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

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

The artist takes stock of his oeuvre with If I Can’t Dance curator, Megan Hoetger, independent curator and editor, Radna Rumping and storyteller and Artistic Research graduate student at the University of Amsterdam, Amalia Calderón. In connection to a year-long studio residency they engage in the tension between value and archive as organizing principle with Associate Professor of Conservation and Museum Studies at Maastricht University, Vivian van Saaze.

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

Carter as late-night DJ explores different modes of storytelling, focussing on one key term in each episode: gathering (December 2020), dispersal (January 2021) and frequency (February 2021). His close readings of Ernie Barnes’s painting unfold through songs (jazz, soul and R&B), personal commentary and Black critical theory.

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

Palazzo della Malinconia

Sent via the If I Can’t Dance newsletter

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 

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

The artist’s LHB (2017) and BRIDGIT (2016) are shown alongside the films that influenced their maker’s thinking around ‘queer wildernesses’: Dani Leventhal and Jared Buckhiester’s Hard As Opal (2015) and Jonathan Rattner’s The Interior (2016). These works enquire into queer life in the densely populated urban contexts that dominate popular LGBTQI+ narratives. A sunset walk through Bergen aan Zee’s dune landscape to the North Sea follows the screening.

6 min, col, English

Filmtheater Cinebergen
Eeuwigelaan 7, 1861 CL Bergen
The Netherlands

€15 adults / students
(includes free bus service, reservations required)

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

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

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

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)

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)

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

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 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

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)

Interviews are structured around material gathered from invited guests and California residents following a workshop and accompanied by artist MPA. The original inspiration is an interview with Michel Foucault, who also spoke about gay liberation and the scant pre-given codes of behaviour there are to invent life. At the time of the original source interview, the philosopher taught at the University of California, Berkeley, and was immersed in the San Francisco’s gay leather scene.

Roski School of Fine Arts, University of Southern California

825 Bloom Walk, Los Angeles, CA 90089

United States

& other venues in Los Angeles and San Francisco

Closed

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 his concept of life as work of art. The philosopher has also discussed gay liberation and the scant pre-given codes of behaviour there are to invent life. Research interviews are structured around straightforward questions about the daily life and rituals of invited guests and Amsterdam residents.

If I Can’t Dance

Westerdok 606–608 1013 BV Amsterdam

The Netherlands

Closed

The interviews depart from Vanity Fair’s 1983 interview with Michel Foucault around his concept of 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 both individually and collectively. A talk is given as part of Suely Rolnik’s ‘Nucleus for Subjectivity’ class at the University of São Paulo.

University of São Paulo 

Butanta, São Paulo – State of São Paulo

Brazil

& other locations in São Paulo

Closed

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

A checkpoint – the first site to open in the Berlin Wall – is examined for fragments of unresolved Cold War legacies. Research into the site that has since become a Lidl yields photographs, audio recordings, performance documentation and a new video and performance work. The work obliquely or explicitly confronts the nexus of landscape and ideology, local memory and world history. The artists’ book Autonomy documents the making process and Christian Petzold’s Jerichow (2008) is screened.

93 min, col, German with English subtitles

Site Gallery
1 Brown Street, Sheffield, S1 2BS
United Kingdom

This structured improvisation with movement, speech and a slide show accompanied by musician Bart de Kroon deals with transmissibility and the conflicts of public life. Questions from an earlier work, a memorial for the squatters, frame the backdrop: And since it seems clear that we have not built it – have not built this space for reflection – what indeed have we built? If we don’t have such a place for discussion, what do we have?

Miles Building
George Gershwinlaan 101, 1082 MT Amsterdam
The Netherlands

€7,50, reservations required

Visitors snake up steep stairs to an intimate apartment space where sensuality and materiality are articulated. Without introduction, the artist begins masterfully weaving stories at the entrance to a wider scenography: two figures stand by windows and become sculptural amid a growing acoustic landscape; another chops wood; and still another lies dead on the floor surrounded by voyeurs.

If I Can’t Dance
Ruyschstraat 4–III, Amsterdam 1091 CB
The Netherlands

Curator Jacob Korczynski moderates this day that introduces the projects for Edition IV, which focusses on affect read in the light of continuing investigations into the construction of subjectivity and the politics of identity. Affect illuminates and intensifies the projects allowing for connections to be made where relevant.

Wyspa Institute of Art
ul. Doki 1 building #145 B
80–958 Gdańsk
Poland

In the film a woman constructs a house to accommodate the ghosts of people killed by the guns of her father’s firearm company. The artist joins for a discussion on the work with Dieter Roelstraete, Manilow Senior Curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago accompanied by a response read by Jacob Korczynksi, curator at the Art Gallery of York University in Toronto.

80 min, col, English

M hka / Cinema Zuid
Lakenstraat 14, Antwerp
Belgium

Free

Also screened at:

Wednesday 11 September 2019
(company projects)
1237 4th Street NE, Minneapolis
United States

Wednesday 15 May – Thursday 10 June 2013
Whitechapel Gallery
77-82 Whitechapel High Street, Shadwell, London E1 7QX
United Kingdom

Wednesday 23 January 2013
Kunsthalle Lissabon
José Sobral Cid 9E, 1900–312 Lisbon
Portugal

Saturday 1 December 2012
The Institute of Contemporary Arts, London
The Mall, St. James’s, London SW1Y 5AH
United Kingdom

Saturday 27 October 2012
Liverpool Biennale
The Box (FACT),
88 Wood St, Liverpool L1 4DQ
United Kingdom

Friday 25 May 2012
La Capella, Institut de Cultura de Barcelona
Carrer de l’Hospital, 56, 08001 Barcelona
Spain

Friday 4 May 2012
Iaspis
Maria Skolgata 83, 118 53 Stockholm
Sweden

Thursday 26 April 2012
Serpentine Gallery
London W2 3XA
United Kingdom

Friday 3 February – Sunday 22 April 2012
with The Hands Of A Clock, Even When Out Of Order, Must Know And Let The Dumbest Little Watch Know Where They Stand, Otherwise Neither Is A Dial But Only A White Face With A Trick Mustache
FRAC Champagne-Ardenne, Reims
1 Place Museux, 51100 Reims
France

Friday 9 March – Saturday 14 April 2012
Altman Siegel
1150 25th St, San Francisco, CA 94107
United States

Thursday 26 January – Monday 9 April 2012
Badischer Kunstverein, Karlsruhe
Waldstraße 3, 76133 Karlsruhe, Germany

Alongside her films The Diamond (Descartes Daughter) (2008) and Gamekeepers Without Game (2009), the artist selects works from the collection. These include installations by Guillaume Bijl and Luc Tuymans, photos by Dirk Braeckman, drawn and painted images by Elly Strik and Marthe Wéry, and three-dimensional images by Cady Noland – all of which reveal a shared slippage between things that are somehow the same but not quite.

The Diamond (Descartes Daughter), 15 min, col, English

Gamekeepers Without Game, 76 min, col, English

M HKA – Museum of Contemporary Art Antwerp
Leuvenstraat 32
2000 Antwerp

€12 adults / €7 60+, groups of 10+, students, those seeking employment, the physically challenged, members of the NICC, inhabitants of Antwerp (during construction €3) / €3 <26 years / Free <13 years, Friends of the M HKA, ICOM, CIMAM, Antwerp City Card, escorts of the physically challenged, The Cultivist, Museumpas

Curator Jacob Korczynski moderates this day that introduces the projects for Edition IV, which focusses on affect read in the light of continuing investigations into the construction of subjectivity and the politics of identity. Affect illuminates and intensifies the projects allowing for connections to be made where relevant.

Wyspa Institute of Art
ul. Doki 1 building #145 B
80–958 Gdańsk
Poland

Free

David Dibosa reflects on a monograph of the artist’s work addressing unresolved histories presented with screenings: From Left to Night (2015) sees players in a low-income area of London, which borders its wealthiest enclaves, share disparate knowledges from riots to music videos; and in the montaged film Bete & Deise (2012), actress Bete Mendes and funk singer Deise Tigrona evoke the power at the intersection of public and personal through speaking.

From Left to Night, 32 min, col, English with English subtitles
Bete & Deise, 41 min, col, Portuguese with English subtitles

Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam
Museumplein 10, 1071 DJ Amsterdam
The Netherlands

€2,50 plus museum fee, reservations required

The artist speaks on her experiment with method and form that often includes a public film shoot, collaboration and co-production of a script. The outcome is at times a film but can also be other forms of projection. Her attempts to identify how her art making is connected with social relations and current conditions, is followed by an interview with If I Can’t Dance director Frédérique Bergholtz on Van Oldenborgh’s development as an artist.

KNAW, Het Trippenhuis
Kloveniersburgwal 29, 1011 JV Amsterdam
The Netherlands

Free

Within the context and among the people that brought the film into being, protagonists Bete Mendes and Deise Tigrona engage in a discussion in a Rio building that is under construction; the two give meaning to the idea of a public in their daily lives as, respectively, an actress and funk singer. Through a montage that evocatively combines their voices and image, Van Oldenborgh confronts the relation between cultural production and politics and the power that results when public issues intersect with the personal.

41 min, col, Portuguese with English subtitles

Casa do Povo, São Paulo; Fundaj – Arte Contemporânea, Recife; Capacete, Rio de Janeiro; Museum of Modern Art, Rio de Janeiro; Casa França-Brasil, Rio de Janeiro

Free

Also screened at:

Wednesday 10 December 2014
The Cross Art Projects
8 Llankelly Place, Sydney NSW 2011
Australia

Tuesday 15 July 2014
Irish Film Institute
6 Eustace Street, Temple Bar, Dublin, D02 PD85
Ireland

Sunday 29 September – Sunday 8 December 2013
Calvert 22
22 Calvert Avenue
Shoreditch, London E2 7JP
United Kingdom

Tuesday 14 May 2013
With Instruction (2009), Supposing I Love You. And You also Love Me (2011)
Mumok
Museumsplatz 1, 1070 Vienna
Austria

Saturday 26 January – Sunday 14 April 2013
De Vleeshal
Helm 5, 4331 CD Middelburg
The Netherlands

Thursday 29 November 2012 – Sunday 24 February 2013
Museum of Contemporary Art Metelkova
Maistrova ulica 3, 1000 Ljubljana
Slovenia

Thursday 8, Friday 9 and Sunday 11 November 2012
M Forum, Playground Festival
L Vanderkelenstraat 28
3000 Leuven
Belgium

Friday 26 October 2012
South London Gallery
65 Peckham Road, London SE5 8UH
United Kingdom

Wednesday 22 August 2012
Transit Display
Dittrichova 337/9, Prague 2, 120 00
Czech Republic

Thursday 16 August 2012
Arsenal – Institute for Film and Video Art
Potsdamer Straße 2
10785 Berlin
Germany

Saturday 26 May 2012
SCREEN Festival
Barcelona

Spain

During a day curated by If I Can’t Dance for the conference-festival Studium Generale Rietveld Academie, Amsterdam, on voice and its re-articulated relation to the receiver through feminist histories, Bete & Deise (2012) is screened. The film narrates an encounter between Bete Mendes and Deise Tigrona, two women in Rio who have each in their own way given meaning to the idea of a ‘public voice’. The screening is followed by a conversation with the artist.

41 min, col, Portuguese with English subtitles

De Brakke Grond
Nes 45, 1012 KD Amsterdam
The Netherlands

€15 adults / €10 students, reservations required

An all-night programme inspired by the production of Bete & Deise (2012) celebrates the artist’s ongoing research into Brazilian cinema. Art historian and writer Eric de Bruyn responds to the film, followed by a concert by Baba Electronica and DJ Lonely, and DJs Marfox and Nervoso. The artist introduces and screens Càncer (1972) by Glauber Rocha to open the evening.

Càncer, 86 min, bw
Bete & Deise, 41 min, col, Portugese with English subtitles

WORM, International Film Festival Rotterdam
The Netherlands

€11, reservations required

Curator Jacob Korczynski moderates this day that introduces the projects for Edition IV, which focusses on affect read in the light of continuing investigations into the construction of subjectivity and the politics of identity. Affect illuminates and intensifies the projects allowing for connections to be made where relevant.

Wyspa Institute of Art
ul. Doki 1 building #145 B
80–958 Gdańsk
Poland

Hannah Arendt wrote that action occurs in ‘the presence of others’. Action is then political. Further, thoughts in the public sphere, are in the realm of action. A ‘de Stijl’-inspired broadcast building by Dutch architect and friend of Gerrit Rietveld, Piet Elling, provides the backdrop for this 2011 polyphonic mini-tragedy. In it, young Dutch and Belgian adults playfully interchange with philosopher Tariq Ramadan on diversity, fear and conflict.

13 min, col, sound, English subtitles

‘Speech Matters’, Danish Pavilion
54th Venice Biennale
Calle del Carso, 8, 30122 Venice
Italy

A programme of lectures, screenings and a live script reading composed by Wendelien van Oldenborgh and If I Can’t Dance delve into temporal simultaneity, shared authorship, acting and being. A departure point is Jean-Luc Godard’s film Número Deux in which the film-maker and his wife Anne-Marie Miéville articulate the experience in cinema as the ‘many (together) to be alone in front of the screen’ vs. in television ‘the alone to the many (together) in front of the screen’. With contributions by Jean Fisher, Sven Lütticken, Snejanka Mihaylova and Ruth Noack.

Gerrit Rietveld Academie
Fred. Roeskestraat 96, 1076 ED Amsterdam
The Netherlands

Free, reservations required

Following his lecture Valcárcel Medina speaks with artists Esther Ferrer and Dora García, led by Catherine Wood, on 22 stories told by guest speakers at art institutions in 2012. Each tale is inspired by a single photo from a series of 18 pictures the artist made in 2011 that depict 18 actions he performed in different cities between 1965 and 1993.

Tate Modern
Bankside, London SE1 9TG
United Kingdom

The series of 18 photographs dislodging the artist’s past performances from their historical frame present as many actions he performed in different cities between 1965 and 1993. Many were never documented, so that this new work addresses the frictions between the live moment and the document, past and present, fact and fiction.

Museu de Arte Contemporénea da Universidade de São Paulo
MAC USP Cidade Universitária
Rua da Praça do Relógio, 160
Brazil

Free, reservations required

A series of 18 photographs dislodge the artist’s past performances from their historical frame presenting as many actions he performed in different cities between 1965 and 1993. Many were never documented, so that this new work addresses the frictions between the live moment and the document, past and present, fact and fiction. The stories are read aloud by different writers, with the artist available by phone at each location.

With interpreters: Pierre Bal-Blanc, Koen Brams, José Diaz Cuyás, Juan Domínguez, Jon Mikel Euba, Esther Ferrer, Dora García, GEACC, Moosje Goosen, Myriam Van Imschoot, Manual Martínez Ribas, Aimar Pérez Galí, Esteban Pujals Gesalí, Isaías Griñolo, Miren Jaio, Emilio Moreno, Pedro G. Romero, Isidoro Valcárcel Medina, Jaime Vallaure, Azucena Vietes, Carla Zaccagnini

Museu de Arte Contemporénea da Universidade de São Paulo
MAC USP Cidade Universitária
Rua da Praça do Relógio, 160
Brazil

Playground Festival/STUK
Naamsestraat 96
3000 Leuven
Belgium

BNV Producciones
Descalzos 8 – bajo. 41003 Seville
Spain

CAC Brétigny
Rue Henri Douard, 91220 Brétigny-sur-Orge
France

Fundació Antoni Tàpies
Carrer d’Aragó, 255, 08007 Barcelona
Spain

Bulegoa z/b
Solokoetxe Kalea, 8, 48006 Bilbao, Vizcaya
Spain

Veem House for Performance
Van Diemenstraat 408-410, 1013 CR Amsterdam
The Netherlands

Dutch Art Institute (DAI) participants meet with the artist and Bulegoa z/b as a starting point for a conversation on the glossary of words that the Basque initiative developed in collaboration with the artist. These words, such as ‘knowledge’, ‘production’, ‘performance’ and ‘resistance’, are often used in a self-evident way in a variety of artistic contexts. Part of If I Can’t Dance’s course at the DAI, Arnhem.

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

Closed session

First presented in 1982, four sisters meet in their parents’ home and wait for the fifth to arrive, chatting about their lives, doctors, diets, work and holidays. Meanwhile, the California sun mysteriously provokes their reactions, emotions and moods. The restaging addresses questions around the idea of ‘making Five Sisters anew’.

Culturgest, Lisbon
Edifício-sede da
Caixa Geral de Depósitos
Rua Arco do Cego, 50
1000–300 Lisbon
Portugal

Monday 13 May 2013
Kunsthalle Düsseldorf
Grabbeplatz 4, 40213 Düsseldorf
Germany

Friday 15 March 2013
Centre Pompidou-Metz
1 Parvis des Droits de l’Homme, 57020 Metz
France

Wednesday 9 – Thursday 10 May 2012
with monologue Espahor ledet ko Uluner! performed by Jane Zingale
Museum of Modern Art
11 W 53rd Street, New York, NY 10019
United States

Saturday 27 April 2012
with monologue Espahor ledet ko Uluner! performed by Jane Zingale
Los Angeles County Museum of Art
5905 Wilshire Boulevard, Los Angeles, CA 90036
United States

Friday 16 December 2011
with monologue Espahor ledet ko Uluner! performed by Jane Zingale
Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía
Calle de Santa Isabel, 52, 28012 Madrid
Spain

Thursday 3 and Friday 4 November 2011
with monologue Espahor ledet ko Uluner! performed by Jane Zingale
STUK kunstencentrum
Naamsestraat 96, 3000 Leuven
Belgium

Saturday 12 November 2011
MUSAC, Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Castilla y León

Avenida de los Reyes Leoneses, 24, 24008 León
Spain

Friday 28 and Saturday 29 October 2011
Frascati WG
Marius van Bouwdijk Bastiaansestraat 54, 1054 SP Amsterdam
The Netherlands

Four sisters wait for the fifth to arrive, chatting about daily activities while the California sun mysteriously provokes their reactions, emotions and moods. An accompanying seminar explores the biopolitics of the dissonant registers of ‘life’ and ‘lifestyle’ with a performance by artist Sara van der Heide and presentations by Frédérique Bergholtz, Zhao Chuan, Nav Haq, Peter Pál Pelbert and Vivian Ziherl.

OCAT Contemporary Art Terminal
Overseas Chinese City, Nanshan, Shenzhen
China

Reservations required

The artist, likened to Andy Warhol’s ‘quiet observer’ but also to ‘camp’ as ‘way of seeing and expressing the world’, was greatly informed by soap operas in his plays and drawings. Based on lectures and film excerpts, Marie de Brugerolle and Sandberg students explore how the TV format’s rhythm can be applied to theatre and how, for example, wrestling programmes become a critical tool for exploring performativity.

Sandberg Institute, Amsterdam
Fred. Roeskestraat 96, 1076 ED Amsterdam
The Netherlands

Closed session

This composite portrait made in 2011 presents the artist in the context of 1970s Los Angeles as told by artist-friends Paul McCarthy, John Baldessari, Richard Jackson, Barbara Smith, Morgan Fisher and others. Original documents, excerpts from plays and interviews reveal dimensions of the work of the ‘Duchamp of L.A.’ Presented in conjunction with the Museum of Modern Art’s performance programme Words in the World.

90 min, col, English

Museum of Modern Art
New York

United States

$12 adults / students $10, $8, reservations required

Thursday 27 October 2011
SMART Project Space
Arie Biemondstraat 111
1054 PD Amsterdam
The Netherlands

With Jane Zingale – an advisor on this research project and one of the original actresses from De Cointet’s plays, having starred in Iglu (1977) and Tell Me (1979) as well as Five Sisters – De Brugerolle explores theoretical and practical concerns raised by making a restaging of the play. Part of If I Can’t Dance’s course at the Dutch Art Institute, Arnhem.

de Appel Arts Centre
Eerste Jacob van Campenstraat 59
1072 BD Amsterdam
The Netherlands

Closed session

The researcher introduces De Cointet with her 2010 documentary about the artist in which he is remembered by his artist-friends including John Baldessari, Larry Bell, Richard Jackson, Mike Kelley, Paul McCarthy, Barbara Smith and Robert Wilhite. The film becomes a portrait of the underground scene in Los Angeles at the junction of the 1970s and 1980s.

50 min, col, English

Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam
Paulus Potterstraat 13, 1071 CX Amsterdam
The Netherlands

€5 plus museum ticket

The artist’s 1977 play is co-written by Robert Wilhite, who authors the music. Wilhite’s soundtrack features pre-recorded phrases from a Spanish-language course, in tune with De Cointet’s awareness as a Frenchman living in the United States of one’s ability to understand another despite the imprecision of language. For him, language became a medium, with its own rhythm, plot and dynamics. Followed by a talk with the researcher.

Frascati WG
Marius van Bouwdijk Bastiaansestraat 54, 1054 SP Amsterdam
The Netherlands

€10, reservations

Thursday 11 November 2010, 22hr and Friday 12 November 2010, 20.30hr
STUK arts centre, Naamsestraat 96, 3000 Leuven
Belgium

The artist acts out a script to think through repetition, reproduction and character development with choreographer Nicole Beutler, artist Suchan Kinoshita, and theatre director Joachim Robbrecht and participants from the fields of dance, visual arts and theatre, respectively. The sessions are illuminated for the public in a discussion introduced by Mullican between Desclaux and hypnotist Vanessa Fyland on hypnotic practices, and class presentations responded to by theatre director Johan Simons.

Frascati
Nes 63, 1012 KD Amsterdam
The Netherlands

Sunday € 10 / Monday € 14 / both, € 3,50 discount per night, reservations required

Mullican’s performance work leans on structure – be it a bulletin board or annotation of a life in short evocative sentences – to materialise his concerns that often hover around empathy. However, the new also perforates these structures. In his hypnosis performances, for instance, each iteration provides uncharted character development. Part of Performance Studies International conference #17: Camillo 2.0: Technology, Memory, Experience.

Centrum Beeldende Kunst Utrecht
Plompetorengracht 4, 3512CC, Utrecht
The Netherlands

Free, reservations required

The artist speaks about his hypnosis performances, in which he moves further into embodying a fictional character, a mental process of entering the image. Under the claim of being ‘That Person’, an object of wonder according to psychology, a character emerges through recurring emotional states. The artist gives up his identity by occupying a void to which the audience in its mere presence contributes.

Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam
Paulus Potterstraat 13
1071 CX Amsterdam

The Netherlands

€5 plus museum admission, reservations required

De Carvalho presented The City of the Naked Man in 1930, an urban plan intended to free thought and shirk scholastic taboos. Peppered with laboratories for expanding desire beyond monogamy and heteronormativity, a core Research Centre focussed on wonder, favouring self-emancipation over exploitative labour as the role of the state. These ideas are furthered in his street performances Experiências. Part of Performance Studies International conference #17: Camillo 2.0: Technology, Memory, Experience.

Centrum Beeldende Kunst Utrecht
Plompetorengracht 4, 3512 CC, Utrecht
The Netherlands

Free, reservations required

Guerrero channels the relationship between the body, psyche and architectural space in De Carvalho’s projects, namely Experiência no. 3 (1956) in which the artist created a ‘New Look’ – a miniskirt and short-sleeve blouse with holes in the armpits designed for the contemporary office worker, which he modelled in the street. The performance is carried out with Ivan Henriques, Hans Schamlé and Vivian Ziherl.

Frascati
Nes 63, 1012 KD Amsterdam
The Netherlands

Free, reservations required