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).