste Evrard at Le Fresnoy
Credits: Fairuz
Production: Auguste Orts, Olga Rodríguez, Estelle Benazet (Le Fresnoy) & Alaíde Castro Hernández (Antítesis Films)
Produced by: Auguste Orts & Le Fresnoy – National Studio of Contemporary Arts
With the support of: Le Fresnoy, Flanders Audiovisual Fund, Arts Council Norway, The Audio and Visual Fund, Oslo National Academy of the Arts, Norwegian Artistic Research Programme, Fotogalleriet Oslo & Netwerk Aalst

Dora García (b. 1965, Valladolid, Spain) is an artist, teacher and researcher who lives and works in Barcelona and Oslo. As an artist, she has participated in numerous international art exhibitions including Münster Skulptur Projekte (2007), Venice Biennale (2011, 2013, 2015), Sydney Biennial (2008), São Paulo Biennial (2010), Documenta 13 (2012), Gwangju Biennial (2016), osloBIENNALEN, Art Encounters Timisoara and AICHI Triennial (2019). In 2021 she developed projects in the Fotogalleriet Oslo, Netwerk Aalst, the Mattatoio di Roma, and the Colomboskope Festival in Sri Lanka. Her work is largely performative and deals with issues related to community and individuality in contemporary society, exploring the political potential of marginal positions, paying homage to eccentric characters and to antiheroes, who have often been the center of her films projects, such as The Deviant Majority (2010), The Joycean Society (2013) and Segunda Vez (2018).

SACRED

GROVE

14.12.2021 – 14.01.2022

Excerpts from Liturgy

Delayed Echo

The term yamabiko is used to describe the phenomenon of a delayed echo in mountains and valleys, and is thought to be a spirit answering. Sometimes, they’re also considered the voices of kodama, the tree spirits. In the K chi Prefecture, regardless of whether it is day or night, when a sudden dreadful voice is heard deep in the mountains, this strange phenomenon is called yamahiko.

Cleansing bells still rang in the atmosphere,

Lost on the summer path, following the sound of a faint gong on the wind, A cemetery, or ancestral mausoleum, and many tall trees.

WU YUE

The Five Great Mountains (Wu Yue) are arranged according to the #ve cardinal directions of Chinese geomancy, which considers “the centre” as a direction.

Each of the great mountains is defined by its own distinct characteristics and landscapes, from lush green forests and fragrant flowers in bloom, to winding rivers, precipitous crags, and endless steep, narrow paths. Associated with the supreme God of Heaven and the #ve main cosmic deities of Chinese traditional religion, these mountains were the subject of imperial pilgrimages by emperors throughout history.

East Great Mountain (泰山); “Tranquil Mountain” 1,545 m (5,069 ft) 36°15’N 117°06’E

West Great Mountain (華山); “Splendid Mountain” 1,997 m (6,552 ft) 34°29’N 110°05’E

South Great Mountain (衡山); “Balancing Mountain” 1,290 m (4,230 ft) 27.254798°N 112.655743°E

North Great Mountain (􏱅山); “Permanent Mountain” 2,017 m (6,617 ft) 39°40’26’’N 113°44’08’’E

Centre Great Mountain (嵩山); “Lofty Mountain” 1,494 m (4,902 ft) 34°29’5’’N 112°57’37’’E

Images courtesy of the artist

Liturgy is published by Primary Information.

Co-Published with PAN.

Managing Editors: James Hoff and Bill Kouligas

Designers: NMR

Copy Editor: Allison Dubinsky

Please see link below for more information.

SACRED GROVE

14.12.2021 – 14.01.2022

‘Sacred Grove’ was recorded live on 28 October 2021 in Piazza Della Genga in Spoleto, Italy as part of a multi-media installation for one night only. Using field recordings collected across month around the region, the piece features tri-cultural references to pagan belief through nature and the sound of insects, bees, water, air, as well as moments of a sermon in the Basilica of Assisi, Convento di Sant’Anna, and a broken music box shamisen and Tibetan tingsha bells used in prayers in rituals from the private collection of worldly instruments borrowed from La Mama Umbria.

Limited Edition of 50 cassette tapes with individual hand-drawn talismans will be released in Spring 2022.

Special thanks to Mahler Lewitt Studio Residency, La Mama Umbria & Shedhalle

White and Black, Things and Rituals

Installation, 2021

Glazed clay and paper

Alicia Velázquez’s installation is an invitation to savor and share a metaphorical meal. Crafted in ceramic, eight “dishes” compose a delicious visual and haptic “meal” that is laid out on a large table. The meal represents the conclusion of her six-month project “White and Black, Things and Rituals,” which explores themes of togetherness and belonging. Each of the eight “dishes” has been co-prepared in intimate encounters with eight Spanish women of different ages, backgrounds, and arrival years in Zurich. During these encounters, each woman was invited to prepare a “meal” representative of her self by using clay as her medium. Migrant misinterpretations, cultural dissonances, daily stories, memories, personality traits, as well as past, present, and future are thus inscribed in these cooperative ceramic objects.

The installation is exhibited following the event “White, Black, and Things,” which takes place on December 5th as part of Club La Fafa’s Diaspora Talk. “White, Black, and Things” invites the participating women, together with the audience, to collectively activate the installation during an open conversation.

Through its exploration of private and public, both the project and event aim to connect individual and participatory rituals, focusing on the inner stories that express our common human foundations beyond culture, gender, race, profession, or social status.

Supported by: Covid-19 Stipendium der Stadt Zürich Kultur, Kanton Zürich Bildende Künste

Alicia Velázquez’s work explores intimacy and belonging, aspects of time, and the convergence of internal and external realities by using a fluid variety of media. Her ritualistic performances and installations act as scaffolds where humans, objects, lines, and colors are invited to construct and experience moments of togetherness. With recurrent inquiries into her own as well as others’ timely identity, Velázquez performs ritualistic, years-long repetitive actions, which are often interwoven with her personal, intimate routines.

Alicia Velázquez studied architecture at the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid. After her graduation she worked and lived in New York City, Amsterdam, Barcelona, and Madrid before eventually moving to Zurich in 2013. As an independent designer, Velázquez works across cultures, teams, disciplines, and media, including graphic design, scenography, interiors, and installations. In 2015, she received the ADAPTr Marie Curie European grant for a residency period in Brussels (1,5 years), during which she developed her first performances.

Co–Listening Session #1: Tune in

19.12. 14h-16h

The digital_analogue_lab* is dedicated for the first time to sound research: we open the Shedhalle for a co-listening session. All visitors are invited to bring small sound fragments with them. Everyday noises, songs, sounds, noise, music – everything is welcome!

Together we will listen to the audio pieces from the personal sound archives and question them: What does home sound like? What do favourite places sound like? What creates a resonance and what doesn’t? Why do I particularly like this particular sound? And what does the breath behind our corona masks actually sound like?

The material we bring with us weaves itself into a shimmering tapestry of sound. We linger listening to original sounds, rhythms and resonances. Closeness and community develop among people with the most diverse backgrounds and life stories.

*In the digital_analogue_lab, people with and without refugee biographies research hybrid narratives together with guest artists. Further listening sessions at different locations are planned.

“Listen to everything all the time, and remind yourself when you are not listening.

Don’t tune out.” Pauline Oliveros

In German and English

Participants: Abdirahman, Abdihakin, Ashu, Reza, Senait, Suad, Soraya, Aurora

Direction, initiator, hosting: Iva Sanjek

Audio design: Kaspar König

Consulting: Kay Zhang

Vernissage Sun 12.12.21 14:00 – 15:00

Multimedia Installation, 2021

Selin Civi, Carolina Palos Mas und Sofia Uribe Gomez

“The old industrial building Oerlikon Nord A, better known as ONA is the home of parts of the Department of Architecture D-ARCH at ETH Zurich. The facility functions also as the Logistic Center of ETH, responsable for coordinating the post service and storing office materials of the whole university. The four-story building hosts other non-university related offices, like caterings and travel agencies. A multi-layer environment is created through its very different users and time presences.” (excerpt of the booklet «ONA Afterhours»)

«ONA Afterhours» is a semester project by the ETH students Selin Civi, Carolina Palos Mas and Sofia Uribe Gomez developed as part of the Design in Dialog Lab of the Architecture department.

«ONA Afterhours» is a pointed and consequential examination of the cleaning staff’s invisibility at the ETH’s ONA building in Oerlikon. It leads the students to consider a series of spatial interventions and practices onsite as “a collection of attempts to provoke a better work environment for everybody.”

“In our engagement to start a relationship with the cleaning staff we became aware of the symbiotic relationship between us. Neither of the groups could use the building without the other. We benefit and can learn from each other. However, the fragility of the social structure and the working time differences hide this work and its workers.” (excerpt of the booklet «ONA Afterhours»)

One such practice consists in inviting students to place their chair on their desk table at the end of the day, enabling the cleaning staff to move more freely and perform their job more easily. The aim is to make the practice a habit of the buildings users that exceed the duration and scope of a semester project.

The proposed interventions and practices, as well as the views of the cleaning staff back onto the students’ usage are documented and gathered in a book. For the exhibition at Shedhalle, the three students expand «ONA Afterhours» into a multimedia installation involving the said practice, the mentioned book and a short video documentation.

«Young Carpet Stories»

Sun 12.12.21 13:00 – 14:00

This open conversation brings together three young voices who, from different perspectives, share stories about their carpets.

Tabea Meienhofer is a student at the Department of Architecture at ETH. As part of the Newrope Design in Dialog Lab, she is developing a semester-long project consisting of interventions that utilize a blue carpet and invite people to come together and exchange ideas with one another. She calls said carpet her “friend” who accompanies her as she explores the urban landscape. Different environments and occasions thus become a field of experimentation for both the unraveling of the carpet and the unpredictable.

Club La Fafa is a collective of cultural workers as well as people from different professions, all with migration and refugee experience. of cultural workers as well as people from various professions, all with migration and refugee experiences. They meet regularly at various locations throughout the city to exchange questions, experiences and practical knowledge. In addition to culinary delights, they are always accompanied by one or, in the best case, several carpets.

The members of the group include Rahimullah Mohammadi and Hicham El Khemisi, two young people from Afghanistan and Algeria, respectively. Growing up, they have been surrounded by different stories about rugs. Rahimullah, like many Afghans, has several carpet weavers in his family. Since men often deny their spouses to work beyond the house, it is mostly women who weave these coveted and expensive carpets at home, which take about six months to make.

Talk in German (with translation from French to German)
With: Hicham El Khemisi, Tabea Meienhofer, and Rahimullah Mohammadi

This event is part of Future Structures, a collaboration between ETH Newrope and Open Futures
With the generous support of: Georg und Bertha Schwyzer-Winiker-Stiftung

Inclusion makes Architecture / «Methodologycafé»

Saturday, 27.11.2021, 14 – 17h

The «Methodologycafé» is a saturday-afternoon workshop open to everyone in which Architecture for Refugees would like to present the «Inclusion makes Architecture» project and we will reflect together on Inclusion.

Architecture for Refugees SWITZERLAND is a non-profit association working for better inclusion of refugees, focussing on architectural and urban projects.
Through the project «Inclusion makes Architecture» they are building a database of best practices, analyzing projects carried out by selected organizations working with refugees. For this, they have developed a spider diagram. The latter enables them to objectively compare the subjective experiences of projects. In order to do that, they have defined some characteristics of inclusion, such as togetherness, interaction, identity, accessibility, equality and diversity. The final aim is to reflect on the projects and identify future development.

The workshop will start with a Community Lunch to get to know each other. Then, Architecture for Refugees CH will present the «Inclusion makes Architecture» project: explaining the methodology, reflecting on the process of «Inclusion makes Architecture», and presenting the first results.

Guests are welcome to present their project to start an open and critical discussion and fill in the spider diagram.

The Methodologycafé takes place in English and German in the Community Pavilion at Shedhalle.

«Inclusion makes Architecture» is funded by Pro Helvetia, Swiss Arts Council. The Community Pavilion is a project by the two associations Architecture for Refugees SCHWEIZ and ExpoTranskultur

«Tropes of Submerged Breathing»

Multimedia Installation, 2021

The installation creates organs for an aquatic future through the activities of cutting, sewing and attaching to bodies seen on screens of submerged mobile phones. What would it be like to imagine yourself as an inhabitant of the many places in the world that will be submerged due to rising sea levels caused by global warming?

In the current human incarnation, we can only visit the underwater world, which is part of our own evolutionary history, for a short time. This inadequacy is the starting point of a conversation between the two artists that can be heard through headphones. The themes touched on in the conversation, such as race, class, gender and identity, materialise in the activity of sewing.

Palm leaves cut into gills, the breathing organ of fish, are sewn into a three-dimensional object. In this way, the artists open up a reference space to the Bay of Bengal, which extends over large parts of Bangladesh and India. According to climate forecasts, it will be completely flooded by 2050 and thousands of people are already forced to migrate. Many seek a livelihood in Dhaka, the capital of the textile industry, under the most precarious and, this is the provocative claim of the artists, at the same time more-than-human conditions: If the people of the Bay of Bengal had the knowledge and the means to make gills themselves, they would not have to leave their land and the land of their ancestors in the event of a flood. The act of gill-sewing thus challenges the undermining of the agency and resilience of the people most at risk from climate catastrophe, people who cannot be separated from the ecosystem in which they live.

In the context of Open Futures’ exhibition “Collective Resonance” at the Shedhalle, this panel event takes up questions that are central to artistic production and its conditions in relation to sustainability.

Together with experts at the interface of visual arts and theater, we will look into an open future and the background of common practices.

What is the meaning of internationality in different contexts and what is its underlying necessity? Is there a paradigm shift because of the climate change? Is the post-pandemic reluctance to travel about to end? Do all participants in the production chain deserve a fair wage?

Program

19h Welcome and introduction by

Monica Ursina Jäger (artist, Visarte Zürich board) and Isabelle Vuong (curator of the exhibition and initiator of Open Futures)

19.15h Panel discussion with:

Ramaya Tegegne (artist, Wages For Wages Against), Diana Rojas-Feile (director/performer, Fairspec), Nicolas Galeazzi (Performer/Actor, SOTA Arts), Moderation: Anke Hoffmann (cultural scientist, curator)

20.30h Apéro

In English and German

In collaboration with Open Futures and the Shedhalle Zürich, with the kind support of the Canton of Zurich

Welcome to the Open Futures Sustainable Sunday Market!

With sales and information booths as well as small informative events and workshops by: Nosweatshop, basimil, the Preserving Library, grassrooted, Tauschen Am Fluss, Hazelburger, ZeroWaste, SocialFabric, EmpathieStadt, Left Bank of the Lake for All, Ladencafé FOIFI, and more.

Open Futures is dedicated to sustainability in its social-cultural-ecological dimensions, and in this context we would like to use the Sustainable Sunday Market to create an exchange between sustainable initiatives and the public in and around the Shedhalle.

We have invited social-ecological, sustainable stores, initiatives, associations, and individuals to come together in the Shedhalle – to provide an informative and yet relaxed Sunday get-together for interested people, Sunday strollers, people from the surrounding area, and those who have traveled to the Shedhalle.

Among others with the cooperative cheese dairy “basimil” and the burgers gone nuts of “Hazelburger” there are sustainable food options, stands of “SocialFabric”, “nosweatshop”, “Tauschen am Fluss” or “EmpathieStadt” offer suggestions on how we can change our (consumer) behavior.

Parallel to the sales and information booths, informative events and small workshops will take place between 12 noon and 5 pm:

If you like, you can become part of the Food Movement around the “Preserving Library” and make vegetable broth from kitchen scraps you brought along!

“Linkes Seeufer für alle” and the store café “FOIFI” inform about themselves as initiatives, and with “grassrooted” you can learn how food prices are created and solidary consumption can look like.

There will also be second-hand stands by and for everyone! Bring your stuff, we have the space and tables! Registration until 8.11.2021 to moritz@openfutures.ch

Starting at 5:30pm, Club La Fafa invites you to Diaspora Talk #1 hosted by Yaqoob Attal. Come by and join, discuss and participate!

The Sustainable Sunday Market will take place during the ongoing exhibition operation of the Shedhalle, so you can visit both the Sunday Market and the exhibition “Collective Resonance”

Partner: Transition Zurich

Through “Can the Sun Lie?” artist Susan Schuppli explores how objects and materials can serve as material and non-human witnesses.

“Can the sun lie?” asked a US court in 1886 when reflecting upon the probative value of new forms of technical evidence, specifically photographs and film. This now historic question was conceptually reanimated when indigenous people in the Canadian north made the public claim that the Arctic sun is setting many kilometres further west—an assertion since corroborated by scientists studying the changing optics of polar ice due to thermal inversions and global warming. The video sets out to explore the emergence of a new visual regime brought about by climate change as well as the dispute between experiential knowledge and scientific expertise that subsequently arose at COP15 with regards to this solar dispute.

In her work, the English artist and author Susan Schuppli explores how objects and materials can serve as witnesses. She explores the extent to which these non-human witnesses can make objective statements of historical events. In her current research and artistic work, Schuppli builds on these ideas. In doing so, she explores how transformations brought about by global warming can generate new forms of material evidence.

Click here to see an excerpt of the video “Can the Sun Lie?”

Susan Schuppli is Reader and Director of the Centre for Research Architecture, Goldsmiths where she is also an affiliate artist-researcher and Board Chair of Forensic Architecture. She explores how materials and objects enter the public discourse as non-human witnesses to historical events such as political violence, ethnic conflict and war crimes. Currently, she is investigating how changes brought about by global warming are producing new kinds of evidence. Her focus is on ice core research and the politics of cold. She lives in the United Kingdom. susanschuppli.com

In “RETE MIRABILE (counter-current)” biological bodies, fantastic figures and points of light flow together. The work is based on the idea that dynamic movement serves as a prerequisite for an ecosystem to exist as such.

In her work “RETE MIRABILE (counter-current)” Zurich-based artist Monica Ursina Jäger creates a multi-layered environment that appears detached from space and time. In the 7-minute video, biological bodies, fantastic figures and points of light flow together. The images are visually reminiscent of the optical effect created by a kaleidoscope. “RETE MIRABILE (counter-current)” raises questions about the interplay between organic and inorganic bodies. The artist focuses on the forces and counter-forces produced by these different bodies, as well as the currents to which the bodies are exposed. Through the work, it becomes clear that Jäger sees dynamic movement as a prerequisite for a system to exist as such. She is concerned with questioning the resilience of an intact ecosystem and making visitors aware of the vulnerability of our environment. Through the calm flow of movement, the camera work, and the accompanying music, Jäger creates a meditative character in her work.

Click here to see the video in full length.

On 11.11. at 18:30 the Research Talk “Fluide Resonanzen” will take place at Tanzhaus Zürich in the framework of Open Futures. This open conversation bringst together Monica Ursina Jäger with Lucia Gugerli (dance collective The Field, Tanzhaus Zürich) and Raphael Portmann (climate scientist at ETH).

Monica Ursina Jäger lives and works in Zurich and London. Her artistic work is characterized by a multidisciplinary reflection of spatial, landscape and architectural concepts. In drawings and installations she investigates how mechanisms of densification and interpenetration, of co-existence and co-habitation occur in living spaces; and subsequently, in what way this also shapes the imagination and the effective handling of landscape and urban development, nature and architecture. Interacting between the intuitive, the narrative, and the factual, the artist explores transformational processes of post-natural landscapes, natural resources, utopias, and dystopias, projecting her findings directly into the crises of the Anthropocene. Jäger studied at Goldsmith College in London until 2008. In 2007 she received the Swiss Art Award and had a solo exhibition at the Kunstmuseum Thun in 2008. www.muj.ch

Installation

& Diaspora Talks (scroll down for more info)

How do I spend my time and where can I go? How do I get in contact with Swiss people? How can I not be too much? How can cooperation between refugees and minority people become a serious question? These and more questions are asked in the exhibition by Club La Fafa.

Club La Fafa (French for family) brings together cultural workers and people from different professions, with and without refugee and migrant backgrounds and with diverse everyday knowledge. Club La Fafa is a social “space” in which knowledge can be exchanged, relationships forged, and personal closeness and sympathy created. Based on this, Club La Fafa sets a sign against the adversities of current migration policies and searches for possible forms of community. During two years, the members of the club have come into an exchange with new arrivals in Switzerland in transit centers and in many personal conversations. In these exchanges, they have explored the personal structural challenges these people face. The participants of Club La Fafa then compiled these realities in the form of questions. Club La Fafa is now showing a selection of these questions in the exhibition and invites all interested parties to enter into an exchange together.

These questions are printed on textile material and hung on the metallic structures of the former silk factory. Most of these questions depend on an ever-changing migration policy and will probably never find a definitive answer. For the ability to project oneself into a future is always dependent on a social, as well as symbolic, recognition. These questions will basically shape the biographies of those affected for a lifetime.

The questions in “Where to belong” serve as an invitation to four Diaspora Talks, which will take place on four Sundays in the Shedhalle. In the context of Open Futures, Club La Fafa invites you on Saturday, November 20th at the “Salon Fütür” in the Gessnerallee to eat together and talk about our ideas of the future.

Club La Fafa invites you: Diaspora Talks for all

The Diaspora Talks combine the personal experiences of refugees, migrants and immigrants with overarching questions about community and society. Together with invited guests, we seek a dialogue in the “Diaspora Talks” that challenge the change of one’s own perspective and open up new perspectives on the topics and fields of action of migration and flight.

14.11. 17:30 Diaspora Talk #1 hosted by Yaqoob Attal

Yaqoob Attal studied political science and economics in Pakistan and has been living in Switzerland for two years. In Afganistan, he worked for almost five years as a translator for USAID, the US State Department, the US Army and the International Rescue Committee, as well as for several other local NGOs. In the Diaspora Talk he will talk about life in Afganistan and his situation in Switzerland.

21.11.21, 14:00 Diaspora Talk #2 hosted by Füsun Ipek

Performer, artist, designer and actvist Füsun Ipek knits while talking about her own migrant entanglements, she tells stories in which she interweaves the personal with the social and continues to spin the threads together with the audience. The talk will be in German.

28.11.21, 14:00 Diaspora Talk #3 hosted by Rada Leu & Jana Vanecek

The socio-economic and political characteristics of the former “Eastern Bloc” don’t really fit into the binary concept of Global North and Global South. Too rich to be part of the global South and at the same time too poor to be considered part of the global North. Too powerful to be called the periphery, but also too weak to represent the center. Using short text excerpts and visuals, we will attempt to explore the “Global East” together. There will be tea, homemade slivovice and a delicious buffet. The talk will take place in English, French, German, Czech, Russian and Bulgarian.

5.12.21, 14:00 Diaspora Talk #4 hosted by Alicia Velazquez

Exploring the theme of togetherness through intimate, performative encounters with Spanish migrant women. Artist Alicia Velazquez’s event will express and interpret personal narratives during and after the making of ceramic objects. The goal is to connect through different levels of ritual, from private to public, with the inner stories that express our common human foundations beyond culture, gender, race, profession or social status. The talk will take place in Spanish, English and German.

Club La Fafa

Founded on the occasion of the “Refaire Le Monde” (2018) exhibition at Helmhaus Zurich, Club La Fafa (French for family) brings together people with and without migration and/or refugee experience and diverse everyday knowledge. Along the line of friendship, love, care and empathy, they are looking for common interests and activity opportunities that can enable us to think and become sensitive to each other in a (post)migrant society.

Club La Fafa: Raphael Perret, media artist, long-term research project on informal e-waste recycling in India; Nadja Baldini, curator and art mediator, collaboration with vocational schools and art institutions, with a lot of experience in creating inclusive processes; Jana Vanecek, artist cultural scientist, transdisciplinarity, great methodological knowledge when it comes to participatory projects; Jawed Stanikzai, in Switzerland for 5 years, background and work in retail, advising Afghan community in Zurich; Rahimullah Mohammadi, came to Switzerland as a minor, meanwhile an apprenticeship as a network electrician and a great knowledge in youth issues; Hicham El Khemisi, all-rounder, with great everyday knowledge and experience and Ali Omar, in Switzerland for 6 years, working in care, advocates for equality and rights of POC.

For each project, Club La Fafa collaborates with other associates. In the framework of Open Future these are: Yaqoob Attal, Füsun Ipek, Rada Leu and Alicia Velasquez.

With “Coal, Earth, Snow or a Similar Substance,” artist Tarik Hayward creates a monumental and site-specific installation. His work, a three-tiered structure, can be seen as a kind of crane, with the help of which the artist and his helpers will carry several tons of earth step by step to the top of the installation.

With “Coal, Earth, Snow or a Similar Substance”, the Vaudois artist Tarik Hayward creates a monumental and site-specific installation. A three-tiered structure with a total height of five meters, it is covered with a white tarpaulin – a discreet reference to the history of the Red Factory. The vertical distance between the floors corresponds to the height from which a person can throw a shovel of earth. At the foot of the work there are three tons of earth, which must be brought to the top of the installation by muscle power. The sculpture can be seen as a rudimentary crane. It thus vacillates between nostalgia for a more rudimentary life and anticipation of future times in a world reduced to its essentials.

In his artistic practice, Hayward questions the status and function of work in contemporary society. His artistic practice is a critique of exploitation by the neoliberal market, including the art market. Hayward is interested in the idea of work as a primitive gesture of survival. For work as action, gives him the possibility to go beyond political and ecological problems. For Hayward, sustainability is a collective, mutual and supportive relationship between people and their environment. His work does not pursue a specific goal, but rather reflects an openness and attentiveness to the here and now.

During his two-week research phase at the Shedhalle, the artist invites the public to participate in two public moments. The first public moment is a DIY workshop, as Hayward invites us to make double-paned windows out of recycled car windows. Besides the survival aspect, these car remnants pose fundamental questions for Hayward about Fordism, mobility, and the big lie of individual freedom. The second moment relates to one of his works. “Pure Life” (2019) is named after a water from a well-known Swiss multinational company and was extracted from pig’s blood. Hayward will reproduce this exact moment of water extraction for an interested audience at the Shedhalle on December 5. This research moment will also be accompanied by an online reading or intervention by Ariana Reines (to be confirmed), with whom Hayward has already collaborated for the Pro Helvetia Cahier d’artiste publication.

Tarik Hayward has been working as a freelance artist since 2012, essentially using physical principles as assemblages, combined with the forces of cohesion and incoherence between objects and within materials and structures. He sees his work as “a series of technical experiments carried out in the urgency of an undetermined need.” One thinks of countries at war, in the process of development or reconstruction after a disaster, the making of certain community utopias, the American deserts, even backyards of thousands of obsessive tinkerers who show their results on YouTube. Tarik Hayward is interested in the material organization of crisis situations, be they economic, ecological or personal: “I work with ruins. Ruins of modernism and minimal art, maybe the ruins of craft, of a certain economic model, or simply the ruins of my childhood and lost playground.” In 2019, his monograph Cahier d’artiste/Pro Helvetia was published and he was exhibited in the Swiss Art Awards in 2015 and 2018. Hayward lives in Lausanne and Vallée de Joux.

Multimedia installation (2013/2021)

& 2 public Research-Moments 20.11. 14-16h/21.11. 18-19h (for more info scroll down)

In “A Fabric in Turkey Red” (Karlsruhe, 2020) Romy Rüegger links questions about the conditions of factory work to the colonial legacy of early rural-alpine textile industries in Glarus, placing them in the context of global colonial and postcolonial economies of trade and knowledge. The bright red printed cotton track, imprinted with images and texts from her research, allude to early “treadmills” and factory processes.

Applied as a foil is a print motif described as a “Turkish red cloth with a Far Eastern pattern”, which the artist understands as one of many actors and voices in her research. The dating and location of the motif coincides with the first factory workers’ strike in Europe, which took place in Glarus in 1837. The workers – according to the statistics, it was mainly women and children – protested against the introduction of fixed working hours, which made it impossible for them to maintain their routines and sometimes unpredictable events of reproduction, stable and home work, which were linked to daylight and the seasons. The work sees itself as a feminist reading of this strike.

Also to be heard is a sound archaeology in which Don’t DJ interprets the bpm data Romy Rüegger found on the work processes in the Glarus textile factories, at the artist’s invitation for the exhibition hall (Romy Rüegger, “The Moving Body, The Listening Body, Moving through Wires of Wind”, Karlsruhe 2020), understanding the exhibition space as a sound body and non-responsive echo chamber.

Public research moments: 20.11. 14-16h/21.11. 18-19h

During her two-week research phase, Romy will begin a new, still completely open-ended research under the working title “Silk Roads”. The artist will visit places of urban and rural, historical and current silk production, mulberry farmers, archives, people and places of related colonial legacies and presences. There will be two public research moments during these two weeks:

On Saturday November 20, Rüegger will experiment with Shedhalle as a sound and echo space together with Alexander Tuchaček.

On Sunday November 21, Rüegger will report on her research regarding textile- and silk-production.

Supported by: Canton Zurich Fine Arts, Ernst Göhner Foundation, Ernst & Olga Gubler-Hablützel Foundation, Erna and Curt Burgauer Foundation.

Romy Rüegger is a visual artist. Her installations, performances, audio works and texts deal with questions of non-linear time, body and embodiment, social spaces and natural resources, and voids and representation in the narratives and readings of our present. Language, montage, and reduction are aesthetic devices she uses to populate settings for performances with voices, props, visual sketches, and also reconstructions of architectural and scenic elements. From this composition, artistic spaces emerge that deal with the language of things and words and their social spaces. Romy Rüegger has taught performance and visual arts at art schools in Berlin, Munich, Zurich and Milan. In 2018, ten of her performance scripts were published in an artist monograph by Archive Books in Berlin. In 2018, she was also a fellow at Gasworks in London. In 2020 to 2021, her current works were shown in a comprehensive solo exhibition at the Badischer Kunstverein in Karlsruhe. In 2021 she is a member of the jury of the Swiss Performance Prize. She lives and works in Zurich and Berlin. www.farfar.ch

Babel Tower

coming October 2021

x Kunsthalle Osnabrück

supported by fmac Genève

A hymn to communication, sharing and nature. Röthlisberger’s tower is made of seven houses; The factory, the church, the school, the Bloc, the prison, the club and the grave. All are superimposed to form a tower of aromatic and medicinal gardens.

This rehabilitation of the Babel Tower is a pretext to have discussion over herbal tea, to meditate and to heal. Evacuate the pressure of the city, the oppressions of the patriarchy, in a calm, healthy and free environment in order to wake up the witch, hiding in all of us.

The artist, poet and sculptor, Sabrina Röthlisberger Belkacem, lives and works between Geneva and Paris. Her videos, performances, installations and texts address the links between science and death, between power and survival, while combining references to the history of art, cinema and allusions to her own social identity and spirituality.

Her works have been presented at the Musée d’Art Moderne d’Oran in Algeria, at the Urbaines de Lausanne, at the Kunstmuseum in Bern, at the Kunstmuseum in Thun, at 186f Kepler, a curatorial project by Jeanne Graff in New York and at the Gaudel gallery in Stampa in Paris, among others.

This year, Röthlisberger presented her first institutional solo exhibition, Sabbatum fever at the Kunsthalle Osnabrück in Germany, in the form of a double exhibition, which also takes place in Shedhalle Zurich, Switzerland. She is also preparing her first medium-length film, Santa sangre from her work Le sang, shot in the Vosges. In 2020, thanks to her collection of poems Le sang, Sabrina Röthlisberger performed her work of the same name between the Center d’Art Contemporain in Geneva, Decoratelier in Brussels, Arsenic in Lausanne and Shedhalle in Zürich.

In 2019, she won the Aeschlimann-Corti Grant, the BNP New HEAD Prize, nominated for the Federal Art Prize and got the Swiss Institute Residency, in New York, where she engages in a curatorial practice. In her apartment she offers a program of exhibitions and events in collaboration with artists such as Ada O’Higgins (NYC), Sadaf H Nava (NYC), Lisa Signorini (F), Julien Ceccaldi (NYC), Marcel Alcalá (LA), Gaia Vincensini (CH), Dese (NYC), Aran Shanmugaratna (NYC) or the poet Roger Van Voorhees (NYC).

The Resto Diaspo

The Resto Diaspo was a restaurant located in Zurich’s industrial district. It was opened in 1963 by community activists of the global majority and served as a meeting place for the diaspora community of the area, as well as for radicals, filmmakers, poets and musicians. In the beginning of the Protozone4, the installation took up the ritualized sociality of the restaurant and was supposed to serve as a setting in which the spirit of Resto Diaspo should have come to life. But the Resto closed unexpectedly and is still facing the circumstances that led to this step.

The original idea was to redistribute power and the attention given to an exhibition, but we are now working on the question of why has redistributing failed in our case? How are we reproducing what we experience systemically as BIPoC towards other BIPoC? How can we support making the urgency of the statements and the importance of the voices of those who are systematically invisibilized visible?

In this exhibition within the exhibition, the Resto Diaspo installation displays the works of the collaborating artists Rosida Koyuncu, Meloe Gennai and Roble / RO X.

Rosida Koyuncu, Cabin19Bis – Sans Frontières (2019), Video (11:17 min)

(Translated from Turkish) Every year in Geneva changing rooms at the lake in the Bains des Pâquis are decorated by artists. The project starts on the 1st of December and one cabin is opened every day. This year there are 24 cabins in total and I designed the 19th one around the theme “Sans Frontières”. On display are photos and stories of people whose bodies have been found or not, and the objects that remember those who wanted to go to Europe and lost their lives in the waters of the Aegean.

They say that there is no place for refugees in Switzerland and send them to underground camps. I put up a photo showing the name of a big shopping center in Geneva (Balexert). Everyone knows this place, but no one knows that there is an underground camp underneath. After reading the description under the photo, the visitors watch the video showing the underground camps. The video is called “Underground”. When asked what was underground, everyone answers “A parking garage” and once it becomes clear what is really underneath the shopping center, they are surprised.

The day my cabin was opened, I wrapped my body in pantyhose and rubbed it with clay. Afterwards, I walked through the people to the cabin and held a ceremony. The tights and clay on my body symbolized my boundaries and I blew them open. During the perfomance I was accompanied by a frame drum and loud shouts and so I walked to the water.

Rosida Koyuncu, Life isn’t a quiet river | Zehra Doğan, Video (13:12 min)

“Life isn’t a quiet river” is a video art piece by Kurdish exiled artist and journalist Zehra Doğan, exploring the kindness of solidarity in times of political uncertainty.

In 2016 Doğan became a political prisoner who was detained for a drawing. Her artwork depicting the destruction of the majority-Kurdish town of Nusaybin and her subsequent arrest went on to spark a world wide discussion on the importance of freedom of expression. The short film draws upon the power of writing and sees Doğan reflect on the compassion shown by supporters around the world who wrote letters to her during her 600 day imprisonment. It was filmed in the summer of 2020 in collaboration with many of Doğan’s exiled artist friends as they travelled across Europe.

Meloe Gennai, Emmanuel Yoro – queer colonialism (2021), 6 graphic poetry posters

Conceived during a period of self-realization and identity building around Afro-descendant trans-identity and autistic cultures, “queer colonialism”, a text conceived and created by Meloe, allows the author to name current masquaradas: the appropriation of trans cultures by (queer) cisgender people; and the manifestations of denial of their whiteness by white queer and trans people through the emphasis of their “minority” identities; and the consequent exploitation and endangerment of racialized trans bodies. A pamphlet, a manifestation of self-determined existence, this text is reinforced by the collaboration with Emmanuel Yoro. Indeed, the latter is a manifestation of a logic of reflection on the individual intersections and community bonds that are created despite the perpetuation of oppressive and exploitative white and/or cisgender supremacist logics. Emmanuel Yoro’s creation is an encounter with the text, in which the artist recognises himself.

Collective X – blackity black black (2020), poetry zine in collaboration with Meloe Gennai, Deborah Macauley, Cassandra Press, Luma Westbau

Blackity Black Black is a fanzine showing the poetry of Kami, Titilayo Adebayo, Jean F., Meloe Gennai and Marilyn Umurungi, Emmanuel Yoro and Yara Dulac Gisler. Responding to the expressed desire of the african-american artist Kandis Williams and Cassandra Press to publish local black poets, Deborah MacCauley and Joëlle Gbeassor commissioned Collective X (IG: _x-collective_x_) and Meloe Gennai to make this possible. The name was chosen from Titilayo’s poem of the same name. The art space Luma Westbau provided support and Emmanuel Yoro contributed his knowledge of design and collage art to create this platform of gifted young black queer poets.

Roble / RO X – NASAB (2021), Video (18:22 min)

We talk about our situation as Illegal Immigrants in the repatriation center every day because it is the life we live, the hardship we endure on a daily basis. Sometimes it makes us laugh, sometimes it makes us sad. Often it depresses us and gives us an impotent feeling of emptiness; a community of common destiny without hope or future, a group of people without any real meaning or purpose in life.

Mollusk Solidarity

Ceylan Öztrük creates alternatives and variations as art works to the space of Shedhalle. She works on the new possibilities on re-creating and re-narrating the solid structures of the architecture and the institution, contextually and ideally.

One of her interventions in the space is a silicone replica-sculpture of Shedhalle columns, which stays among other columns, that cannot erect properly. The work proposes a possible softness to the architecture and offers a new set up to the potent structure of the concept. Among the rest of the columns, this column will propose to conduct a criticism towards the potent and unbendable structures by its softness. Besides this work, Öztrük also creates mould work by interfering the big white walls of Shedhalle. While these moulds represent a rottenness of a structure, it is actually another life that grows in. These moulds challenge the bright massive whiteness of the so-called white cube.

With the soft column and moulded walls Ceylan Öztrük creates a scene in Shedhalle, produces an extra worldling by bringing alternatives to the space.

Ceylan Öztrük is an artist lives and works in Zürich. She completed her practice-based PhD (2016) in Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University (Istanbul) that she initiated her subject in Vienna in Academy of Fine Arts on Post Conceptual Art Practices in 2014. She received her graduate (MFA-2011) and undergraduate (BFA-2006) degrees from the Fine Arts Faculty at Anadolu University. Some of her exhibitions and performances are Orientalien, Gessnerallee Theatre, Zürich (2020); Am a Mollusk, too; re/producing tangents, Longtang, Zürich (2020), IV. Berliner Herbstsalon, Berlin (2019); Oriental Demo, My Wild Flag Festival, Stockholm (2019), Building Poems, 1.1, Basel (2018); Speculative Domestics: Ai (Artificial Intimacy) Showroom, Alienze, Lausanne (2019); Call me Venus, Mars, Istanbul (2016).

@aevtarperform

Selection of Instagram augmented reality filters and story highlights 2017–ongoing

x Camp Fires

On Instagram, under the pseudonym “aevtarperform,” Cibelle Cavalli Bastos exhibits, documents, and comments on their experience as a queer, non-binary artist, signer, and performer. Through daily stories, live videos, and publications on their feed, they share their everyday life with their audience, and reflect on the struggle for recognition, for themselves and their community. These contents deal with themes such as the body in relation to a patriarchal, capitalist, ableist, and ageist society, the formatting of the gaze through a binary conception of gender, and the need to de-program and escape from our mental and cultural constructions of the notion of identity. As an expansion of their work on social media, Cavalli Bastos began to create AR filters for Instagram that encourage her audience to confront these issues. In one such filter, they propose a virtual face tattoo of “They/Them,” with one of these words under each eye, ironizing the incomprehensible difficulty that people have in respecting the use of pronouns chosen by non-binaries by putting it directly on the face. It could be said that their filters counteract the narcissistic resource of selfie to turn it into a dissident therapeutic tool; at the same time, it is through selfies that so much of our public identity is understood, absorbed, questioned, and exonerated. Cavalli Bastos’s Instagram stories’ archive is visible on a phone in the exhibition while QR codes scattered in and around the exhibition’s venues allow the audience and passersby to access a selection of face filters.

This artwork is presented at Shedhalle as part of the exhibition CAMP FIRES curated by Simon W Marin and Violeta Mansilla which is taking place at Last Tango, Zurich and co-hosted by Shedhalle and Tanzhaus Zürich.

Cibelle Cavalli Bastos (b. 1978 in São Paulo, lives in Berlin) is an artist, musician, performer, independent researcher, and activist. They graduated in 2015 from the Royal College of Art, London. Under the name “Cibelle,” Cavalli Bastos released four music albums with Crammed Discs. Among others, they have performed and presented work at Martin Gropius Bau, Berlin; Volksbühne, Berlin; ICA, London; MASP, São Paulo; Carnegie Hall, New York; LCCA, Riga; CAC Wilfredo Lam, Havanna; Steirischer Herbst, Graz; MdbK Leipzig; and collaborated with the 28th and the 31st São Paulo Biennial.

Ex Nilalang (From Creature ~From Creation)

x Camp Fires

Bhenji Ra and Justin Shoulder founded the collective Club Ate in 2014. Both artists belong to the Filipino diaspora living in Australia and navigate between the worlds of performance, dance, and contemporary art, working closely with their queer and diasporic communities. Through their collaboration as Club Ate, Ra and Shoulder blend their respective approaches with social and engaged practices by creating artworks in an institutional context as well as events such as the queer Sissy Balls that envision a form of radical togetherness through community activation. Their work Ex Nilalang is a series of videos that reinstate indigenous Filipino mythologies that were once used by colonial powers to demonize queer identities. The fourth episode on view as part of CAMP FIRES revisits the Filipino original myth of Maganda and Malakas, the first human beings on earth. In this speculative version, the two characters performed by Ra and Shoulder become fluid beings devoid of a clear gender and identity, while their choreography recalls an invocation to the reparative power of forgotten ancient spirits.

This artwork is presented at Shedhalle as part of the exhibition CAMP FIRES curated by Simon W Marin and Violeta Mansilla which is taking place at Last Tango, Zurich and co-hosted by Shedhalle and Tanzhaus Zürich.

Bhenji Ra (b. 1990 in Sydney, lives in Sydney) studied contemporary dance at the Martha Graham School in New York and at the Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts in Perth. As a trans person of Filipino descent, she uses her interdisciplinary artistic voice to evoke the entanglement of queer and diasporic identities through dance, video, and club events. She also is the mother of the ballroom house of SLÉ. Her work has recently been exhibited at the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra (2020); the 22nd Biennial of Sydney (2020); Artspace, Sydney (2019); Auto Italia South East, London (2019).

Justin Shoulder (aka Phasmahammer, b. 1985 in Sydney, lives in Sydney) is a transdisciplinary artists working between performance, sculpture, video, and collective events. Phasmahammer constitutes an eco-cosmology of alter-personas based on queer ancestral myth. Shoulder’s practice is often collaborative and aims at building a queer Filipinx futurism through art, spectacular performances, and community activation in the underground queer scene. Shoulder’s work was presented in venues such as the 22nd Biennial of Sydney; Palais de Tokyo, Paris; the Prague Quadrennial of Stage Design; Performance Space, Sydney; the 8th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, Brisbane.

Blessed Avenue (Jade Edition)

x Camp Fires

Jacolby Satterwhite is known for his powerful video installations combining dance, illustration, and 3D animation. With graphics inspired by the world of video games and using the expansive possibilities of virtual architecture, he creates alternative universes in which he transposes real-life and biographic elements as well as dancing bodies, including his own, to explore topics such as personal history, memory, fantasy, and desire. Blessed Avenue entails a series of works created by Satterwhite in homage to his mother in which he included some of the thousands of drawings she produced and sampled her voice compositions into the video’s soundtrack. The two-channel video notably stages a mesmerizing choreographic study into the dynamics of power in fetish sex and includes cameos by figures of club and queer scenes such as Juliana Huxtable, Lourdes Leon Ciccone, or DeSe Escobar. Inhabiting this fantastic but somehow dystopic virtual reality, the dancers, performing Vogueing-inspired choreographies, become like avatars of their other selves. They seem to navigate ambiguously between self-empowerment and alienation, raising questions about identity performance, freedom, and integrity in a digital and social media age.

This artwork is presented at Shedhalle as part of the exhibition CAMP FIRES curated by Simon W Marin and Violeta Mansilla which is taking place at Last Tango, Zurich and co-hosted by Shedhalle and Tanzhaus Zürich.

Jacolby Satterwhite (b. 1986 in Columbia, SC, lives in Brooklyn, NY) holds a BFA from Maryland Institute College of Art (2008) and an MFA from the University of Pennsylvania (2010). His work has been exhibited worldwide in venues such as Haus der Kunst, Munich (2021); Gwangju Biennial (2021); Art Basel Unlimited (2019); MoMA, New York (2019); The Whitechapel Gallery, London (2019); Berlin Biennale (2016); Whitney Biennial (2014). His first major institutional solo exhibition is currently on view at Miller ICA at Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA.

New Maps of Hyperspace_Test_01

NMHS explores a post-human environment where several abandoned experiments to sustain life, beehives in incubators, 3D models of bodies, plant and insect colonies lie empty. The work is set in a liminal time when humans have vacated the world. All that remains are remnants of corporate research/manufacturing plants, data centers and machines which still contain some consciousness of humans which were uploaded before climate disaster destroyed life. The work dwells on systems theory, climate care, AI consciousness, data mining and the memory of plant consciousness and the knowledges which has been destroyed by Neo-liberal extraction.

Their multidisciplinary, research-led practice encompasses video installation, virtual reality and performance. Through the staging of an immersive, world-building, they critically capture emergent modes of subjectivity that have moved beyond the narrow gender binaries inherited from a western-centric scientific and philosophical tradition. The history and emergence of 20th and 21st century techno-bodies and their representation in their speculative worlds critically rehearses multiple readings of art history, theory, psychoanalysis, physics, computational science and science fiction, and the seemingly endless ways in which these different fields and histories merge and interact in the creation of new subjectivities.

NOWNES(S(ESS_

The title of LETHE’s work for PROTOZONE 4 : EXTRA WORLDING refers to a caring attention to presence (NOWNESS) as primary material for world-making. It also references author N. K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth, in which (SESS)-ing supports the main characters and their kin as a special endowment that is strictly controlled by humans in power. In Jemisin’s world, the faculty of sessing means the ability to feel and act upon a wide variety of geological processes such as shifing, growing and altering the course of tectonic plates.

Until the 16th century, the color orange had no proper name in Europe, but was called yellow-red. Orange is the color of both the sunrise and the sunset. – Embodied liminality is what gives shape to the constellation of Izidora L LETHE’s contributed works for this exhibition.

_ (SUNRISE(SET —An orange light spilling through the crack of a slight open door. The lightspill may be making present the space between the exhibitionspace and the outside, pointing at the occurence of air, light and now-time.

_ (OPENINGS —A semi-translucent drawing backlit by orange neon-light. The graphite drawing points to semi-fictive/semi-real semi-abstract and semi-figurative openings, oriphices, maybe volcanic craters or places of entry.

_ (FOLDS —A grouping of ceramic forms placed on the between-space of the exhibition, surrounded by green plants, lit by soft yellow-reds. The forms are only to be seen through glass panels evoking a space for consensual being looked at – or terrarium. Between creature and static object, the works hoan in on the materiality of soil and the skinfold or -orifice.

Izidora L LETHE is a transdisciplinary and conceptual artist. Their practice spans choreography, sculpture and video, accompanied by correspondent writing and drawing processes. In their research-based works, LETHE returns to the body as a site of knowledge-production and repository. Aiming at undermining naturalized hierarchies, LETHE develops works with and through the body, allowing space for it to access and ‚speak‘ its own vocabulary. In particular, LETHE aims to uplift queer, female, non-binary/trans*, postcolonial and post-migrant epistemologies, which have systematically been overlooked and undervalued.

Izidora L LETHE received their MFA at the San Francisco Art Institute (SFAI, 2017) and their BFA from Zürcher Hochschule der Künste (ZHdK, 2013). Their most recent exhibitions include Cabaret Voltaire at Monte Verità (Switzerland) (2021), the Leslie Lohman Museum (New York City) (2021); The Contemporary Jewish Museum (CJM, San Francisco, CA) (2019-2020) et al. LETHE is the recipient of the independent artist residency at the BANFF Centre for the Arts in Canada (2018) and the IMA fellowship program of the New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA, 2019).

LETHE has been teaching as visiting faculty in the ART+ART HISTORY department at the University of Washington (UW, Seattle), the San Francisco Art Institute (SFAI) and F+F (Zürich) among others. Currently, LETHE is based in Zürich.

UKI virus rising

UKI virus rising follows an ever-morphing Reiko roaming at the e-trashville till her rising as UKI the virus. Taking its narrative from Shu Lea Cheang’s UKI, a sci-fi viral alt-reality cinema in the making, Reiko, a redundant IKU (orgasm) coder dumped on E-trashville by GENOM Co. strives to reboot their defunct hard drive body. Inadvertently, Reiko’s frenzy self-coding launches herself into UKI the virus.

Meanwhile, GENOM Co. exits the Net and takes the human body hostage to initiate BioNet, a network made up of reengineered red blood cells (erythrocytes) capable of coding DNA with orgasmic data. In its profitable biotech engineering scheme, GENOM Co. further harvests orgasmic data to produce red pills for consumption. UKI virus rising, propagated and mobilized, entering human body…thus the story begins.

Shu Lea Cheang is an artist and filmmaker working with various art mediums and film formats, including installation, performance, net art, public art, video installation, feature length film and mobile web serial. Her artistic pursuits demonstrates an imagination and desire to cross the boundaries of society, geography, politics, and economic structure, thus redefining genders, roles, mechanisms, etc.

As a net art pioneer, her BRANDON (1998-1999) was the first web art commissioned and collected by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York. Her network installations, including Bowling Alley (1995, Walker Art Center, USA), Baby Love (2015, Palais de Tokyo, Paris), often employ electronic interactive devices to construct open networks that permit public participation. Her multi-player participatory networked performance, including Moving Forest (2008, transmediale, Berlin), UKI (2009-2016) with transgressive plots are realized in collective impromptu mode. She drafts sci-fi narratives in her film scenario and artwork imagination, crafting her own “science” fiction genre of new queer cinema, terming them eco-cybernoia (FRESH KILL, 1994), scifi cyberpunk (I.K.U., 2000), scifi cypherpunk (Fluidø, 2017). From homesteading cyberspace in the 90s to her current retreat to post-netcrash BioNet zone, Cheang takes on viral love, bio hack in her current cycle of works.

Born in Taiwan in 1954, lived in New York City for two decades, Cheang is currently residing in Paris.

Spiraling

x Haus der Kunst München

Spiraling – spelt with one L – is Tarek Lakhrissi’s most recent film work produced during May 2021 with Haus der Kunst, Munich, DE in collaboration with Shedhalle, Zürich, CH. The video features queer activist pole dancer Mila Furie performing a routine on a pole in which the spiral is a regular action set in the middle of the authoritarian architecture of one of Haus der Kunst’s galleries. Lakhrissi considers the spiral to be a positive and meditative movement that enables someone to twist and adapt to a situation in which someone feels lost, weary or uncomfortable socially. In a recent interview with Hans Ulrich Obrist, the artist stated that the “video is about a close friend performing inside the museum, addressing the spiral as a poetic movement in relation to pole dancing”. The shape and form of the movement can be seen in prior works of the artist, most notably his installation series Unfinished Sentence I and II (2019 & 2020). The film is inspired by Felix Gonzales Torres’ work “Untitled” (Go-Go Dancing Platform) (1991), in which a performer dances with headphones to inaudible music on a lit-up platform that is empty except for short moments of a day when the dancer appears. Celebrating its 30th anniversary this year, Spiraling is not only a homage, but a continued reinvocation of poetic space that Torres captured in the work.

Tarek Lakhrissi (b. 1992, Châtellerault, FR) is based between Paris, FR and Brussels, BE. Lakhrissi has had international solo presentations at museums and galleries including: VITRINE, London, UK; Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin, IT; Centre d’Art Contemporain, Noisy-Le-Sec, FR, with an upcoming solo show at MOSTYN, Llandudno, UK. Further group exhibitions at galleries, museums and biennials internationally include: Palais de Tokyo, Paris, FR; Wiels, Brussels, BE; NIRIN 22nd Biennale of Sydney, Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Sydney, AU; Baltic Triennial 13, Contemporary Art Centre, Riga, LV & CAC, Vilnius, LT. Forthcoming exhibitions include Horst Festival, Brussels/Vilvoorde, BE; Manchester International Festival, UK (all July 2021). He has been shortlisted for the 22nd Foundation Pernod Ricard Prize 2021.

It’s Always You

x Blindspot Gallery Hong Kong

Utilising the formation of a four-piece boyband whose members comprise of masculine drag characters, Sin Wai Kin presents It’s Always You (2021), a new body of work composing of a dual-channel tongue in cheek music video and various other boyband ephemera that capture an essence of queer joy.

Sin deconstructs the cultural elements that form a successful boyband and explore the evolvement of gender, sexuality and expectations of masculinity within the boyband industry. Sin adopts the role of all four members in their boyband – The One, The Universe, The Storyteller and Wai King; each assuming an independent persona that strives to take apart a number of ingrained binaries that colonial and patriarchal narratives have embedded into our system. By considering the structural formulation of boybands, Sin explores the idea of collective individuals operating as a singular unit and presents the idea of a community as one body and the individual as many, making a comparison to the non-exclusive possibilities of gender identity and thinking.

Sin Wai Kin (fka Victoria Sin) is an artist using speculative fiction within performance, moving image, writing and print to interrupt normative processes of desire, identification, and objectification. Drawing from close personal encounters of looking and wanting, their work presents heavily constructed fantasy narratives on the often unsettling experience of the physical within the social body.

In 2020, Sin Wai Kin (b. 1991, Toronto, CA) opened the solo exhibition Narrative Reflections on Looking at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Zagreb, Croatia. In 2021, the artist will be included in the touring exhibition British Art Show 9. Recent selected group exhibitions include Born in Flames, The Bronx Museum, New York, USA (2021); Age of You, Jameel Arts Centre, Dubai (2021); MORE, MORE, MORE, Tank, Shanghai, China (2020); Transformer: A Rebirth of Wonder, 180 The Strand, London, UK (2019); La vie des choses, MOMENTA Biennale de l’Image, Montreal, Canada (2019); Kiss My Genders, Hayward Gallery, London, UK (2019); Display, Dortmunder Kunstverein, Dortmund, Germany (2019). The artist has performed at Frac Lorraine, Metz, France; Serpentine Galleries, London, UK; Whitechapel Gallery, London, UK; ICA, London, UK; Palais de Tokyo, Paris, France and as part of the 58th Venice Biennial, Venice, Italy.

Training Camp:

Week 2:

19-20 June, 14 – 18h

Ingo Niermann & Michelangelo Miccolis with Melanie Bonajo and Ayo Gry

Week 3:

26-27 June, 14 – 18h

Ingo Niermann & Michelangelo Miccolis with Alessandro Schiattarella

Please register: jointhearmyoflove@gmail.com

Language: English or others on request

Accessibility needs are especially taken into account

The Army of Love is a solidarity that offers training, recruitments, discussions, manuals, and testimonial videos to promote the redistribution of sensual love to all who need it. Since its founding in 2016, the Army of Love has recruited and trained people of diverse age, gender, ethnicity, and appearance all over Europe.

Week 2: 19-20 June

For the first weekend, artist Melanie Bonajo and bodyworker Ayo Gry will join us. They both work with Skinship in Berlin, a touched-based place for kinship, centering queer, trans*, nonbinary, intersex, Agender, genderfluid and femme bodies, creating safe”er” spaces through embodied art and activism.

Oceano de Amor (2019)

A film by Alexa Karolinski and Ingo Niermann will open on the 19th and remain open to the public for the duration of the Protozone. The production of Oceano de Amor has been made possible by the support of Castello di Rivoli, Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, Fachausschuss Film und Medienkunst Basel-Stadt / Basel Landschaft, and Robot Love, a project of the Niet Normal Foundation.

Week 3: 26-27 June

For the second weekend, choreographer Alessandro Schiattarella will join us. We will focus on your own proposals, questions, and critiques.

Previous presentations include: 9th Berlin Biennale (Berlin), Wiesbaden Biennale (Wiesbaden), MACBA (Barcelona), Casco Art Institute (Utrecht), La Casa Encendida, (Madrid).

Ingo Niermann (Bielefild DE, 1969) is a writer. He is known in the German-speaking for his novels, short stories, non-fiction, and his editorial projects as well as his forays into contemporary art. Utopian scenarios are a common thread throughout his work, as is a subversive note. He lives in Basel.

image 1: Army of Love, recruitment poster. All right reserved. Design of the heart: Jonas Voegeli

Image 2:Oceano de Amor (HD, 95 min, 2019) by Alexa Karolinski and Ingo Niermann. Courtesy of the artists

Week 4:

3-4 July

Building on a process of investigation begun in the summer of 2020 as part of her collaboration with the SHED, where Delmar recorded her research on the seminal essay Bullshit Jobs: A Theory by the late anthropologist David Graeber, she will present a newly commissioned work in the form of a performative sculpture and a text specific to the program.

Delmar will also oversee the unfolding design of the exhibition space, repurposing corporate furniture as performative sculptures, reframing the architecture of the space to help reshape the activity for the Protozone’s final weeks.

Débora Delmar (1986, Mexico City) lives and works in London where she recently completed the Postgraduate Programme at the Royal Academy of Arts, previously attending the School of Visual Arts, NY. Her work explores global consumer culture in the 21st century and corporate aspirational aesthetics impact on everyday life. Delmar frequently creates multi- sensory installations composed of appropriated and solely authored images and intervened everyday objects as well as fabricated sculptures. In her installations she frequently utilises elements such as scent, sound, and online interventions. The work of Débora Delmar has been presented in solo and group exhibitions including the 9th Berlin Biennale (Berlin), Museo Universitario del Chopo (Mexico City), Modern Art Oxford (Oxford, UK), Museum of Modern Art (Warsaw), IMMATERIAL V3 (Mexico City), Museum of Contemporary Art Denver (Denver), Museo de Arte Contemporaneo de Oaxaca- MACO (Oaxaca).

image: The original Debora Delmar Corporation logo created in 2009. Courtesy the artist

Week 6:

17-18 July

with Lara Dâmaso, Meret Kaufmann, nick von kleist, Jesper List Thomsen, Michelangelo Miccolis and Cally Spooner.

OFFSHORE is an itinerant performance company and pedagogical structure initiated in 2017 by Cally Spooner to draft new vocabulary and terms of how to organise, work, and perform together. Arriving from literature, theatre, and a messy, unrequited love affair with philosophy, OFFSHORE sits somewhere between a philosophy school for embodied knowledge, an engine, an alibi, a backroom, a rehearsal, and some deliberate, unguaranteed, social plumbing.

AT STAKE:

The future is uncertain. In the case of COVID-19, this logic fails; the future is cancelled, and we are left at home, in the present, hopefully no longer in our pyjamas.This rubs abrasively against everything we know, yet, while money needs to be made, and the economy will return to some semblance of operation.

OFFSHORE believes now is not the moment to escape the mighty pause we have been dealt by nature.

OFFSHORE believes this is a moment to extend the pause, to stay with its trouble, so we can restructure everything that is rotten. For those that welcome it, the pause will open up maximum focus. With focus, OFFSHORE considers how to build performance practice, live events and social gathering in the present, so that EVERYONE might draft new vocabulary, new terms and new conditions on how to organise, gather, be embodied, care, listen, respond, form solidarity and, indeed, perform.

OFFSHORE was born in Europe in 2017 via Corpus — an international network for commissioning performance-related work, co-funded by the Creative Europe programme of the European Union. OFFSHORE developed further in 2018, via the Stanley Picker Fellowship at Kingston University, in collaboration with The Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy (CRMEP) and has been unfolding since, as a transdisciplinary, pan-European entity at the Playground Festival (STUK arts centre and M Museum), Leuven; Bulegoa z/b, Bilbao; NTU CCA Singapore, Singapore; Centre National de la Danse, Paris; Swiss Institute, New York; Cabaret Voltaire, Zurich and the David Roberts Foundation, London. OFFSHORE was founded by Cally Spooner and her role in the company continues today as THE LEGIBILITY COORDINATOR and LECTURER.

Image:OFFSHORE IN PARIS, Centre National de la Danse, Paris, 2018. Courtesy of OFFSHORE. Photo: Marc Domage

Artist-in-Residence

Week 7: July 19-25

The space will be open for audiences while Jagudajev develops, together with collaborators, a new work titled Basically. This open process invites visitors to experience the process of choreographing, rehearsing, discussing and staging the movement-based work as a way to share the moments of collective learning and making that lie at the heart of the work.

The project responds to the changed conditions for live work during the restrictions for infection control and creates new modes of gathering and participation.

Jagudajev’s practice is concerned with the format of gatherings. Her works engage participants and audiences in open-ended situations which collectively make up space and deviate. Projects include formal dance sequences, but also food, divination, sorcery, music, clothing, and sound. These elements work as informal invitations to engage in different ways, shifting attention or offering agency.

Similar to a music festival or a traveling fair, Jagudajev and her collaborators arrive, subtly infiltrate, contaminate, transform into something different, and depart. Her spaces propose strangeness and are interested in the voids of representation, in what is often left out from what is considered culturally valuable or desirable. Besides a seating area for visitors on bleachers, the space will contain a recording studio, a wall with specifically made clothing that will be used for the performances and daily actions such as the casting of a I Ching, an ancient method of foretelling.

Originally commissioned by Bergen Kunsthall for the fall of 2020, the work has hit many delays and has up until now, due to covid-border restrictions, been unable to have a full presentation with the artist present. Shedhalle has initiated a partnership with Bergen Kunsthall for the opportunity to bring this work, uniquely developed in the midst of the pandemic, finally to the public in Zurich.

Nikima Jagudajev (b. 1990) is a New York and Brussels based choreographer. Her work, expanding formal dance into the construction of open-ended socialities, has been presented in the context of Material Art Fair’s IMMATERIAL (Mexico City), Kurimanzutto (Mexico City), Centre d’Art Contemporain (Geneva), the Whitney Museum of American Art (New York), Human Resources LA, Rockbund Art Museum (Shanghai), Villa Empain (Brussels), as part of and 89+ at LUMA/Westbau (Zurich) and the Marrakech Biennale (Morocco).

Week 1:

11-13 June

11.06 – 17-21h

12.06 – 14-18h (Protozone open until 20h)

13.06 – 14-17h (Protozone open until 18h)

Language: English

“Would you rather feel too busy or not busy enough?”

Tino Sehgal, Ann Lee (2011) with Lilya Barnard & Solia Nahmani

Pierre Huyghe, Two Minutes Out of Time (2000)

Ann Lee appears. Slowly moving her limbs with a wondrous, inquisitive look in her eyes as she discovers the world for the first time.

This constructed situation by Tino Sehgal, which directly refers to the title of the Protozone, is an existing work from 2011 that will be put in dialogue with the video, Two Minutes Out of Time by Pierre Huyghe, featuring a monologue, delivered by the cartoon character, on her condition as a “virtual” image.

Bringing the character both virtually and physically to life in the space, Ann Lee invokes the Protozone. This celebrated work from a time before COVID-19, will resonate as a voice from the past, a reckoning, perhaps, with the present moment.

Tino Sehgal (London, 1976) studied economics and dance. In 2005, he represented Germany at the Venice Biennale. The Guggenheim, Tate Modern, and dOCUMENTA (13) have also presented solo shows of his work. In 2013, he was awarded the Golden Lion at the 55th Venice Biennale. The art of Tino Sehgal is immaterial; it takes shape in the moment in which the spectator encounters it. Since 2000, he has been constructing live situations in which performers enter into contact with the visitors and spectators by way of movements, conversations, or song, inviting them to influence the structure of the work.

Pierre Huyghe (born in 1962, Paris) lives and works in New York. His work is internationally known and presented in various exhibitions around the world. Huyghe has received a number of awards, including the Nasher Sculpture Prize (2017); Kurt Schwitters Prize (2015); Roswitha Haftmann Award (2013), the Smithsonian Museum’s Contemporary Artist Award (2010), the Hugo Boss Prize, Guggenheim Museum (2002), the Special Award from the Jury of the Venice Biennale (2001), and a DAAD in Berlin (1999-2000). Most recently, he was appointed Artistic Director of the Okayama Art Summit 2019.

INFINITY minus Infinity

INFINITY minus Infinity draws on several inspirations: the modernist verse of the Jamaican poet Una Marson, the alluvial invocations of the Martinican philosopher and poet Édouard Glissant, the black feminist poetics of the Brazilian philosopher Denise Ferreira da Silva, and the racial formation of geology theorised by British geographer Kathryn Yusoff amongst others in order to envision a black feminist cosmos animated by the principles of mathematical nihilism.

The phrase “hostile environment” invokes the covert policy of targeting migrants enacted by the UK Conservative government since 2014. It stands for the criminalization of the Afro-Caribbean women and men that migrated to Britain in the 1950s to help reconstruct its industrial infrastructure after the war. The recent effort to detain and deport the women and men of the “Windrush generation”—so called because they followed in the wake of the men that emigrated to Britain from the Caribbean on board the HMS Empire Windrush in 1948—reveals the commitment of the British State to disarticulating the forms of attachment and belonging of Afro-Caribbean settlement that helped decolonize the British empire from within. INFINITY minus Infinity extends its confrontation with the Tory policy of the ongoing hostile environment into an interscalar movement between times and spaces.

It brings together dance, performance, music, recital, and digital animation to compose a transhistorical zone in which the unpayable debts of racial capitalism cannot be separated from the ongoing crimes of climate catastrophe. INFINITY minus Infinity enacts the past distress, present duress and future dread of the British Capitalocene through the assembly of a chorus of transtemporal deities whose utterances, expressions, gestures, and movements allude to the accumulated times and spaces of the United Kingdom’s environmental hostility.

INFINITY minus Infinity confronts the compounded timelines of the afterlife of slavery enacted by British imperial capitalism with the forces and the fictions of 21st Century black feminist digital cosmology.Commissioned by Sharjah Architecture Triennial SAT01.

2019 Co-produced with Z33 House for Contemporary Art, Design and Architecture.

The Otolith Group was founded in 2002.

Its work is research based and spans the moving image, audio, performance, installation, and curation. It incorporate film making and post-lens-based essayistic aesthetics that explore the temporal anomalies, anthropic inversions, and synthetic alienation of the posthuman, the inhuman, the non-human, and the complexity of the environmental conditions of life we all face.

Approaching curation as an artistic practice of building intergenerational and cross-cultural platforms, the collective has been influential in critically introducing particular works of artists such as Chris Marker, Harun Farocki, Anand Patwardhan, Etel Adnan, Black Audio Film Collective, Sue Clayton, Mani Kaul, Peter Watkins, and Chimurenga in the UK, US, Europe, and Lebanon.

Hellscrape

Artist duo Zheng Mahler’s collaboration with the artist and filmmaker Tiffany Sia Hellscrape conjures a series of animated videos produced by a generative adversarial network (styleGAN) algorithm trained on a dataset of media images of significant sites in Hong Kong’s 2019 anti-extradition protests. The dataset was scraped from Google image searches of Harcourt Road, Tamar Park and PolyU and trained for one hour.

The resultant morphing landscapes hover in a liminal state, between the known and unknown datasets, moving through horrific trans-imaginary moments of time where multiple threads collapse into one.

The images are also a synchronic map of the artists IP address details at the time and place in which the image search was undertaken that simultaneously function as a particular, mutated typology of the media’s site-specific representation of the protest sites themselves.

Consequently, the images are viewed as formal agglomerations of art historical and photographic landscape conventions weighted towards the cinematic spectacularization of protest.

Amidst so much resistance against surveillance, facial recognition and the technological apparatus of the state within the protest, the work raises questions around the queasiness of using AI generated imagery and the reappropriation of the ongoing “capture” that unfolded in those months, and comes to take on the subject position of the state itself in order to critique it. Snippets of concrete poetry composed by Sia, leaks from her forthcoming book Too Salty Too Wet 更咸更濕, a hellish scroll about affect, geography and the occult in Hong Kong, are additionally threaded into the images, woven in the style of voice-over text or subtitles which come to embody what film theorist Michael Chion describes as a kind of talking and acting shadow – “These images although static contain hundreds of threads of time, and a voice emerges from this void as an atemporal, spectral being – ‘a special being’”.

Our times of political unrest are at once etched into our digital timelines, our bodies and our dreams. Accordingly, these phantasmagorias challenge traditional images of landscape photography and painting, these images asking, what does the landscape of affect look like?

Zheng Mahler are an artist (Royce Ng) and anthropologist (Daisy Bisenieks) duo working together on research intensive, community based, site-specific projects often utilising digital media, performances and installation to explore relationships between art and research practice. Drawing from each other’s respective backgrounds, they examine the limits as well as the methods and strategies of expanding both their familiar disciplines while experimenting with new interdisciplinary possibilities or cross pollinations, where anthropological approaches are applied to art practice and artistic methodologies are utilised as research exercises in the studies of anthropology.

Together they have presented their work in numerous solo and group exhibitions internationally, including at the Johann Jacobs Museum in Zurich, Switzerland (2014 and 2016), PERFORMA: New Visual Art Performance Biennale in New York City (2015) Parasite, Hong Kong (2016) Whitechapel Gallery, London, UK (2017), the Akademie der Kunst der Welt in Cologne, Germany (2019) and Shanghai Biennale XIII (2021)

The presentation of the selected zines from ZINE COOP as part of the work Hellscrape was made in collaboration with VOLUMES.

ZINE COOP is an independent publishing collective based in Hong Kong. They collect, curate and educate through zine publications, workshops, and exhibitions. Founded in 2017, they operate across Hong Kong, Japan and Canada without a fixed or hierarchical membership system.

VOLUMES is a non-profit organisation and collective created in Zurich in 2013 to support the local and international DIY-facet of art publishing and introduce it to a larger audience in Switzerland. Exploring the creativity gravitating around the practices of small scale art publishing, they create events such as book fairs, exhibitions, performances, workshops, projections, talks, symposiums and curated libraries. Anne-Laure Franchette, Patrizia Mazzei, Gloria Wismer

Confluencas

Riikka Tauriainen creates an immersive space of memory and future: she weaves connections through the exhibition Protozone 2 – Continuity / Transpassing. Floating reliefs made of transparent PET hang from the ceiling of the room. The objects capture the shape of an undulating water surface. At the same time, they are reminiscent of digital renderings, liquid screens, bodies or partitions for protective devices.

The space-filling elements interact closely; with the plastic surface of the reliefs, images are distorted as light refracts on the PET and draws a play of light throughout the room – mirrored sunlight or projections. Confluencas by Tauriainen thinks in a fictional world between solid and fluid matter.

Riikka Tauriainen plays with opposites between the natural and the toxic, threat and well-being, human and non-human, inside and outside and between the intimate and the foreign, mixing these ambivalences and frictions while blurring the boundaries between into flow.

I explore the relationship of our bodies with the world around them. I refer to sources in queer feminist literature, such as the author Astrida Neimanis and her concept about “hydrofeminism”. This theory is based on the idea of the fluidity of our bodies and offers it as a force for emancipation: “Water, in other words, flows through and across difference.” (Astrida Neimanis) The focus of the work is materialist: how do ecofeminist and postcolonial practices approach critical materialism? How do we deal with toxic material? How does the foreign become the familiar?

Riikka Tauriainen born in Oulu, Northern Finland (FI), lives and works in Zurich. In her installations, videos and performances she is interested in historical narratives, gender issues, knowledge production and language. She navigates on the boundaries between art and science, between fact and fiction. Since 2018, Tauriainen has been working on the series of works “Hydrocommons,” which operates in a posthumanist world of ideas. It explores to what extent our kinship with other bodies can be understood as a deeply materialistic relationality. She Studied in Tallinn (Estonian Academy of Arts, BA photography), Essen (Folkwang University of the Arts, communication design), Berlin (Berlin Weissensee School of Art, Fine Arts / Sculpture) and Zurich (Zurich University of the Arts, MA Fine Arts). She taught among others at the Zurich University of the Arts and is currently teaching at the F+F School for Art and Design Zürich and the ETH Zurich.

Her works are exhibited internationally, including Bâtiment d‘art contemporain in Geneva, Siemens Sanat in Istanbul, Center for Contemporary Art in Plovdiv Bulgaria, NGbK Berlin, Helmhaus in Zurich and the Biennial for Time Based Art in Zagreb Croatia. She presented her latest work at the Swiss Art Awards in Basel 2019 and at her solo exhibition at SIC! Elephanthouse in Lucerne in 2020-2021.

Ablagerungen und Transporte durch die Zeit

Patrick Rohner’s works are closely linked to his living environment and everyday practice. Rohner meticulously documents and executes processes and procedures that span over years and even decades. Thus, the beginning of the work exhibited here dates back to 2015. Embedded in the valley of Glarus where Rohner’s studio is located, complex ecosystems emerge, as a result of which various formats see the light of day.

The works from Ablagerungen und Transporte durch die Zeit – translated into Deposits and Transports through Time – consist of a sequence of technical processes with oil paint on the picture panel, thereby triggering processes on the picture surface. The nature of the labor process, specific information about the quality of the paint mass, and dating notes are recorded on file cards. This file system serves to document this specific artistic practice.

Patrick Rohner (*1959) was born in Rothenturm. He studied at the Lucerne School of Design and at the Düsseldorf State Art Academy. He is represented by Galerie Mark Müller in Zurich. His works include paintings, objects, texts and site visits. With meticulous precision, Rohner documents work processes and creates a fascinating cosmos, a material-based archive. In 2007 he received the Straubenzeller Art Prize (St.Gallen), in 1988 the Manor Art Prize (St.Gallen), in 1997: Collection Cahiers d’artiste” Pro Helvetia, 1991 – 1993: Federal Art Scholarship. Selection of his solo exhibitions: “Entanglement”, Galerie Mark Müller, Zurich (CH) / “Wasserarbeiten”, Kunstraum Kreuzlingen (CH) / “Wirtgestein”, Nidwaldner Museum, Stans (CH) / “Landmannalaugar”, Galerie Mark Müller, /Kunsthalle Wil (CH) / “Gemälde, Zeichnungen, Fotografie”, Kloster Schönthal, Langenbruck (CH) / Kloster Schönthal, Langenbruck (CH) / Galerij S 65, Aalst (BE) / Kunstmuseum St. Gallen (CH) / Kunsthaus Glarus (CH)

Golden Insider — 81 Inflated Facets

By way of kundalini technology and quantum entanglement, Golden Insider—81 Inflated Facets finds its nub in the world of mind-bending ideas. In kundalini technology, it is believed that the mind has eighty-one facets. Positive (“+”), negative (“-”), and neutral (“=”) emotions flood the mind, blurring and distort- ing thought-processes.

Golden Insider—81 Inflated Facets does not concern itself with the human mind, but with the matrixial mind of the microorganism slime mold. Metal and microorganisms become agents of thoughts in their various entangled materializations.

Lea Porsager graduated from the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, Copenhagen, and the Städelschule, Frankfurt am Main, in 2010. She began her studies as a PhD candidate at Malmö Art Academy and Lund University in September 2015. Porsager’s practice interweaves fabulation and speculation with a variety of mediums, including film, sculpture, photography, and text. Her works encompass science, politics, feminism, and esotericism.

She is represented by Nils Stærk Gallery, Copenhagen. Her recent solo exhibitions include In Moderna Museet in Stockholm (2020/21), Museum of Contemporary Art, Roskilde 2019; Nils Stærk, Copenhagen, 2016; Brandts, Odense, 2016; Göttingen Kunstverein, 2015; Overgaden, Copenhagen, 2015; Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin, 2015; Henie Onstad Kunstsenter, Høvikodden, 2013; and Emily Harvey Foundation, New York, 2013.

In 2012, Porsager participated in dOCUMENTA (13) with Anatta Experiment. In 2015, Porsager partook in the 14th Istanbul Biennial: SALTWATER: A Theory of Thought Forms as Annie Besant’s “medium,” recreating thirty-six of Besant’s watercolours from the book Thought-Forms: A Record of Clairvoyant Investigation (1905).

Supported by the Danish Arts Foundation. Exhibitions: Moderna-utställningen 2014: Society Acts, Moderna Museet, Malmö, SE, curated by Andreas Nilsson; Ring-Pass-Not, Göttingen Kunstverein, Göttingen, DE, 2015, curated by Kordula Fritze-Srbic; Survival Kit 8, festival, Riga, Latvia, 2016, curated by Solvita Krese and Inga Lāce.

You Take Me Across The Distance تأخذني عبر المدى

In the new installation You Take Me Across The Distance, Marouf is presenting two video works: Thikra (memory) and Wa’d (promise).

The installation reinvokes a dwelling of some kind. The videos are conversations between a ‘me’ and a ‘you’ that is multiple. The ‘you’ lived in the middle east over the last 70 years and has lived through the outbreak of the AIDS epidemic, which forms a central theme of the video essay. In an uncanny manner, the AIDS epidemic of the 1980ies which we still find ourselves in, appears to anticipate today’s challenging times in more than one respect. In both moments, ‘the world’ as we know it, seems to come to an end. What emerges, thus, is a parallel moment in which the notion of futurity is radically put into question. Our sense of the present, past and future appears to clash, as these temporalities begin to oscillate and interfere with one another.

Marouf’s work occupies itself with memory, loss and intimacy. Asserting the physical inaccessibility of certain aspects of one’s life, memory and the act of remembrance are the only granted access to this challenge of loss and the inaccessible. By looking into queer narratives and histories, he aims to shift questions of straightforward identity politics towards processes of embodiment. Rethinking queer gestures and speech are understood not only as behavior but as action.

Enad Marouf is a Syrian/German performance artist based in Berlin. After graduating from the Syrian National Ballet School and studying international law at the Faculty of Law at the University of Damascus, Marouf continued his studies of choreography Ernst-Busch-Hochschule in Berlin. He received his MA in choreography and performance at the Institute for Theater Studies Gießen/Frankfurt he completed in 2014. In 2010 he founded with Franziska Aigner, Billy Bultheel, Samuel Forsythe and Daniel Jenatsch the collective New Forms of Life. His solo works and collaborations have been shown at venues including the Athens Biennale, KunstenfestivaldesArts Brussels, 104 Paris, HAU Berlin, Babel Beirut, Centre culturel Francais de Damas, Venice Biennale presented. Since 2016 he is part of Anne Imhof’s studio, where he works as a dramaturg, choreographer and performer. He was part of ANGST I&II at Kunsthalle Basel and Hamburger Bahnhof, of Faust (winner of the Golden Lion, Venice Biennial 2017), and of SEX I&II at the Tate Modern and at the Art Institute of Chicago.

You take me across the Distance (2021) is a co-production of Shedhalle Zurich with the generous support of NATIONAL PERFORMANCE NETWORK – STEPPING OUT, funded by the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and Media within the framework of the initiative NEUSTART KULTUR. Assistance Program for Dance.

Elemental Study Room

The Elemental Study Room – the place for studying the elemental, elementally and the elements – is both an invitation and an enactment of a manner of attending to what exists (actually, potentially, and virtually) that welcomes it all and at once. Astrology, Quantum Field Theory, Particle Physics, Octavia E. Butler, Hortense Spillers, Tarot, Saidiya Hartman, Fred Moten, Stefano Harney, Fred Moten & Stefano Harney, Karen Barad, Dark Matter, the oracle, Reiki – this is a partial list of those and that with which I think, experiment, wonder & wander.

This Elemental Study Room, in addition to items from my practice, also gathers images, words, and objects that re/de/compose the exhibition, the Shedhalle, and each and every work in it. As such, it exists as one of the works and as one with the works in this exhibition.

Anyone, everyone, who happen to come across, walk by the Elemental Study Room is welcome to stop by this place, remember or just try not to forget the current and past violence and violations that renders this global health crisis deadlier to some rather than others. And, while doing so, just do also have in mind the question animating my practice: What if instead of experience and identity, existence and implicancy were …?

Elemental, as a descriptor, has been key in the experiments in re/de/composing (imaging/reading) that are central to my artistic practice; in both the film works with Arjuna Neuman and the reading practice, in collaboration with Valentina Desideri. As a descriptor for what exists, the elemental refers to the what and the how, that is, to the fact that any existing thing is but a re/de/composition, which can be read as a referent of the classic elements (water, air, fire, earth).

Study is practice; as such, it requires the taking of time, the giving time, and the making of time; to study is to demote time, to strip off its transcendent and interior airs; study is with and about at the same time. To study is to forget about time, to ignore it and, in doing so, even if for a moment, that moment, it is to end time.

Room is the name I find appropriate to a place designed for observation, experimentation, and contemplation. To study as a practice – and not an obligation or a means to an end — it necessarily and hopelessly collaborative and collective. It gathers images (videos and photos), words, sounds, and objects, which has been composed in experiments on the question of existence and implicancy.

Elemental Study Room names this composition of this space as well as any other place, anywhere, any time, as long as that there/then gathers material, tools, and techniques I have chosen or designed because of their capacity to aid in experiments on a simple question: What if instead of experience and identity, existence and implicancy focused and guided premises for statements about as well as descriptions and considerations of what happens and exists?

Universal, as a concept, distinguishes modern thinking relies on the ontological and epistemological operations of the notions of experience and identity, respectively. Both support the distinctions that allow for conceiving of humans in their specificity, and the distinctions that separate that from everything else and also establishes unsurpassable separations among them. Existence and implicancy, in particular when approached elementally inspire images, descriptions, and propositions that might just undermine the tools and mechanisms through which the universal has sustained the unrelenting violations state capital inflicts on the planet and everything/everyone that exists on it.

Denise Ferreira da Silva (Rio de Janeiro & Vancouver) practice involves working with words, images, and sounds. A founding member of EhChO.org, presently, she is Professor and Director of the Social Justice Institute-GRSJ at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver (Canada) and Adjunct Professor of Curatorial Practice at Monash University Art, Design & Architecture, Melbourne (Australia). Her artwork include the films Serpent Rain (2016), 4Waters (2018) in collaboration with Arjuna Neuman, and Poethical Readings and Sensing Salon, in collaboration with Valentina Desideri. She is the author of Toward a Global Idea of Race (2007), a Divida Impagavel (2019), and Unpayable Debt (2020) and co-editor of Race, Empire, and the Crisis of the Subprime (2013).

(fed and cared for
by JP Raether)

aLifveForms are bodies of work that explore questions of identity and language consituting reality. In their performative, distributed social interventions, the array of bodies activates a plurality of alter-identities engaging an elaborated vocabulary. Organized in a conceptual ‘Identitecture’ the techno-organically sprawling herd of humanoid beings grows through partition, forking, and updates to become a multiplicity of identities.

In their appearances, the avatara work to demonstrate that in every common reality the potential for another reality is always present. There are currently three active identities:

Transformellae research globalized and industrialized human reproduction. The Swarm-Being traces the transnational circulation of bodies and souvenirs. Protektoramae seek out sites of production of contemporary information technologies, interrogating the relation of the human body to its technological devices. The AlterIdentities are vessels for story drafting, from which photography emerges as derivative, crystalizing the essence of the performative appearances. Their sculptural practice transforms the experience of the AlterIdentities into complex, sculptural-spatial ensembles.

All of the aLifveForms are currently fed and cared for by J.P. Raether, born 1977 in Heidelberg. He attended University of Arts Berlin (1999–2005) and is currently holding a professorship for Artistic Practice in the Public Space at AdBK Nuremberg. He regularly talks at conferences. He lives and works in Berlin.

The aLivfeForms’ work has been exhibited in solo and group exhibitions such as Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler (2021; solo); nGbK, Berlin (2020); Museum of Contemporary Art, Toronto (2019); Dortmunder Kunstverein (2019); 6th Athens Bienniale (2018); Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler (2018); Edith-Russ-Haus, Oldenburg (2017); transmediale Festival, Berlin (2017), Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen, Düsseldorf (2017; solo); Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2016); 9th Berlin Biennale (2016); Kunsthaus Bregenz (2015); Fridericianum, Kassel (2015); MMK, Frankfurt (2015); District, Berlin (2015; solo); Kunst-Werke, Berlin (2013).

Their appearances have been presented at Tanznacht, Berlin (2020); PACT, Essen (2019); BAK, Utrecht (2019); Kampnagel, Hamburg (2018); Kammerspiele Munich (2018); Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (2017), amongst others.

Proto-Club is a series by Shedhalle, circulating around queer culture, eco feminism and social movements. It seeks to create an ongoing process around these topics, connecting them to speculative and science-fictional ideas.

Therefore, on a regular basis, Proto-Club invites artists, researchers, activists and scientists to Shedhalle to share their work, practices and thoughts – always in relation to the respective here&now.

Herewith we commemorate the artist, researcher, exhibition organizer and former curator of Shedhalle, Marion von Osten.

Full of admiration we take a look back at her time at Shedhalle, where she worked as a curator between 1996 and 1998 realizing various exhibition projects.

Marion von Osten belonged to the first generation of curators who contributed significantly to the programmatic revision of Shedhalle from 1994 onwards. This included opening the curatorial program to more unconventional forms of exhibition making and promoting interdisciplinary collaboration between artists, scientists and socially engaged initiatives.

The team consisted of Renate Lorenz, Sylvia Kafehsy, Ursula Biemann and Marion von Osten, who all pursued a practice at the intersections of art, discursive procedure and political commitment.

At that time Shedhalle established an explicitly feminist perspective for the first time. The program was asking questions about collective possibilities to change the conditions of art production.

The aim was – and still is – to break up the dominant roles of curators, artists and cultural producers and re-think these roles within the institutional framework.

During her time as a curator at Shedhalle, Marion von Osten realized several legendary exhibition projects, including Irene ist viele (1996), SEX&SPACE (1996), Alt.Use.Media (1997), SUPERmarkt – money/market/gender politics (1998) and MoneyNations@access (1998).

What these projects have in common is a critical examination of hegemonic structures: Marion von Osten has always been committed to giving space to marginalized groups and opening discourses that examine structures of discrimination and stereotyping. An important approach was to overcome the boundaries between theory and practice and to develop a hybrid understanding of roles and spaces.

The group exhibition SEX&SPACE was dedicated to “Gender Spaces” – gender-specific attributions concerning spatial and architectural aspects in urban private and public spheres. Together with the participating artists, Marion von Osten examined the extent to which urban space is determined by a traditionally male, white perspective: Who is represented in private and public spaces and who is excluded? How can social and cultural counter-images be developed? For SEX&SPACE, Marion von Osten transformed Shedhalle into a television studio, a stereotyped backdrop in the limbo between private and public space, where norms were deconstructed and became negotiable.

This approach of creating settings for critical media-practices in the exhibition space was developed further in the next projects. In 1997 she transformed Shedhalle into a digital, audiovisual studio that explored alternative media practices and forms of distribution. And in 1998 a production facility for fanzines, videos and sound recordings was set up at Shedhalle. Discourses from the underground scene in and around Zurich, self-organization and activism were formative for the program of Shedhalle.

The exhibitions SUPERmarkt – money/market/gender politics (1998) and MoneyNations@access (1998) can also be seen in this context. The “supermarket” was understood as a way of critically re-thinking economies.. Here, postcolonial approaches and counterstatements to hegemonic and eurocentric representations were developed. The exhibition examined the economically motivated border politics of Western Europe. Representations in the media were examined and artistic strategies of an alternative, anti-racist media practice were developed.

After working as a curator at Shedhalle Zurich, she taught as professor of artistic practice at the Institute for Theory of Art and Design in Zurich and at the Institute for Artistic Teaching at the Vienna Academy as a professor of art and communication.

From 2014 onwards, Marion von Osten was the curator and artistic director of the research and exhibition project Bauhaus Imaginista, which focused on the intertwining of Bauhaus and modern ideas around the globe. In the Bauhaus year 2019, all international stations of the project came together in a large exhibition at Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin.

Marion von Osten set important impulses, initiated significant projects that have strongly influenced the practice of Shedhalle to this day.

Nowhere else do debates about political incapacity to act, the empowerment of formerly marginalized groups and ecological sustainability meet in such a condensed form as in culture. Museums, art galleries, festivals and theaters are laboratories for change and laboratories for utopias.

We will all miss Marion von Osten. She was a person who always stood up for the potential of hybrid, collaborative practices in art and culture. A person who, driven by political and social questions, initiated interdisciplinary and transnational exhibitions and projects that continue to shape the art world until today.

Her work will live on at Shedhalle. Her values, her thinking and her impulses remain a source of inspiration and a role-model for the further development of our institution.

The team and the board of Shedhalle

Archive material can be found here and at Shedhalle.

Obituaries of her companions can be found here:

labor-k3000

ARCH+, Christian Hiller

Digitales Kondolenzbuch der Akademie der bildenden Künste Wien

Photos: Archive of Shedhalle, installation views of the exhibitions SEX&SPACE (1996), Alt.Use.Media (1997), SUPERmarkt – money market gender politics (1998)

Born in 1988 in St Julien-En-Genevois, Sabrina Röthlisberger lives and works in Geneva. Her videos, performances, sets, installations and texts address the links between medicine and death, between power and survival by combining references to art history and allusions to her own history and social identity.

Active as a collective since 2012 in Switzerland and recently internationally, Winner of the New Heads Prize, the Cantonal Fellowships of the City of Geneva and resident in the program of Pro Helvetia and the Swiss Institute of New York. Since 2014, she has developed within the collective LGGSB a practice centered around women, healing and an active rewrite of their own history, through an understanding of reality through the prism of adolescence.

Her works have been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in Oran, Algeria; at Gaudel de Stampa, Paris; at les Urbaines, Lausanne; at the Kunstmuseum Bern; at the Kunstmuseum Thun; at 186f kepler, New York; in Upstate, Zurich; at Alienze, Lausanne and at LiveInYourHead, Geneva among others. She won the 2019 Aeschlimann-Corti Grant, the BNP New HEAD Prize and participated in the Swiss Art Awards. At the end of 2018, she was also a resident at the Swiss Institute, New York.

Röthlisberger is engages in a curatorial practice and notably carried out during her residency in New York a program of exhibitions and events in collaboration with artists such as Sadaf H Nava, Julien Ceccaldi, Marcel Alcalá, Dese Escobar, or again the poet Roger Van Voorhees.

Radical Sociability

What started out as a vigilante strategy for bringing accountability to powerful people who had previously been immune to any consequences for their actions, is increasingly becoming an unreflective method for bullying within communities. Whether to call it call-out culture, cancel-culture or shaming-culture is hotly debated, but regardless of its name, by now its toxicity is undeniable.

Lou Drago has been investigating identity politic’s role in perpetuating what socio-political observers have called the “fracturing of the Left,” and cancel-culture’s role in deepening divides along identity-based lines. In this sound piece, Drago introduces their ideas around enacting intersectional affinity through a process called Radical Sociability, and through a series of exercises, speculate with participants on how to be receptive and humble in order to really enact solidarity.

Lou Drago is a Berlin-based artist, curator, writer and radio producer/ DJ. Drago is a founding member of XenoEntities Network, Berlin, a collective who focuses their research on queer, gender and feminist studies and their interactions with digital technologies.

They curate and produce, Transience, a monthly show on Cashmere Radio, Berlin that focuses on experimental, ambient and experient music that aims to offer anxiety relief to its listeners. Drago’s recent research is concerned with finding ways to coalesce all of those who fail to fit a neoliberal, capitalist mould in an attempt to reunite what we have witnessed to be an increasingly fractured Left.

They have shown work, curated shows and spoken on panels across Europe and internationally.

Dark Water

Dark Water, 2020 performed by Lauryn Youden is an auto-theoretical text that examines the history of mourning, lamentation and death as central to the daily lives of European society during the rise of capitalist patriarchy and the plague; as well as the divination and ritualistic practices used by many to endure this period of time. Interwoven between passages are Youden’s personal experiences with ritualistic lamentation and intergenerational trauma expressed through poetry and healing found in Crip Magic practices.

Lauryn Youden is a performance and installation artist, poet and independent curator based in Berlin. Her practice derives from her research and navigation of modern Western medicine, the medical-industrial complex, ‘alternative’ healing practices and traditional medicine for the treatment of her chronic Illnesses and invisible disabilities.
By publicly presenting her personal experiences and re-evaluations of the history of medicine through a feminist, Crip queer lens, her work illuminates and advocates for repressed, marginalized and forgotten practices of care and knowledge.

Youden is currently in residence at the Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin. She was the winner of the Berlin Art Prize in 2016, is a founder and co-director of Ashley Berlin and organizing member of Sickness Affinity Group (SAG)

Nicholas Grafia (DE, *1990, Angeles City, Philippines) holds an MFA from the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf (DE). He has previously studied at the Kunstakademie Münster
(DE), the School of Arts and Cultures in Newcastle (UK) as well as British, American and
Postcolonial Studies at the University of Münster (DE). His paintings, videos and performances, frequently made in collaboration with Polish artist Mikołaj Sobczak, negotiate processes of memory formation, as well as the in- and exclusion of subjects from history writing.

His works were recently exhibited at Capitain Petzel (Berlin, DE), Shoot the Lobster (New York, US), signs and symbols (New York, US), Kunsthal Aarhus (Aarhus, DK), Andersen’s
Contemporary (Copenhagen, DK), Museum Ludwig (Cologne, DE), K21 Museum Düsseldorf
(Düsseldorf, DE), fffriedrich (Frankfurt am Main, DE), Tramway (Glasgow, UK), Kunstraum
(London, UK), Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen Düsseldorf (Düsseldorf, DE),
Dortmunder Kunstverein (Dortmund, DE), PS120 Berlin (Berlin, DE), Exo Exo at David Giroire
(Paris, FR), Museum of Modern Art (Warsaw, PL) and BOZAR (Brussels, BE).

Nina Emge (1995, Zürich) lebt und arbeitet zwischen Berlin und Zürich. Sie schloss ihren Bachelor of Arts mit Auszeichnung an der Zürcher Hochschule der Künste ab.

Im Zentrum ihrer künstlerischen Praxis steht die Frage des kritischen Zuhörens. Die Werke werden meist als Installationen und oder Soundarbeiten ausgestellt.

Emges Arbeiten wurden in der Kunsthalle Zürich, Les Urbaines Lausanne, Cherish/Alianze an der Art Genève, Spoiler Berlin und weiteren Ausstellungsräumen in der Schweiz und im Ausland gezeigt.

Tupamaras Technophallus

TT is a multidisciplinary work cycle that tries to synthesize a new relationship with science and technology iconography by delighting it with a global south, queer feminist kink.

It consists of a 360 ° video VR assemblage with Colombian voguing and performance collective “House of Tupamaras” , sculptural works of advanced photography and site specific installations.

Centered around an abandoned plane in Bogota, the surrealist-documentary video work reflects socio- political issues through dance, fiction and interviews. Among others, the criticism of universal knowledge, narratives of fictitious peace and armed conflicts, gender-specific fluidity and the future dangers of data gaps for historically marginalized groups.

Throughout latex, cockpits and cheap VR glasses ideas circulate from screens and polyester into the space.

Anna Ehrenstein was born in Germany to Albanian parents and works in transdisciplinary artistic practice. While her mother could acess a residency permit through a work visa, her father left Germany after denied asylum and started anew in Tirana. This biographical peculiarity aroused her interest in the necropolitics of migration. The main focuses of her work are reflections on the visual and material culture of the periphery, networked images, ecologies and precarious assemblages .
She studied photography and media art in Germany and attended curatorial classes in Valetta, ML and Lagos, NG. Her work as an art un-educator is part of her collaborative, artistic and activist practice.

The materialization of intangible data, constructions around authenticity, “high” and “low” cultures and reflections on circulations are as much a part of her installation process as texts and written word. She writes for magazines like Arts of the Working Class or Artleaks and works with a large number of groups on joint artistic projects, including for the 10th Berlin Biennale for contemporary art, as part of the queer feminist collective N * A * I * L * S or for the Critical Academy in Dublin.

She exhibits internationally, including at MdbK Leipzig, R’encontres d’Arles, at Pablos Birthday New York, at Museum Centquatre Paris FR, at Bazament Art Space Tirana AL or at the Fotomuseum Winterthur.

The Living Virtual Theatre (2020)

Omsk Social Club began creating intuitive gaming boards in 2019. These boards acted as both aesthetic artistic objects that can be viewed in a native gallery setting and/or they were designed to offer a gateway into their conceptual practice of Real Game Play*​.​ ​

Gateways naturally presume a space of transition, yet perhaps the boards offer more of a crossroads than a simple choice to enter or not. As there are so many routes, one can take with these boards, an infinite number of possibilities can be born or rejected across these boards.

Historically, Crossroads are extremely charged spaces – choices have to be made, fears, facts and fictions overlap and of course the acknowledgement that choosing one path immediately closes down another. The anthropologist Victor Turner notes that Crossroads create “liminal zones” ambiguous threats and potent transformations are promised from this hybrid of cultural geography.

Another liminal zone that is ever more present in our fates and fabrications of narratives is the internet and the Game boards were designed with the architecture of the world wide web in mind. Symbols appear as do uncuffed words – one finds the recognisable along with jargon and chaos. This new mode of communication technology, the internet materially embodies our ability to discover and exploit natural laws through the exercise of reason, it is but all form of humanity rotting in its beautiful abyss.

And to survive you have to keep moving, as you do with the Game boards do not let your rational mind close your intuitive core that is the only rule of understanding the simulation we live in both in fiction and reality.

The Living Virtual Theatre e​xamines the notion of Chapel Perilous: A Temporary Decentralized Temple inspired by Simone Weil, Robert Anton Wilson, thee temple ov psychick youth and many other practitioners of reality crafting. The board guides the user’s unconscious mind through pathways such as the Bootcamp for losing yourself in ten easy steps or lucid dying in the age of Necropolitics.

Each route will offer a new set of horizons, allowing the viewer to perform an entangled reading of the work and their own lived reality. Omsk Social Club declares the only way to really view this work is participation as the perception of viewing, over the opening weekend there will also be guides that take the viewer deeper into the work and their unconscious landscape.

*A live action role-playing game (LARP) is a form of role playing game (rpg) where the participants physically act out their characters’ actions.

Real Game Play (RGP) mutation of rpg see above, is a combination of Larp and your own identity/lived experience – think of it like a meta structure of you and the character given to you to act out.

Shaun Motsi (b. 1989 Harare, Zimbabwe) studied at HfBK Städelschule, Frankfurt am Main from 2015 to 2020, with professor Judith Hopf. Through painting, video, installation, and writing, Shaun’s work explores the politics and potentialities of language- often focusing on the ways in which narratives are constructed, inherited, appropriated or transformed in the processes of worldmaking and cultural production. Shaun is interested in the effects that these processes have on subjectivity, on the constantly shifting boundaries between subject and object or self and other. His work has been exhibited in art spaces around Europe, in the US and Canada.

Sowing the Seeds for the Future

As a multimedia video, sound and space installation, Sowing the Seeds for the Future weaves three narratives into a “science-fictional poetry”.

The starting point is the history and activities of ICARDA (International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas), whose research programme and data collection in Aleppo, Syria, was threatened with destruction due to the ongoing war.

In 2011/12, various employees were involved in the exfiltration of seeds from the war zone in Syria under the most difficult and dangerous conditions in order to secure the remaining stocks in new centres in Lebanon and Morocco.

Part of this action to preserve the seeds was also the first repatriation in 2015 of seed samples from the Svalbard Global Seed Vault for duplication. The bomb-proof and permafrost-situated facility provides a genetic archive of about one third of the world’s seeds, which can be accessed in case of regional and global crises, wars and climate disasters. A material back-up copy, which in the face of apocalyptic scenarios of world events is intended to guarantee the genetic diversity of plants as well as the nutrition of mankind.

ICARDA owns one of the world’s largest collections of old or wild seed varieties, which it continuously plants and archives. ICARDA’s research goal is to prevent hunger crises as a result of droughts and other disasters. In the face of rising global temperatures, water shortages and new pathogens, these seed varieties are becoming important building blocks for science to rediscover and apply the characteristics and survival skills they have acquired over thousands of years. ICARDA does not practise genetic manipulation and provides its seeds to farmers and scientists without financial compensation, on condition that no patents are taken out on them.

In Sowing the Seeds for the Future the images from the research institute are interwoven with a conversation with the natural philosopher Andreas Weber, who deals with the idea of unconditional reciprocity and paraphrases this with the concept of “edibility”. In addition, another fictional voice conveys the perspective of the stored seeds.

Thus, in this video project, the narrative modes mix and merge, culminating in a kind of “science-fictional poetry”. For science fiction is the place where the boundaries between fiction and political and scientific reality are blurred and new worlds can be experimented with.

Dominique Koch is a Basel and Paris based visual artist, understanding her works as “thinking laboratories” that merge different fields of research resulting in hybrid entanglements and unlikely intellectual encounters. Solo exhibitions include CAN—Centre d’art Neuchâtel, Rinomina Paris, Centre Culturel Suisse Paris and upcoming at MASI Lugano. Her works won several awards and were presented in various group exhibitions at, among others, CCCB Barcelona, STATE Studio Berlin, Shedhalle Zürich, Istituto Svizzero di Roma, Lagos Biennial II, A Tale of a Tub Rotterdam, Frankfurter Kunstverein, Swissnex San Francisco, Kunsthalle Basel, EKKM Tallinn, Copenhagen Contemporary, and Kunsthalle Mainz.

Supported by Abteilung Kultur Basel-Stadt and Saly Frommer Foundation

The self-help community dispensary

“Building community is to the collective as spiritual practice is to the individual.”

by Grace Lee Boggs

The self-help community dispensary is a space to find healing, to practice self-care and care for the community – built by the many and made for the many. It is a pharmacy for togetherness, a place to heal, to sooth, to take care and mutually protect each other.

As a practice of community care the remedies will be made collectively in the course of the exhibition. A variety of remedies with different healing powers will be available. Visitors can take with them the healing remedy that they feel they need at the very moment.
The self-help community dispensary is a place that tends to the needs of the individual in order for the community to flourish.

The remedies will be made collectively on the 14th of November 2020.

Sign In here to help make the remedies.

With the voices of Melly Iyabo Reden, Muriel Scholl, Solina Sahli, Stéph and Tina Yemi Reden

Stéph

First and foremost she is a gardener.

Stéph’s field of dedication shifted from international political and economic systems to mycorrhizae systems, reoccurring patterns across all the biological kingdoms’ species and to designs of intelligence and remembering in other than human entities. After graduating in international relationships from the University of Geneva she is currently studying Environmental Engineering at the Zurich University of Applied Sciences.

Tina Yemi Reden

Tina explores polyphony, the role of active listening and the resulting entanglements, interdependencies and relationships. She’s interested in the moments of care needed when living in and listening to this abundance of connections, desires and interactions. She works with sound installations, rituals, storytelling or listening sessions as possible places for decolonial, queer feminist, and mindful practices – always trying to initiate intimate moments of being together. She studied at the Zurich University of Arts, the Rietveld Academie and the Sandberg Institute in Amsterdam.