Within the framework of our research exhibition Bodies Extra-ordinaires we host the screening of this film at our production studio in Westerdok and online on the ificantdance.studio. Set against the backdrop of second-wave feminism and the larger struggle to escape the repressive authoritarian regime in 1970s Brazil, Sea of Roses proposes a set of women figures whose behaviours and violent acts deliver a raw critique of institutions and established beliefs regarding the family, education, religion, romantic love and the honouring of the father. Following a gruesome attempted murder at the start of the film, mother and daughter set off on a journey full of mischievous, surreal events, which leaves viewers situated in a complex negotiation of identification and alienation. We are happy to offer a new subtitled version of this important film after the copy with the English subtitles was burnt in a fire at the cinematheque of São Paulo.

Sea of Roses, 1h30 min, col. Brazilian/Portuguese with English Subtitles.

If I Can’t Dance production studio
Westerdok 606–608
1013 BV Amsterdam

Studio (streaming only once at 19hr)

ificantdance.studio

Free, the audience number is limited to 25 people, first come first served

Corona QR code is required to attend

Soup and drinks will be served from 18hr, the screening starts at 19hr

Before the screening the library display is open to visit

Within the framework of our research exhibition Bodies Extra-ordinaires we host the screening of this film online at the ificantdance.studio. Ulrike Ottinger’s world of ‘freaks’ or unusual characters with physical or mental oddities gradually seem much less odd than their physically ‘normal’ contemporaries. Over the course of five episodes the film traces different origin stories.

Freak Orlando, 126 min, col. German with English subtitles

ificantdance.studio

Within the framework of our research exhibition Bodies Extra-ordinaires we host the screening of this film at our production studio in Westerdok and online on the ificantdance.studio. Three women are accused of the murder of a shopkeeper. The film subtly layers the forms of microaggressions experienced by the women and carried out by male partners in their lives and work. The narrative poignantly intersperses silence and laughter, which comes to a culmination in the last scene of the film. In 1983 artist Barbara Kruger reviewed the film for Art Forum and described how at each screening she attended in New York the infectious laughter of the women spread from the screen to the theatre audience.

A Question of Silence, 92 min, col. Dutch with English Subtitles.

Soup and drinks will be served from 18hr the screening starts at 19hr.

Artist Pauline Curnier Jardin will be present.

If I Can’t Dance production studio
Westerdok 606–608
1013 BV Amsterdam

Studio (for 24 hours)
ificantdance.studio

Free, the audience number is limited to 35 people, first come first served

Corona QR code is required to attend

At the premises of the If I Can’t Dance production studio, both in Westerdok and online, archivist Anik Fournier and scholar Giulia Damiani create a research space and dramaturgy of activities inspired by Curnier Jardin’s feature film in the making. Departing from the artist’s somatic world of martyred saints, secreting beings and anatomic caves, a library display explores potentials of transforming bodies, human and more-than-human, in cinematic language. Furthermore, the ificantdance.studio accumulates other resources around the vocabularies, stories and feminist genealogies informing Curnier Jardin’s film production. The project runs in conjunction with the exhibition Waiting for Agatha, Sebastian and the Rest of the Holy Children — Unfolding A Filmic Research at Index in Stockholm.

Library display

If I Can’t Dance production studio
Westerdok 606–608
1013 BV Amsterdam
Exhibition Opening: 27 October, 17hr
Open daily Wednesday, 13–17hr

Studio display

ificantdance.studio

Please note that to compensate the period of closure due to the lock down, the library display will be extended until 9 February

Pauline Curnier Jardin, Explosion Ma Baby, 2016. HD video and sound, 7 minutes (excerpt) © Pauline Curnier Jardin

The artist’s research in Italy is shared through a video letter and trailer, alongside viewings of Explosion Ma Baby (2016), in which naked babies are lifted in front of alter pieces during Italy’s chaotic Saint Sebastian festival, and Qu’un sang impur (2019). In the latter, based on Jean Genet’s homo-erotic film Un chant d’amour, Qu’un sang impur (1950), the male bodies in the original are replaced with menopausal women celebrating their erotic powers.

Qu’un sang impur, 16 min 5 sec, col, German with English Subtitles

Explosion Ma Baby, 9 min, col

Introduction
Not Yet Shebang

Hettenheuvelweg 16

1101 BN Amsterdam

The Netherlands

Free, reservations required

A meditation on human violence and the possibility of transformation, Fire for Water is a solo performance by Los Angeles based artist MPA. The duality of fire as a force of both creation and destruction is a metaphor that burns throughout the piece, igniting the complicated entanglements between wounds and armaments, protection and oppression, spectacles and wars. Led by an original soundtrack, the piece enacts a dream-like space where different visions appear. Water vessels, armors, fires, and telepathic means are characters in a story that unfolds across different modes of being. Speaking to the wounds that inhabit us, self-armaments are undone, leaving space to the desire to be wet and to be with water.

After it premiered with If I Can’t Dance at Kunstfort bij Vijfhuizen in October last year, Fire for Water will be presented this month as a full theatre piece in the space of Gessnerallee in Zürich.

Gessnerallee

Gessnerallee 8

88001 Zürich

Switzerland

Tickets

Departing from the question ‘Can we stop bullets with our minds?’, the performance develops further the artist’s investigation of psychological and esoteric dynamics propelling human violence and systems of defense. The piece is conceived specifically for the spaces and gardens of the Kunstfort, a former military fort on the Amsterdam defence line. The fort’s bunker becomes a dream-like space where different visions appear. As if in a perverted fashion show, self-armaments are done and undone, igniting the complicated entanglements between protection and oppression, spectacles and wars. After the two evenings, remnants of the performance stay at the Kunstfort conjuring an afterlife of the dreams awakened.

18hr, shuttle departure at 17hr
20hr, shuttle departure at 19hr

€10/€12,50 with shuttle from Amsterdam

Purchase your tickets here

Exhibition:

Friday 22 October – Sunday 5 December 2021

Friday – Sunday, 13–17hr

€4 adults / €2 children 12–18 years / free children up to 12 years

Purchase your ticket here

Kunstfort bij Vijfhuizen

Fortwachter 1

2141 EE Vijfhuizen (Haarlemmermeer)

The Netherlands

The artist shares a public address in the context of El Caldo/the Broth, a festival transmitted by Gessnerallee, Zürich. Thinking about oceanic and diasporic journeys, El Caldo focusses on the invisible ways in which people, in order to survive, communicate through waves, spores, winds and telepathies. Somewhere in between the lines of practical communiqué and channelled phantasms, MPA’s sonic meditation ruminates on the foreignness of coming together across cosmological distances. The radio transmission is one of the many manifestations of her performance commission Fire for Water.

You can listen to the piece here.

Gessnerallee
Gessnerallee 8
8001 Zürich
Switzerland

The audience is seated astride a sort of catwalk with a sword at one end. In angular sunglasses, black jeans and a dark hoodie, the artist offers concise statements: ‘These are dark times, but these are not the darkest times’; ‘Will we save each other from ourselves?’ She closes by kneeling, repeating the same phrase – a ritualistic moment in which ‘spectators’ might negotiate their position and possibly join her.

Introduction 
Not Yet Shebang

Hettenheuvelweg 16

1101 BN Amsterdam

The Netherlands

Free, reservations required

A database archiving the artist’s work, which is assembled through storytelling and reproductive labour methods developed with his collaborators Amalia Calderón, Megan Hoetger and Radna Rumping over the nearly three-years of their eponymous durational performance of archiving. The website catalogs nearly 2400 ‘studio objects’, tracing the web-like network of relations that characterize the artist’s practice and highlighting the multiplicity of ways in which objects and their stories can be entered.

giftsciencearchive.net

The exhibition brings together works exploring humour as a strategy for describing alternative representations of gay male sexuality and mental health; and which centre the influence of feminist figures, including the artist’s former teacher and long-time friend Carolee Schneemann. Through such strategies, the artist consciously and systematically links with the history of feminist art practice.

The show is accompanied by commissioned and restaged performances from Cassie Augusta Jørgensen (DK) & Rory Pilgrim (UK / NL), Harilay Rabenjamina (FR) and Ebun Sodipo (UK). For more on the exhibition and public programme, visit: https://autoitaliasoutheast.org

Opening hours: Thursday – Sunday 12-17hr

Auto Italia, London

44 Bonner Rd, Bethnal Green

London E2 9JS

United Kingdom

In the final process event, the artist and collaborators Amalia Calderón, Megan Hoetger and Radna Rumping sit together with If I Can’t Dance archive and research curator Anik Fournier to discuss the structures of ‘collaboration’ within the group’s performance of archiving and the modes of feminist storytelling and knowledge production developed over the course of their eighteen months working together. They also share insights into their respective roles and shared tasks throughout the process.

Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten

Free, live-streamed

As a pendant piece to the artist’s exhibition for the Rijksakademie Open Studios 2021, the durational performance invites visitors inside the project’s studio-depot where the artist and collaborators Megan Hoetger and Radna offer a peak into the group’s working processes and relational methods.

Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten, studio (A14)
Sarphatistraat 470
1018GW Amsterdam
The Netherlands

€10, registration required

Conceived within the frame of the Rijksakademie Open Studios 2021, the exhibition presents a wide selection of never-before-seen works, which have been unearthed in the artist’s performance of archiving, including paintings on paper and fabric, photographs and video, and works by Senga Nengudi and Carolee Schneemann from his personal collection. The installation highlights the artist’s long-standing practices of writing, painting, posing, and feminist citationality.

Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten, studio (A15)
Sarphatistraat 470
1018GW Amsterdam
The Netherlands

€10, registration required

The installation opens up the process of the ‘monumental’ 18-month collaborative performance Gift Science Archive (GSA) to the public for haptic engagements with the artist’s working and archiving processes. Visitors are invited to peruse the GSA database and to pull materials from the collection for a closer look and, over a cup, for a story. The ‘research experience’ is thus set into relational motion, by conversations – a central part of Murray-Wassink’s practice.

mistral

Groenhoedenveem 2
(entrance round the corner at Veemkade)
1019 BL Amsterdam
The Netherlands

Research Visits: Thursdays and Saturdays, 12–17hr
Book here

Virtual Tours: Fridays, 17–18hr
Book here

Free

Exhibition folder

The second of the Gift Science Archive process events unfolds over eight months, as the artist corresponds with Bilbao-based curator Aimar Arriola, reflecting on how ‘queer’ relationships – including the one in the making here – form, grow, shift and blossom. Across the letters, they share insights into their lives and perspectives on the primary materials (thoughts, feelings and relationships) and key thematics (sex, sexuality, gender, health and self-care) in Murray-Wassink’s art/life practice. The exchange (26 June 2020–6 February 2021) is available for the public as a quilt-like network of chapters at ificantdance.studio.

ificantdance.studio

In the opening of a three-part series, the artist takes stock of the role of ‘value’ in his 25-year oeuvre at the start of his collaboration with the Gift Science Archive group: Amalia Calderón (storyteller and artistic researcher), Megan Hoetger (If I Can’t Dance curator) and Radna Rumping (independent curator and editor). In connection to Murray-Wassink’s year-long studio residency at the Rijksakademie, the conversation unfolds as a studio visit with Associate Professor of Conservation and Museum Studies at Maastricht University, Vivian van Saaze, and members of the Amsterdam artist community in which the artist and collaborators engage in the tension between value and archive as organising principles in Murray-Wassink’s practice and in the project of preserving the past,

Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten

Sarphatistraat 470

1018 GW Amsterdam

The Netherlands

Free, reservations required

The artist’s textile paintings adorn the space throughout the weekend. Here, he shares on his multimedia practice, concentrating on its early beginnings in 1993, in a slide show that makes clear his reliance on feminist figures like Carolee Schneeman, Hannah Wilke and Adrian Piper. He then dances before a dual projection – a

Schneemann video and footage from his studio – in and out of step with ‘Starlight’ by The Supermen Lovers.

Introduction
Not Yet Shebang

Hettenheuvelweg 16

1101 BN Amsterdam

The Netherlands

Free, reservations required

Part of the Arts Everywhere Festival, this Big Ideas in Art + Culture talk with Carter is a collective listening session masquerading as a lecture. Pairing musical selections from his Black Revelry Quiet Storm radio show with close readings of Ernie Barnes’ painting The Sugar Shack, Carter together with his audience explore what happens when we apply the painting to our social worlds.

Art Gallery of Guelph
358 Gordon St

Guelph, ON N1G 1Y1, USA

No RSVP required.

For more information, click here.

Convened by Dr. Saidiya Hartman, this event is part of the “black poesis/radical composition” series, which examines literary experiments in prose and poetics by contemporary writers, critics and artists whose work in sonic production, visual culture, critical thought, textual assemblage and auto-theory articulates possibilities of living and making inside the racialized enclosure. Carter is joined by Black Revelry contributor Samiya Bashir for a reading from the publication followed by a small academic seminar led by Carter, Bashir and Hartman.

Columbia University
Deutsches Haus
420 W. 116 Street
New York 10027, USA

No RSVP required, seating on a first come first serve basis.

For more information, click here.

Organized by Dr. Aleia Monae Brown and Carter, this event features a five-course meal with readings from Black Revelry, as well as sonic interludes from the Black Revelry Quiet Storm radio show, between courses.

Coffee + Spice

1025 West Fifth Street

Greenville, North Carolina 97834, USA

Berlin launch of Derrais Carter’s publication Black Revelry: In Honor of ‘The Sugar Shack’, hosted by the wonderful Hopscotch Reading Room, a bookshop centering non-western and diasporic perspectives. Carter will be joined in conversation by curator Megan Hoetger and publication designer Karoline Świeżyński to discuss key conceptual and material elements of the Black Revelry album-book, including notions of the detail and the sprawl in relation to the readerly experience. The dialogue closes with a DJ set from Carter, which draws together a selection of songs from his Black Revelry Quiet Storm radio shows, aired between December 2020 and February 2021.

Hopscotch Reading Room
Kurfürstenstraße 14/Haus B
10785 Berlin, Germany

Free

An experiment in book making, which takes up the form of the LP record as a starting point for re-configuring the haptics of the printed book. Presented as a collection of unbound pages inside a gatefold record sleeve, the publication includes a pressed record, as well as written, visual and sonic contributions from scholars, poets, artists, choreographers and DJs. Through the logic of the detail, each contributor imaginatively (re)produces Ernie Barnes’s iconic painting The Sugar Shack as an archive of personal histories and a universe of intergenerational connections. Held together as an album, it is a performance to be made at home, which invites readers/listeners to feel art’s histories and to be in them with their bodies.

To accompany the release of Carter’s publication, a seven-hour live broadcasting marathon featuring all three of his radio shows, as well as a very special one-hour guest set from publication contributor DJ scholar Lynnée Denise. The live broadcast is hosted by the Sandberg Instituut where the space is transformed into a listening lounge replete with pillows, blankets, and cocktail selections. At the finale of the marathon, Carter hosts a conversation on the performance-based research methods that inform his project. The live session in Amsterdam is followed by radio broadcasts in Los Angeles and Berlin.

Ja Ja Ja Nee Nee Nee, Amsterdam
Fred. Roeskestraat 96
1076 ED Amsterdam

Other broadcasts
Monday 29 November 2021, 12-19hr
dublab, Los Angeles

Sunday 28 November 2021, 2-9hr
reboot.fm, Berlin

In conjunction with the end of his residency in the Sandberg Instituut’s Fine Arts department, Carter presents a display of elements from Black Revelry: In Honor of ‘The Sugar Shack’, bringing attention to the incredible scope of haptic and sensorial experiences held together in the publication’s LP sleeve.

Sandberg Institute, Amsterdam
Fred. Roeskestraat 96
1076 ED Amsterdam

Carter as late-night DJ experiments with different modes of storytelling, weaving together sonic readings of ‘the detail’ in Ernie Barnes’s Sugar Shack through song selections (jazz, soul and R&B), personal commentary and recitations of Black critical theory. Episode three, FREQUENCY, shares songs and rhythms that just keep coming back, whether as remakes and remixes, or as embodied memories.

Podcasts of the show now available:

· Ja Ja Ja Nee Nee Nee

· Dublab

· reboot.fm

Ja Ja Ja Nee Nee Nee, Amsterdam and dublab, Los Angeles

Sunday 21 February 2021, 2-4hr

reboot.fm, Berlin

Carter as late-night DJ experiments with different modes of storytelling, weaving together sonic readings of ‘the detail’ in Ernie Barnes’s Sugar Shack through song selections (jazz, soul and R&B), personal commentary and recitations of Black critical theory. Episode two, DISPERSAL, presents a playlist built around ‘the stretch’ of time, of energy – collective and personal – and, most basically, of song length.

Podcasts of the show now available:

· Ja Ja Ja Nee Nee Nee

· Dublab

· reboot.fm

Ja Ja Ja Nee Nee Nee, Amsterdam and dublab, Los Angeles

Sunday 24 January 2021, 2–4hr

reboot.fm, Berlin

Carter as late-night DJ experiments with different modes of storytelling, weaving together sonic readings of ‘the detail’ in Ernie Barnes’s Sugar Shack through song selections (jazz, soul and R&B), personal commentary and recitations of Black critical theory. Episode one, GATHERING, anticipates the winter solstice, offering a rumination on ‘coming together’ from whatever distances are between us.

Podcasts of the show now available:

· Ja Ja Ja Nee Nee Nee

· Dublab

· reboot.fm

Ja Ja Ja Nee Nee Nee, Amsterdam and dublab, Los Angeles

Sunday 20 December 2020, 2-4hr

reboot.fm, Berlin

Structured after a ‘late-night radio show’ – or ‘Quiet Storm’ hour – the artist sits before a projection of Ernie Barnes’ Sugar Shack (1976), a painting as rhizome for black intimacy. The project uses art history and popular music to create a Black written and performative mood, what Aliyyah Abdur-Rahman calls the ‘black ecstatic’. Anecdotes on Gladys Knight and Marvin Gaye – and a circulating bottle of cognac – make for a connected vibe.

Introduction
Not Yet Shebang

Hettenheuvelweg 16

1101 BN Amsterdam

The Netherlands

Free, reservations required

If I Can’t Dance

Westerdok 606–608

1013 BV Amsterdam

A few external spots are available. If you want to join, please send a short motivation (150 words) around your own personal ‘undead’ to ssg@ificantdance.org before October 26.

On the anniversary of the book Maquillage as Meditation, Sara Giannini is joined by performance curator and researcher Daniel Blanga Gubbay for a gathering that articulates the questions and the embodied research methodologies that are at the core of this work: What do we do with the “dirt of our past”? How does one reconcile—or even just face—those early influential figures? How do we understand the experiences they engender(ed), even if it might not be our desire to return to those experiences? But what can happen if we do return? Book contributor Arnisa Zeqo also joins the conversation.

San Serriffe
Sint Annenstraat 30
1012 HE Amsterdam

Free, no reservation required

Partly a script, partly a personal voyage into the psyche of diseducation, this book happens, has happened and will happen on the 31st of October in a place called ‘The Palace of Melancholy’. In this temporal and spatial loop, the figure of Italian actor, author, director, philosopher, and public persona Carmelo Bene is summoned to hopefully be dismissed once and for all. Bene is looked at by the author reluctantly and yet resolutely through inner voices of dissent, shame and rebellion. He is imagined in gatherings that didn’t happen and read through an epistemology of contradiction. In Giannini’s company and support, Snejanka Mihaylova, Jacopo Miliani, and Arnisa Zeqo probe the walls of the Palace, looking for an exit.

Palazzo della Malinconia

Sent via the If I Can’t Dance newsletter

An intimate and experimental text explores the researcher’s conflictual relationship with actor, author, director and public persona Carmelo Bene since she first saw him on Italian television at age 10. Following this entry into dis-identity, ecstasy and the feminine, Bene’s first cinematic experiment, the short-film Hermitage (1968), is shown.

25 min, col, Italian with English subtitles

Introduction
Not Yet Shebang

Hettenheuvelweg 16

1101 BN Amsterdam

The Netherlands

Free, reservation required

Moving between the epistolary, poetry, performance and scholarly research, Anemones centres on a new translation of Simone Weil’s 1942 essay ‘What the Occitan Inspiration Consists Of.’ The text elevates the troubadour concept of love to a practice of political resistance rejecting force in all its forms. Robertson dwells on the transhistorical potential of this concept from the violent context in which it emerged to the troubling conditions of the present. Embracing actualised and suppressed histories, the work testifies to words, friendship and readership as resistance across distances.

After the publication was launched in Amsterdam in December 2021, we are thrilled to announce its upcoming presentation in Vancouver, adding another bead to the long and beautiful relationship of Lisa Robertson with Western Front. The event will begin with a conversation with Yoon Sook Cha, a Vancouver-based writer, photographer, and scholar of Simone Weil, and will be followed by a reading by Robertson of her translations of three troubadour poems and a Q&A period with the audience. For those not able to join onsite, the event can be followed online via livestreaming.

Reading by Lisa Robertson and conversation with Yoon Sook Cha

Tickets
Live stream

Workshop:

Saturday 4 February 2023, 13-16hr

Tickets

Western Front

303 E 8th Ave
Vancouver BC V5T 1S1
Canada

The author’s research on troubadour poetry yields this experiment in thinking ‘near and with’ philosopher and political activist Simone Weil. Moving between the epistolary, poetry, performance and scholarly research, it centres on a new translation of Weil’s 1942 essay ‘What the Occitan Inspiration Consists Of’ that elevates the troubadour concept of love to a practice of political resistance rejecting force in all its forms. Robertson dwells on the transhistorical potential of this concept from the violent context in which it emerged to the troubling conditions of the present. Embracing actualised and suppressed histories, the work testifies to words, friendship and readership as resistance across distances.

To accompany the release of Robertson’s publication, an afternoon with a Radio Emma Broadcast, live (poetry) reading by Lisa Robertson, and a floral action by Benny Nemer. During the radio show, curator archive and research Anik Fournier will be in conversation with Lisa Robertson, contributor Benny Nemer, designers of the book Rietlanden Womens Office’s Johanna Ehde and Elisabeth Rafstedt, and director Frédérique Bergholtz. Over the course of the day you are welcome to pass by and experience a floral action by Benny Nemer, browse through Robertson’s research materials and buy your copy of the book for a reduced launch price of 15 € (through 9 January, afterwards 22 €).

Ellen de Bruijne Projects
Singel 372, Amsterdam
Ja Ja Ja Nee Nee Nee

13–14hr

Anik Fournier a.o., Radio Emma

Tune in via Ja Ja Ja Nee Nee Nee

14–17hr, ongoing
Benny Nemer, Floral Action

15hr (fully booked)

Reading – Lisa Robertson
A poem by Bernart de Ventadorn

16hr (fully booked)

Reading – Lisa Robertson
A poem by William IX of Poitiers

Both readings are fully booked, but please pass by for your copy and for experiencing Benny Nemers floral action between 14-15hr; 15.30-16hr; and 16.30-17hr

Free

The researcher shifts registers between poetry and academic study in examining rhyme and voice among medieval troubadours – the first European poets to write in their spoken regional vernacular – in the Languedoc region. Her outline of voice and vernacular as a space where power is constantly renegotiated and reconfigured is punctuated by readings from her poetry.

Introduction
Not Yet Shebang

Hettenheuvelweg 16

1101 BN Amsterdam

The Netherlands

Free, reservations required

This documentary follows the personal discussions, people and places related to four women originally from Lebanon and Syria: Waad, Hanin, Rogine and Zeina. In their new cities, they face questions about the meaning of their cultures, family and political visions. Is exile a choice or an accident? What is home? How do we behave in our new countries? Does the abuse of the word ‘refugee’ affect us?

43 min, col, Arabic with English subtitles

Van Abbemuseum
Bilderdijklaan 10

5611 NH Eindhoven
The Netherlands

This documentary follows the personal discussions, people and places related to four women originally from Lebanon and Syria: Waad, Hanin, Rogine and Zeina. In their new cities, they face questions about the meaning of their cultures, family and political visions. Is exile a choice or an accident? What is home? How do we behave in our new countries? Does the abuse of the word ‘refugee’ affect us?

Avant-première with Syrian banquet by Aleppo Kitchen, and a music performance by Rogine Hassan.

43 min, col, Arabic with English subtitles

ZID Theatre
De Roos van Dekamaweg 1

1061 HR Amsterdam
The Netherlands

€12,50 adults / €10 students
(includes meal)

The film, whose title translates as ‘to the health of allies’, narrates layers of parallel events in Lebanon and Syria during the pan-Arab Nasserite movement of the 1950s and 60s. Made from 2003–16 and told from the different perspective of the artist’s relatives, opinions and recollections of the same incidents begin to contradict each other, mixing personal and political events to reveal time as three-dimensional rather than linear.

Eye Filmmuseum
IJpromenade 1

1031 KT Amsterdam
The Netherlands

€5 

This new performance engages third-year SNDO – School for New Dance Development students in a two-week workshop towards a public presentation. The artist’s solo work this is a performance. / you are a community. / you are my material. / this is a prison. / leave when you want is opened up to other bodies who conceive something else to share.

A night of poetry, dance, performance and music lead by the artist and Derrais Carter and facilitated by sidony o’neal and Adee Roberson (Tropic Green) for the talent development project of the Bijlmer Parktheater whereby young talent from eighteen years old with experience in performance can further deepen their competencies in poetry, photography, theatre and dance.

In Amsterdam to further develop their commission, the artist presents a performance that, as Litia Perta writes, is ‘less about a whole picture – a total or totalizing knowledge – than it is about intimacy, failure to see, nearness that obstructs rather than clarifies … this work unsettles, undoes, asks what it means, looks like, feels like, to come undone, to see only fragments, to have little or no context.’

FLAM – Forum for Live Art Amsterdam at Arti et Amicitiae
Rokin 112

1012 LB Amsterdam
The Netherlands

€7,50 

Writer Jamie Hale has reflected on this work in The Oregonian: ‘… no matter how hard keyon gaskin tries to make the performance not a thing, its not a thing is somehow the most captivating thing in town.’

Dansmakers Podium
Gedempt Hamerkanaal 203

1021 KP Amsterdam
The Netherlands

€7,50 adults / €5 students

An exchange of sensorial, perceptive and imaginary tools developed through her practice: touch, different modes of seeing, states between sleep and wakefulness and silent forms of communication. Collective conversations with participants about the experiences produced by these tools open up and map the issues that emerge from the modified states, addressing contemporary modes of attention and guided by the enquiry: What practice creates the conditions for our attention to shift?

Participants are asked to bring a text they consider feminist and an object or fabric with interesting tactile or sound properties.

Podium Mozaïek
Bos en Lommerweg 191, 1055 DT Amsterdam
The Netherlands

Free, reservations required

(includes meal)

An exchange of sensorial, perceptive and imaginary tools developed through her practice: touch, different modes of seeing, states between sleep and wakefulness and silent forms of communication. Collective conversations with participants about the experiences produced by these tools open up and map the issues that emerge from the modified states, addressing contemporary modes of attention and guided by the enquiry: What practice creates the conditions for our attention to shift?

Centro Municipal de San Francisco
Plaza Corazón de María s/n, 48003 Bilbao
Spain

Free, reservations required

An exchange of sensorial, perceptive and imaginary tools developed through her practice: touch, different modes of seeing, states between sleep and wakefulness and silent forms of communication. Collective conversations with participants about the experiences produced by these tools open up and map the issues that emerge from the modified states, addressing contemporary modes of attention and guided by the enquiry: What practice creates the conditions for our attention to shift?

Huiskamer van de Buurt de Tagerijn
Balboastraat 18, 1057 VW Amsterdam
The Netherlands

Free, reservations required

One of a series of public meetings putting into practice the research about attention, sensation and perception conducted during her three-month residency at La Ferme du Buisson. Through various immersive devices that provoke encounters between choreographic artists and spectators, Lefkowitz creates the conditions for an increased perceptual experience through the use of gaze, touch, walking and liminal states between sleep and waking.

La Ferme du Buisson
Allée de la Ferme, 77186 Noisiel
France

Free

At last the Amsterdam public can view the 2019 installation that concludes the eponymous video trilogy named after the last of several maned lionesses – a cipher for queer attachment and desire – documented in the Okavango Delta, Botswana. The artist came to know about the lioness through conservationists’ camera-trap and behaviour footage. 

Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam
Museumplein 10
1071 DJ Amsterdam
The Netherlands

€20 adults / €10 students and CJP

With narration and film, Anastas introduces her study of artist and philosopher Adrian Piper’s Some Reflective Surfaces (1975–76). In this piece, Piper appears as a disco dancer in modified Mythic Being guise, performing for the first time in formal terms for an art audience. Additionally, two other works by Piper are screened: It’s Just Art (1980) and Aspects of the Liberal Dilemma (1978).

If I Can’t Dance
Westerdok 606–608, 1013 BV Amsterdam
The Netherlands

Free

In empathy with female subjectivities, several of Eszter Salamon’s works focus on feminist genealogies and transgenerational relations. M/OTHERS reconsiders the structures of generations by exploring the mother-daughter relation, aiming to move away from social norms and arrive at new modalities of action, feeling and perception.

If I Can’t Dance and Nataša Petrešin-Bachelez commissioned Eszter Salomon to make a new performance in the frame of the research project on Delphine Seyrig’s unrealised black-and-white silent feature film Calamity based on the correspondence between American frontierswoman Calamity Jane and her daughter.

Splendor
Nieuwe Uilenburgerstraat 116, 1011 LX Amsterdam
The Netherlands
Part of Amsterdam Art Weekend

€15 regular / €10 students

A reactivation of actress, video-maker and feminist activist Delphine Seyrig’s unrealised black and white silent feature about the letters of US-American frontierswoman Calamity Jane to her daughter. At the heart of Seyrig’s interest in the story is the relationship between mother and daughter, which she explores as an actress in Chantal Akerman’s Letters Home (1986), screened here alongside camerawoman Babette Mangolte’s Calamity rushes and Seyrig’s videos S.C.U.M. Manifesto (1976), Maso et Miso vont en bateau (1976) and Inês (1974).

Eye Filmmuseum
IJpromenade 1, 1031 KT Amsterdam
The Netherlands

€5 adults / students

Twelve women dressed in as many striking colours of Aldo van Eyck’s Hubertushuis – designed in 1973 as a home for mothers in difficulty – stand on its balconies and behind its windows. The public is told nothing about what they might see, allowed access to one of the two conjoined structures, but not the one occupied by the performers.

Finale

Hubertushuis

Plantage Middenlaan 33, 1018 DB Amsterdam

The Netherlands

€5 adults / students

The elastic golden thread hooked over nails and stretched across the entrance windows solicits thoughts of modernist architect Eileen Gray. The opponent of Le Corbusier’s philosophy is channelled through this shimmering vector that ‘emanates to the world’ from J.B. Ingwersen’s building – inspired by Le Corbusier’s Unité d’Habitation and its principals of living – where this edition’s artists are introduced. Also a high school, the space embraces learning, becoming and testing ideas.

Introduction

Cygnus Gymnasium

Vrolikstraat 8, 1091 VG Amsterdam

The Netherlands

€15 adults / €10 students

(includes meal)

In the frame of Centre Pompidou’s programme Mai 68 – Assemblée Générale, this film presentation of Our Future Network (2016) derives from a larger work that traces the genealogy of ‘feminist new materialist’ and ‘sexual difference’ theory. In addition, ten participants gather to reflect on the focus they each have on feminism today and their relationship to 1970s feminisms.

54 min 34 sec, col, English

Centre Pompidou
Place Georges-Pompidou, 75004 Paris
France

Free

Accompanied by a screening of the artist’s Their desire rang through the halls and into the tower (2014) highlighting five practices developed within the Gender Studies programme at Utrecht University: double-track approach to institutional politics, international networking, pluralism, affirmative critique and transdisciplinarity. Followed by a conversation between the artist, Casco curator Staci Bu Shea and If I Can’t Dance curator and book co-editor, Susan Gibb.

Casco Art Institute: Working for the Commons
Lange Nieuwstraat 7, 3512 PA Utrecht
The Netherlands

Free

The six film installation traces the stories of as many connected feminist groups since the 1970s who have built communities in Europe and Australia. Through observation, interviews and archival research the artist proposes how to grapple with contemporary society through feminist methodologies. The final film, Our Future Network (2016), offers twenty propositions for feminist collective political practices.

54 min 34 sec, col, English

Exhibition Opening and Book Launch: Friday 27 April, 19–23.30hr

Archive Kabinett

Müllerstraße 133, 13349 Berlin

Germany

Free

Six films trace the stories of as many feminist groups since the 1970s who have built communities in Europe and Australia. Through observation, interviews and archival research the artist proposes feminist methodologies for contemporary times. The final film, Our Future Network (2016), offers twenty related propositions. A workshop and public salon led by the artist engages with local contributors on historical feminist practices in the film to develop further political practices.

54 min 34 sec, col, English

Badischer Kunstverein

Waldstraße 3, 76133 Karlsruhe

Germany

€ 3 adults / €1,50 reduced / Friday, 14–19hr free / Public Salon free / Workshop free with reservations, bio and statement of motivation

Six films trace the stories of as many feminist groups since the 1970s who have built communities in Europe and Australia. The final film, Our Future Network (2016), offers twenty related propositions. A workshop programme led by the artist extends on Our Future Network propositions for feminist practices according to participants including Helena Reckitt, Senior Lecturer in Curating at Goldsmiths, University of London, featured in the film. Findings are presented in a public salon.

54 min 34 sec, col, English

The Showroom

63 Penfold St, Marylebone, London NW8 8PQ

United Kingdom

Free, reservations for events only

Six films trace the stories of as many feminist groups since the 1970s who have built communities in Europe and Australia. Through observation, interviews and archival research the artist proposes feminist methodologies for contemporary times. The final film, Our Future Network (2016), offers twenty related propositions. Martinis Roe responds to questions gathered from viewers using storytelling, political theory and diagrams considering possible futures that open out from the project.

54 min 34 sec, col, English

ar/ge kunst
Via Museo, 29, 39100 Bolzano BZ

Italy

Free

Invited guests pose strategies for engaging with and constructing feminist histories, in dialogue with contemporary needs, desires and practices hosted by the artist in response to a screening of the film, with comments from Deborah Withers, Ana Teixeira Pinto, choreographer Cécile Bally and Vasso Belia with fellow members of the Gender Studies community at Utrecht University.

54 min 34 sec, col, English

Finale

Dokzaal

Plantage Doklaan 8, 1018 CM Amsterdam

The Netherlands

€10 adults / €7,50 students

(€10 for meal and drinks)

Six films trace the stories of as many feminist groups since the 1970s who have built communities in Europe and Australia. Through observation, interviews and archival research the artist proposes feminist methodologies for contemporary times. The final film, Our Future Network (2016), offers twenty related propositions. With a tour by the artist and day-long salon, ‘Our Future Network: Historiography, Public Speaking, and Collective Difference’.

54 min 34 sec, col, English

Casco Art Institute: Working for the Commons 
Lange Nieuwstraat 7, 3512 PA Utrecht
The Netherlands 

Free

Considering trans-generational collective politics as part of the programme, Priorities: The Talk Show provides participants with the chance to undertake exercises based on collective political practices developed by the Milan Women’s Bookstore Collective from the 1970s to today, drawing on and part of the research and methodologies of the artist’s project.

Piet Zwart Institute

Karel Doormanhof 45, 3012 GC Rotterdam

The Netherlands

Free, reservations required

Twenty-seven women meet for programmed activities in a large guesthouse in the Brandenburg countryside outside Berlin, expanding on the workshop series over the past eighteen months with prepared contributions – discussions, group tasks, etc. – the artist terms ‘propositions for feminist collective practice’. The meeting provides the action for the development of the last film.

Gutshof Sauen  

Herrn Jörn Geffers  

Zum Anger 8, D–15848 Rietz-Neuendorf  

Ortsteil Sauen  

Germany

Closed set

Field notes from To Become Two mapping feminist collectives and a screening of It was an unusual way of doing politics: there were friendships, loves, gossip, tears flowers (2014) on a meeting of 300 women are presented alongside edition introductions in a J.B. Ingwersen-designed building inspired by Le Corbusier’s Unité d’Habitation and its principals of living. As a functioning high school, the space encourages learning, becoming and testing ideas.

10 min 34 sec, Super 8, col, English

Introduction

Cygnus Gymnasium

Vrolikstraat 8, 1091 VG Amsterdam

The Netherlands

€15 adults / €10 students

(includes meal)

Charting his attempt to exhaust his interest in the Guatemalan Civil War, the publication is launched with the artist and If I Can’t Dance’s Frédérique Bergholtz and Susan Gibb alongside an exhibition of the complete collection of video works documenting the performance cycle.

grunt gallery

50 E 2nd Ave, Vancouver, BC V5T 4R8 

Canada

Free

This solo presentation debuts the complete collection of video works documenting a three-year performance cycle. The artist uses his body and direct action to perform six images related to the Guatemalan Civil War, his personal position softening images through abstraction and humour while the intense performance schedule pushes beyond the immense force of the collective and inscribed memory of the war’s history. Here videos are featured as part of Capture Photography Festival.

grunt gallery

50 E 2nd Ave, Vancouver, BC V5T 4R8 

Canada

Free

Four video works see the artist use his body and direct action to perform a series of images related to the history of the Guatemalan Civil War at punctuated moments and locations across a three-year period. The personal approach soften images of the war through abstraction and humour, while the intensity of the performance schedule is used to push beyond the immense force of the collective and inscribed memory of the war’s history.

Playground, Leuven

Leopold Vanderkelenstraat 28, 3000 Leuven

Belgium

€12 adults / €5 youth

Fluorescent lights are arranged across modernist open-planned floors and surrounded by ceremonial objects – candles, cigars, bowls of honey and perfume, roses from the sellers at the city’s cemetery – selected for their ties to Spiritsm, ‘dedicated to the relationship between incorporeal beings and human beings’. Performers communicate from their stations by using the objects, at times setting fire to patterns left over from their intuitively sewn together white-gauze shirts.

Brazilian Tour

Casa do Povo

Rua Três Rios, 252 – Bom Retiro, São Paulo 01123-000

Brazil

Free

The site-specific installation is presented with the fifth and final performance in this cycle along with the four previous videos. Focusing on eighteenth-century Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus who created a nomenclature to classify living species, a cold and bleak atmosphere of a farm emerges where hybrid species are grown on an industrial scale, addressing a recurrent theme in the artist’s work: the suffering of land and the people who farm it.

CAPC musée d’art contemporain de Bordeaux

7 Rue Ferrere, 33000 Bordeaux

France

€7 adults / €4 reduced rate

Through a string of rooms established to study tropical cultures, the viewer passes embroidered silk wallpaper, colonial artefacts, a sofa with its springs revealed, a pile of chairs denuded of seats, and then the artist, atop decaying pillows, a Venus, string twined around buttons stitched into their skin – a piece of furniture, a mediation on the body, scars and mimicry. Accompanied by video works of the two other performances.

Royal Tropical Institute

Mauritskade 63, 1092 AD Amsterdam

The Netherlands

Free

This meditative dreamlike scene recalls an emergency response shelter, combining printmaking with human surfaces and bedtime rituals. The artist paints metal bedframes, guiding performers to be imprinted by them; the bed’s tattooed pattern connotes ‘parrilla’, where victims of the Guatemalan Civil War were strapped to metal frames and given electric shocks. Presented at the conclusion of performance programme Sunrise Sunset at KW Institute for Contemporary Art.

KW Institute for Contemporary Art

Auguststraße 69, 10117 Berlin

Germany

€8 adults / €6 reduced

A work originally presented in a gallery is staged at the Guatemala City General Cemetery, which, following the 1917 earthquake, became home to high-rise grave complexes for those unable to afford burial. From 5 to 9 am, the artist holds an ice slab in a blanket like a baby. He wavers under its weight as it melts – the closest we come in these works to realism, to the trauma that inspires them.

Guatemala City

Guatemala

Closed set

Six dormitory-style bedframes make an emergency response shelter out of a high school gym. The artist paints each cot, guiding performers to be imprinted; the bed’s tattooed pattern connotes ‘parrilla’, where victims of the Guatemalan Civil War were strapped to metal frames and given electric shocks. Presented with other introductions to this edition in a J.B. Ingwersen-designed building inspired by Le Corbusier’s Unité d’Habitation and its principals of living.

Introduction

Cygnus Gymnasium

Vrolikstraat 8, 1091 VG Amsterdam

The Netherlands

€15 adults / €10 students

(includes meal)

Premiere

This new commission from If I Can’t Dance presented within BMW Tate Live: Performance Room comprises a corridor of brightly hued sheets hung like theatre wings, swiftly crowded by children carrying oversized props – a claw, twigs – switched out on the artist’s command for animals and fruit, and then, at their behest once more, destroyed, after which the artist approaches the camera. Followed by Q&A with curator Catherine Wood.

Video, 4 min 55 sec, col, sound

Tate Modern

Bankside, London SE1 9TG

United Kingdom

Available online here

The video on the artist’s reorganised archive – drawn from fashion magazines and other media sources with eight teenage students from Amsterdam – is overlaid with passages from philosophers Plato and Vilém Flusser addressing images, text and textiles. Accompanied by a lecture on Flusser’s essay ‘Our Clothes’ by artist, editor and translator Rodrigo Maltez Novaes and a performative workshop in which Robaard invites different practitioners to make configurations with the fashion photographs.

45 min, col, English

Brazilian Tour

Casa do Povo

Rua Três Rios, 252 – Bom Retiro, São Paulo 01123-000

Brazil

Free

The artist’s reorganised archive of photographs and related texts drawn from fashion magazines and other media sources is in part performed with eight students through text rehearsals and discussions. Images are intersected accompanied by passages from Plato and Vilém Flusser, evolving a game-like structure in which latent historical, political and social information is embedded within the archive. Hosted in the artist’s studio, and with a publication detailing the exercise.

45 min, col, English

Finale

Wittenburg Studios

Derde Wittenburgerdwarsstraat 1, 1018 KR Amsterdam

The Netherlands

Free

(meal included)

Cygnus Gymnasium students perform ‘an access’ to the artist’s image archive garnered from fashion magazines in an exploratory workshop that guides their selections for texts as foci across the project. Presented with other introductions to this edition in a J.B. Ingwersen-designed building inspired by Le Corbusier’s Unité d’Habitation and its principals of living that is also a functioning high school, encouraging learning, becoming and testing ideas.

Introduction

Cygnus Gymnasium

Vrolikstraat 8, 1091 VG Amsterdam

The Netherlands

€15 adults / €10 students

(includes meal)

A discussion between curator Grant Watson and the researchers on restaging a historical exhibition with contemporary works motivated by art, design and collaborative practices. Works from the original exhibition as well as its restaging by contemporary Toronto artists appear within a mise en scène by Amsterdam-based art and design practitioners. The publication offers new essays and expands on the above analysis.

Dokzaal

Plantage Doklaan 8–12, 1018 CM Amsterdam

The Netherlands

Free, reservations required

Chromaliving occupied a former department store with a theatricalised vision of contemporary living through domestic room displays outfitted with artist-made furniture, dressed mannequins, appliances and interior decoration. Chroma Lives as rejoinder exhibition takes over a condominium presentation centre in Toronto. Works by contemporary artists in remarkable affinity with the art and design practices advanced nearly 40 years before stand alongside an archive of ephemera and oral histories documenting the original event.

Camrost Felcorp Yorkville Plaza Sales Centre

21 Avenue Road, Toronto, ON M5R 1A8

Canada

Free

The archive as performative medium – with respect to Toronto-based artist collective Chromazone’s 1983 show Chromaliving – in relation to contemporary work poses challenges, in addition to that of making a uniquely ‘liveable’ exhibition. This discussion coincides with other edition introductions in a J.B. Ingwersen-designed building inspired by Le Corbusier’s Unité d’Habitation and its principals of living. Also a functioning high school, the space encourages learning, becoming and testing ideas.

Introduction

Cygnus Gymnasium

Vrolikstraat 8, 1091 VG Amsterdam

The Netherlands

€15 adults / €10 students

(includes meal)

Making use of fabric and sound, ‘chance events’ are produced that relate to the social and physical significance of touch and voice, space and time, while maintaining the mystery of who we are and what we know. Presented as part of five performance days put on by Arika and Tramway titled Episode 10: A Means Without End.

Tramway

25 Albert Drive, G41 2PE Glasgow

Scotland

Pay what you can

Making use of fabric and sound, ‘chance events’ are produced that relate to the social and physical significance of touch and voice, space and time, while maintaining the mystery of who we are and what we know. Presented as part of Ten Days Six Nights at the BMW Tate Live Exhibition.

Tate Modern

Bankside, SE1 9TG London

United Kingdom

The companion to sculptural performance Gravitational Feel is launched with the authors and the publication designer Will Holder. Audience ask questions to which Moten responds with songs from his laptop.

San Serriffe

Sint Annenstraat 30, 1012 HE Amsterdam

The Netherlands

Free

Fabric and sound are used to produce ‘chance events’ relating the social and physical significance of touch and voice, space and time, while maintaining mystery of who we are and what we know. The sculpture performance sees its makers cohabit the roles of poet and performance artist.

Finale

Splendor

Nieuwe Uilenburgerstraat 116, 1011 LX Amsterdam

The Netherlands

Free, reservations recommended

Premiere

Moten moves in a sunny backyard wearing a cape with crystal-decorated lapels before Tsang’s camera in this 2015 work. Experimental musician Josiah Wise’s rendition of the eponymous jazz standard is soundtrack to this humble, sometimes slow motion, example of the attuned collaboration. Presented with other edition introductions in a J.B. Ingwersen-designed building – inspired by Le Corbusier’s Unité d’Habitation and its principals of living – and operational high school to engender learning, becoming and testing ideas.

4 min, col, sound

Introduction

Cygnus Gymnasium

Vrolikstraat 8, 1091 VG Amsterdam

The Netherlands

€15 adults / €10 students

(includes meal)

This 2016 film by Alejandra Riera realised with Ueinzz revolves around spaces of history, constructions and demolitions, such as the 2014 removal of a Columbus statue in Buenos Aires. It engages stories and storytellers, female narrators for whom there is often no space, so that space has to be produced.

105 min, col, Portuguese

Brazilian Tour

Fundação Joaquim Nabuco – Cinema do Museu

Av. 17 de Agosto, 2187 – Casa Forte, 52061–540 Recife

Brazil

Free

This 2016 film by Alejandra Riera realised with Ueinzz revolves around spaces of history, constructions and demolitions, such as the 2014 removal of a Columbus statue in Buenos Aires. It engages stories and storytellers, female narrators for whom there is often no space, so that space has to be produced. Accompanied by a talk by the film-maker and launch of the Performance in Residence book for this research project.

105 min, col, Portuguese

Brazilian Tour

Espaço Itaú de Cinema Augusta

1. Augusta, 1475 – Cerqueira César, 01305–100 São Paulo

Brazil

Free, reservations recommended

Ueinzz members present the latest episode in an ongoing series inspired by experimental French educator Fernand Deligny and his unrealised idea for a play or a film in which there are more actors than roles in a troupe. The piece is the result of a collective creation inspired by the work of Deligny, known for his pioneering and alternative approach to education for children and adolescents with autism.

Finale

Badhuistheater

Boerhaaveplein 28, 1091 AT Amsterdam

The Netherlands

Performance: Saturday 10 December 2016, 20hr

Dokzaal

Plantage Doklaan 8, 1018 CM Amsterdam

The Netherlands

Free, reservations recommended

Sunday 4 December 2016, 11hr

Filmtheater Kriterion

Roetersstraat 170, 1018 WE Amsterdam

The Netherlands

Free

(includes meal)

Reflecting on Ueinzz, the philosopher suggests rethinking time as not linear or circular but as a ‘crumbled handkerchief’ with events spread out on it unpredictably, pointing to multiple histories. Presented with other introductions to this edition in a J.B. Ingwersen-designed building inspired by Le Corbusier’s Unité d’Habitation and its principals of living that is also a functioning high school, encouraging learning, becoming and testing ideas.

Introduction

Cygnus Gymnasium

Vrolikstraat 8, 1091 VG Amsterdam

The Netherlands

€15 adults / €10 students

(includes meal)

On three occasions during their residency in Cyprus, the artist reads their novel – and first fiction work – aloud to an audience. Written in six months in six cities, the text conveys institutional encounters and features a performance artist and secret service agent besieged by exhaustion.

Megaro Hadjisavva, Evagorou 2, Nicosia 1097

Cyprus

The artist’s first published book – celebrated with a presentation and drinks – sees a secret service agent and performance artist, among other characters, besieged by exhaustion and frustration. The carefully described architectures in which they find themselves are barely able to contain their big personalities. Bibby relays intrigue in passages brimming with wit, acute observation and occasional disgust, offering viewers ‘ways out’ even if only for the time of reading.

If I Can’t Dance

Ruysdaelkade 2, 1072 AG Amsterdam

The Netherlands

Free

Over six weeks, the artist investigates the venue’s operations, especially its heating system. The study of these functions informs the writing of their novel The Drumhead (And Other Language Costumes), and exposes the alternately intimate and estranged relationship between artist and organisation. Featuring a conversation with David Bussel, Celine Condorelli and Jessica Vaughan.

The Showroom

63 Penfold Street

London NW8 8PQ
United Kingdom

Free

Full table service is provided during this intermediary look into the artist’s book in progress and ‘working’ characters, both on and off stage. Rectangular surfaces decompose and relax into tables; keyboards and chords become napkins; mouse pads become table cloths. Visitors are encouraged to bring excerpts from prose or poems in which favourite characters punch-in, log-on, take a smoke-break or otherwise dance against the rhythms of the daily grind.

If I Can’t Dance

Westerdok 606–608, 1013 BV Amsterdam 

The Netherlands

Free

Dutch Art Institute students meet with the artist in Amsterdam to take a wandering tour back to school in Arnhem. Meandering and experiential, the trek is intended to be experienced alone, with participants provided an ‘action score’ in advance. The experience of the wander and the ‘work of not working’ is then reflected on when everyone is back in the same environment.

Dutch Art Institute

Kortestraat 27, 6811 EP Arnhem

The Netherlands

Closed seminar

The artist reads their manuscript in development while in residency at KUB Arena, followed by a discussion with If I Can’t Dance director Frédérique Bergholtz and curator Vivian Ziherl on the commissioning institution’s unique structure, with Scott Cameron Weaver. The next two days see many guests of the artist give provocative related presentations alongside those of fellow artist in residence Juliette Blightman.

KUB Arena – Kunsthaus Bregenz

Karl-Tizian-Platz, 6900 Bregenz

Austria

Free

Concentrating on the writing at the root of their practice, the artist takes a hiatus from sculpture and performance. They use the institutional space provided as reading room in which to write a lengthy manuscript. Events including a reading with Vivian Ziherl are also organised, featuring international guests from different fields of cultural production.

KUB Arena – Kunsthaus Bregenz

Karl-Tizian-Platz, 6900 Bregenz

Austria

€11 adults / €9 concessions / €7 20–27 years old / Free first Friday of the month

Taking up the role of production assistant on an If I Can’t Dance project, the artist serves oysters to Frieze Fair workers, the left-over shells becoming performative fragments. Some years before, while working at the fair, the artist discovered relics of the now extinct Thames Oyster buried on site. The work is also a window into the oyster’s economic history in London.

Frieze London

The Regent’s Park, London NW1 4NR

United Kingdom

£32

The artist’s position as ‘backstage’ worker on select If I Can’t Dance productions issues a Frankenstinean cast of characters that make their appearance through reassembled emoticon punctuations, jerry-rigged silk banners and Crowd Control Barriers. This work joins an eccentric series that leads towards the ultimate project of a novel.

12th Biennale de Lyon

65 rue Challemel Lacour
69007 Lyon

France

The notion of throwing the voice in public speaking – as in acting and ventriloquism – involves the mediation of an appropriated body, be it a mechanised doll or a space. The artist is interested in the seminar’s temporal and spatial parameters, its visual and sonic qualities, and how it stages presenters and audience. They use these aspects as material to address the social, technical and spatial aspects of the seminar.

Goethe-Institut Niederlande

Herengracht 470, 1017 CA Amsterdam

The Netherlands

€30, reservations required

(includes breakfast, lunch and the publication Reading/Feeling)

In a small Greek church, the artist reads from her poetic interpretation of the Gospel of Thomas. Found at Nag Hammadi, Upper Egypt in 1945, and made up of 114 sayings by Jesus, the artist says the gospel ‘listens, where the written is not simply the record of a voice but a radically different dimension of cognition that emerges as an acoustic realm.’ Followed by a conversation with Susan Gibb.

Performance Biennial, Mylopotamos, Cythera

Diakofti

Greece

Free

The author introduces and reads from her poetic interpretation of the Gospel of Thomas, found at Nag Hammadi in Upper Egypt in 1945, with 114 of Jesus’ sayings. According to Mihaylova, the gospel ‘is a poem that listens, where the written is not simply the record of a voice but a radically different dimension of cognition that emerges as an acoustic realm in the formation of thoughts.’

If I Can’t Dance

Westerdok 606–608

1013 BV Amsterdam

The Netherlands

Publication available for the special launch price of €15

Following the artist’s reading of her poetic interpretation of the Gospel of Thomas, which includes 114 of Jesus’ sayings, composer Lisa Holmqvist gives a performance of a prayer featuring six singers and recorder players. Before starting, they rehearse in the gallery to reflect on the acoustic dimension of cognitive experience.

REDCAT

631 W 2nd St, Los Angeles, CA 90012

United States

Free

An introduction to and reading by the artist of her book on the Gospel of Thomas moves through her interpretations and expansions – including her philosophy on time and singing. Initially seated, the artist moves to the floor, relishing the awkward silence or pause when the end is not yet known. Then a horn begins being played, and five women in concert with the artist layer harmonies. With a reading by Gregg Bordowitz.

Ruysdaelkade 1072 AG Amsterdam

The Netherlands

Vondelkerk

Vondelstraat 120, 1054 GS Amsterdam

The Netherlands

With composer Lisa Holmqvist, the artist performs a song in relation to the research material on Gospel of Thomas, and the technique of exegesis (commentary on sacred texts). This pre-performance lights upon the artist’s interest in how listening and receiving are necessary predispositions to thinking.

If I Can’t Dance

Westerdok 606–608 1013 BV Amsterdam

The Netherlands

Semi-public

Artist Gertjan Franciscus’ texts and performances give life to prophetic half-divine, half-animal figures that inhabit the space of revelation. Here they are linked to Mihaylova’s own reflections and poster display, which rethinks the boundaries between economy and art.

Ellen de Bruijne Projects

Rozengracht 207a, 1016 LZ Amsterdam (now Singel 372, 1016 AH Amsterdam)

The Netherlands

Free, first come, first served, 50 capacity

The poster presents the introductory chapter of the artist’s forthcoming publication in a signature print of 100 copies. The development of her publication takes place across the various stages of the project to forge a closer bond between publishing and performance.

If I Can’t Dance

Westerdok 606–608 1013 BV Amsterdam

The Netherlands

Poster: €30

(also on display and for sale at Ellen de Bruijne Projects from 28 January – 22 February 2014)

Continuing series of workshops at the Dutch Art Institute with the artists.

Dutch Art Institute

Kortestraat 27, 6811 EP Arnhem

The Netherlands

Closed seminar

The artist gives a seminar in relation to Egypt’s Nag Hammadi library and its collection of Gnostic texts discovered in 1945, which record ideas circulating among early Christians. Reading and commenting on sacred texts, the group focusses on the artist’s core research text, the Gospel of Thomas, composed entirely of Jesus’ sayings. The artist also gives a talk on her work.

Beirut

11 Mahmoud Sedky 
off Shaheen St.

Agouza, Cairo

Egypt

Free, reservations required

Humorous and playful performance-based interventions convey a two-year exploration of temporality, aliveness, periphery and ‘discomposition’ – and their potential for instituting moments of political transition. The words of Virginia Woolf, Gertrude Stein, David Hammons, Lucinda Childs and Jack Smith are spoken by the artist and collaborators who bob up and down holding wave crests outside the windows and wandering about the audience. The book captures images and text from the project.

If I Can’t Dance

Westerdok 606–608 1013 BV Amsterdam

The Netherlands

Entry cost varies

Within a theatre setting, ‘to discompose’ – working through in relation to site and performance, social spaces, institutions and collaboration – articulates an environment of observation and response, framed by text and tableau. A dramaturgy of darkness is punctuated by contributions, from drawings to choreography, by invited artists who ultimately become a troupe of players.

Playground Leuven

3010 Leuven

Belgium

Adults €10 / reduced €6, reservations required

With Vivian Ziherl, the artist discusses her concept of ‘discompose’: a field of inquiry, a speculation on ordering theatrical space, audience orientation and institutional structures. The tool is worked through in relation to site and performance, social spaces and collaboration. In addition, her ‘minor theatre’ pursues an invested staging of audience and text, while trying to ‘build a structure for people to be alive inside’.

If I Can’t Dance

Westerdok 606–608 1013 BV Amsterdam

The Netherlands

Free

‘The stage’ is punctuated with interventions and texts. Performers, shirts over coats, look like bloated interlopers with a queer way of walking. Celestial photogram images adorn the floor on which the audience is asked to lie down. They are surrounded by projections of artist Babi Badalov’s drawings. The performers weave through the audience repeating: ‘Works or doesn’t.’

Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam

Museumplein 10, 1071 DJ Amsterdam

The Netherlands

Reservations required

The artist discusses and works on a new element of her performance By Any Other Name. Group movement is rehearsed for a performance outside the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, which will take place at a distance from the audience. Participants work with choreographer Eleanor Bauer on developing this particular movement.

Dutch Art Institute

Kortestraat 27, 6811 EP Arnhem

The Netherlands

Closed seminar

The rhythmic montage illustrates one year of growth and decomposition in the artist’s garden, confronting value, decay, death and stillness – processes beyond growth – in the space of nature according to our biological clock.

56 min, col

44th International Film Festival Rotterdam

Lantaren Venster 6

Otto Reuchlinweg 996, 3072 MD Rotterdam

The Netherlands

Images projected in a darkened room show geometric figures flowing into one another. Trained in meditation, the artist lies down beneath the screen and breathes. When she gets up, the blinds are lifted to reveal first light. Exploring the transitory time of day, the work is also performed at sunset. Installation diagrams and a new essay appear in the publication.

If I Can’t Dance

Ruysdaelkade 2, 1072 AG Amsterdam

The Netherlands

€17,50 afternoon / morning and afternoon programme

(includes one free publication)

From 20.33 to 00.53, artists, writers and curators give five-minute summer-solstice presentations in affinity with the artist’s research into time, the Earth and metabolising processes, including breathing and photosynthesis. Dotted around the biggest cacti and succulents collection in the Netherlands – a secluded safe haven, an unfixed utopia – presentations situated by different plants involve music, readings, mirrors, botanical history, spitting, gold and silver tuning forks, and magical projected shapes.

VU Hortus, Van der Boechorststraat 8, Amsterdam

The Netherlands

Free, reservations required

The 1913 opera Victory Over the Sun – a collaboration between Aleksei Kruchenykh, Velimir Khlebnikov and Kazimir Malevich (who designed the costumes and set) – proposed capturing and destroying the ‘sun’ as symbol of rationality. Students’ considerations of what the sun represents become five-minute performances with self-made backgrounds.

Dutch Art Institute

Kortestraat 27, 6811 EP Arnhem

The Netherlands

Closed seminar

The artist addresses biopower and remaining faithful to past work through radical queer activism with critic Rachel O’Reilly who brings in a feminist and environmental perspective and poet Fred Moten who speaks from the Black radical tradition. Poetry is read. The politics and aesthetics of appropriation and dedication is discussed. Open to all types. A fascinating archive of Bordowitz’s material and allies is launched.

Ruysdaelkade 1072 AG Amsterdam

The Netherlands

€17,50 evening programme

(includes one free publication)

With Sven Lütticken, Tom Vandeputte, and students of the VU University Amsterdam and Sandberg Instituut MFA Critical Studies programme.

Ruysdaelkade 1072 AG Amsterdam
The Netherlands

Closed seminar

This keynote touches on experiences in the 1980s with fellow creatives the artist refers to as ‘disgusted by the alignment of regressive politics in the White House with politics in the art world’ when the ‘federal government to museums and galleries were perceived to be driven by national interests, imperialist expansion, profit motive, male supremacy, white supremacy and heteronormativity.’ The artist notes their analysis ‘led to tactics of subterfuge and refusal. Still, we were not resigned.’

Hammer Museum

10899 Wilshire Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90024

United States

Free, first come, first served

‘Identity is a form of repetition.’ Letting a line like this hang there can be likened to speech bubbles from a state of the union address: uttered to loud applause, urgency is weaponised through quotable phrases. The artist’s phrases are also crafted to be quoted, but this is because of their poetry, not their bombast. This kind of writing process stops only after the last question is asked.

The Poetry Project

131 East 10th Street, New York NY 10003

United States

Free

The artist considers what he has to gain from his continued belief that art can change the world. And further, that art is necessarily related to freedom. Even though there are no facts supporting this, he continues to hold onto these ideas, and wonders why they remain. To the visitor he writes: ‘At risk of sounding ridiculous, I will try to explain.’

Goethe-Institut Niederlande

Herengracht 470, 1017 CA Amsterdam

The Netherlands

€30, reservations required

(includes breakfast, lunch and the publication Reading/Feeling)

The author and editor introduces the outcome of an extensive research project into the subjective role of the camera in Babette Mangolte’s film The Camera: Je/La Camera: I (1977) and in text and image in Lucy R. Lippard’s novel I See/You Mean (1979). He situates both works within the context of feminist strategies of self-portraiture.

Art Metropole

158 Sterling Road

Toronto, ON M6R 2B2

Canada

Free

The curator discusses The Camera: Je/La Camera: I (1977) with its film-maker Babette Mangolte, who premieres a new film. Supporting texts and films are also put forward to help frame the withdrawal of the author’s body from the fictional and documentary image as a strategy of self-portraiture.

Ruysdaelkade 1072 AG Amsterdam

The Netherlands

€17,50 morning and afternoon programme

(Includes one free publication)

This programme around Mangolte’s work includes a day of talks where she speaks with curator Fleur van Muiswinkel on the documentation of performance and feminist aesthetics, and with Korczynski on the subjective role of the camera in film. In addition to a rich screening programme that includes legendary images of Trisha Brown’s dancers on rooftops and a masterclass, there is a screening of The Sky on Location with a Q&A by art critic Bianca Stigter in Eye Filmmuseum.

Eye Filmmuseum

IJpromenade 1, 1031 KT Amsterdam

The Netherlands

Conversation: Saturday 24 May 2014, 11–13hr

Veem House for Performance

Van Diemenstraat 408–410, 1013 CR Amsterdam

The Netherlands

On view are the results of a two-week exercise following Lippard’s 1969 instructional work on image and writing that informed her novel I See/You Mean (1979). Daily photographs are taken at the same place and time, with participants in approximately the same positions, and then described in writing. The final outcome shows these texts and images rearranged in different ways. The Camera: Je/La Camera: I is screened on 16mm.

88 min, bw and col, English and French

Cinema de Uitkijk

Prinsengracht 452, 1017 KE Amsterdam

The Netherlands

In the late 1970s critic Lucy R. Lippard and film-maker Babette Mangolte drew on landscape and friends to assemble an image of the lives of artists mediated by their seeing I/eye. The former, in text: Lippard’s novel I See/You Mean is anchored by descriptions of fictional photographs of its characters

Goethe-Institut Niederlande

Herengracht 470, 1017 CA Amsterdam

The Netherlands

€30, reservations required (includes breakfast, lunch and publication Reading/Feeling)

The Question of Manet’s ‘Olympia’: Posed and Skirted by The V-Girls mocks male academic authority on a panel. After it is shown, the researcher, with co-panellists Sidsel Meineche Hansen and Fatima Hellberg, addresses patriarchal elements in art history. In thinking through what it means to return to 1970s and 1980s practices through a feminist lens, he looks into the V-Girls’ performativity, and how it expands traditional art forms.

64 min, col, English

If I Can’t Dance

Ruysdaelkade 2, 1072 AG Amsterdam

The Netherlands

€17,50 afternoon programme

(includes one free publication)

With Gregg Bordowitz, Tom Vandeputte, and students of the VU University Amsterdam and Sandberg Instituut MFA Critical Studies programme. Lütticken’s book on Lawler with essays by collaborators is available.

Ruysdaelkade 1072 AG Amsterdam

The Netherlands

Closed seminar

Louise Lawler’s work is a springboard for a discussion on widening the parameters of appropriation theory ca. 1980, which often presupposes a work’s meaning depends on critical intentions shared by artist and critic. A specific model of authorship has thereby tacitly been (re)established: the artist, mirrored by the writer, as a critical subject engaging with media images.

Goethe-Institut Niederlande

Herengracht 470, 1017 CA Amsterdam

The Netherlands

€30, reservations required (includes breakfast, lunch and publication Reading/Feeling)

A new edition of Louise Lawler’s 1979 work A Movie Will Be Shown Without the Picture revolves around the announcement and screening of a film chosen by the artist, accentuating the operation of the screening and moviegoing. Followed by a talk in the presence of the artist, with Sven Lütticken, Andrea Fraser and Eric C. H. de Bruyn around the work’s actual and potential consequences for contemporary art and theory.

The Movies

Haarlemmerdijk 161, 1013 KH Amsterdam

The Netherlands

To celebrate the life of Sylvère Lotringer (1938–2021) whose work as a literary critic, editor, publisher and educator helped to shape the course of contemporary cultural theory, we share this interview that was recorded in Los Angeles, California, in 2014.

How We Behave (2013–ongoing) is an interview project by Grant Watson departing from a 1983 provocation by Michel Foucault that life practice can be the material for a work of art. Over the past years, Watson has begun re-opening up this project to new forms and constellations. In conversation with If I Can’t Dance’s Anik Fournier and Megan Hoetger, How We Behave/An Archive of Radical Practice has emerged in the ificantdance.studio, putting new emphases on how “unfinished” work can yield valuable moments for understanding research-as-performance and for reconfiguring the assumed ‘pastness’ of documents as ‘liveliness.’ More coming in the .studio next year; and, for now, we leave you with Sylvère.

These three interviews with Brussels- and Antwerp-based artists – feminist project Just for the Record, Anne-Mie van Kerckhoven and Elke van Campenhout – are inspired by Michel Foucault’s question: why can’t life be ‘the material for a work of art?’ The interviews’ focus on how people work on themselves and reflect on their lives and relationships appears in the context of similar reflections from other artists on citizenship in cities urged to adapt to diverse inhabitants.

Kunsthal Extra City

Eikelstraat 29, 2600 Antwerp

Belgium

€10 voluntary / €5 standard / € 3,60+, groups of 10 or more persons, teachers’ card, oKo / €1 -26s, NICC members, persons with a disability and their guides, unemployed / €0 -13s, ICOM, persons with Omnio status, press

These three interviews with Athens-based artists and activists Sotirias Bahtsetzis, Kiriakos Spirou and Kostas Tzimoulis are inspired by Michel Foucault’s question: why can’t life be ‘the material for a work of art?’ The focus on how people work on themselves and reflect on their lives and relationships merges here into a foreboding fog in times of crisis and transition and how we politically articulate ourselves within and out of it.

State of Concept

Mpotsari Tousa 19, Athens 117 41

Greece

Free

Inspired by a 1983 Vanity Fair interview of the same name with Michel Foucault, who asked, why can’t life be ‘the material for a work of art?’, Watson conducted over 50 interviews in myriad cities. Several of the filmed portraits on how people work on themselves, and reflect on life and relationships, appear with research material as setting for a discussion on Foucault’s concept of life as work of art.

The Showroom

63 Penfold St, Marylebone, London NW8 8PQ

United Kingdom

Free

Inspired by an interview with Michel Foucault who asked, why can’t life be ‘the material for a work of art?’, Watson conducted over 50 interviews in myriad cities. Several of the filmed portraits on how people work on themselves, life and relationships appear with research material as setting for a discussion on Foucault’s concept of life as work of art.

Accompanied by a seminar with guests involved in the project.

Nottingham Contemporary

Weekday Cross, Nottingham NG1 2GB

United Kingdom

Free, reservations required

Delving into the ancient Greek philosophies of ‘askesis’ or ‘self-making’ called upon by Michel Foucault amid the 1980s period of neoliberalism, interview-style film portraits are shown, self-reflexive in their production and methodology. Each monologue is a self-conscious performance of the quotidian, communicating belonging and exclusion.

Ruysdaelkade 1072 AG Amsterdam

The Netherlands

€ 17,50 evening programme

(includes one free publication)

What does it mean to pick up and reflect on a 1983 interview Michel Foucault had with Vanity Fair? What about the author’s biographical circumstances at the time of publication and theoretical work – in particular his interest in classical antiquity and the idea of an aesthetics of existence? In addition to these quandaries, some of Foucault’s suggestions for how we might appropriate and use concepts from the past are put forth.

Goethe-Institut Niederlande

Herengracht 470, 1017 CA Amsterdam

The Netherlands

€30, reservations required

(includes breakfast, lunch and publication Reading/Feeling)

The project departs from a 1983 interview with Michel Foucault around life as work of art. The philosopher has also spoken about gay liberation and the scant pre-given codes of behaviour there are to invent life. The week-long rehearsals with guests and New York residents are based on Foucault’s idea of bios as material for art. Exercises trained on personal activities attempt to interpolate the city’s particular character and personalities.

The Kitchen

512 West 19th Street, New York, NY 10011

United States

Free