3 Works on the Body as Activated Object
Saturday, 30 April 8:00 pm
Acker Stadt Palast e.V.

Ackerstr. 169/170
Hinterhof
U8 Rosenthaler Platz & S-bahn Nordbahnhof

 

Space/Time’s first-ever month of programming concludes at the Acker Stadt Palast with two performances and a multi-channel video screening, in which the artists examine the body as object, investigating both the aesthetic and political implications.

Barabara Berti’s I am a shape, in a shape, doing a shape sees the performer employing associative physical and spoken choreographies, effectively detaching her physical and mental gestures into two parallel, but resonant performances. Gili Avissar’s Diary Videos find the artist in his studio integrating himself into his sculptural installations, activating the objects he has created while simultaneously objectifying himself.

The program concludes with Alexa Wilson and Oliver Connew’s Resistant Body Series, which is a series of collaborative actions designed around the notion of privileged bodies and personal boundaries, using the camera as a means of creating distance, control, and intimacy.

Featuring:

I am a shape, in a shape, doing a shape
Barbara Berti
Hybrid dance performance.

Diary Videos
Gili Avissar
Multi-channel video screening.

The Resistant Body Series
Alexa Wilson & Oliver Connew
Performance on privileged bodies and borders.

Barbara Berti – I am a shape, in a shape, doing a shape

 

I am shape, in a shape doing a shape is a solo piece by the Berlin-based Italian dancer and visual artist Barbara Berti. In a free-flowing mixture of movement and language, of preconceived sequences and improvisation, Berti explores the interplay between the dancer and the spectators — an experiment in sensitivity where the slightest change in energy in the room may be picked up and amplified. The result is a performance full of quick shifts in atmosphere: from lyrical to humorous to matter-of-fact to philosophical.

Berti uses a system she began exploring in a duo piece called “Aoouuu”, developed in 2013-2014. In her research in these past few year she has been exploring the human body and mind, developing an approach to dance performance through a method that examines the effects of the hidden connection between the body, the mind and how those manifest in relation with an audience, started from a research in empathy.

Continuing on the question of ‘how creation of perception happens’, the relationship between visible and invisible, the imagination, the thoughts and the simultaneity of the senses can reinforce the communication and understanding

“At first there was a point, flowing without decisions. Then someone called it ‘shape’ and a separation occurred. Infinite numbers. I started to fly, but I was visible, too visible. Confusion. I fail. Many identities at the same time. Silence — the space above me. Tilting my head up 2cm, my focus blurred. I am not attached to any material things, I think. Then it all becomes an explosion. The point is, how long? Almost here. Towards the stars again. Emphasizing one point and all the possible volumes accessible from my body-mind. Glitter on my shape. Still not here.”

Watch a trailer.

‘I am shape, in a shape, doing a shape’ won the HAU2 Theatre’s Jury Prize during the 100° Festival in Berlin, 2014.

Gili Avissar – Diary Videos

In Dairy Videos, the artist presents a selection of his video library, which he has cataloged, classified, and arranged in a private index of videotaped raw materials from 1997 to 2015. The medium of video is the vehicle by which the artist explores and documents the objects created in his studio, activating and personifying them, objectifying himself through them.

The subject of Wild Yellow is the transformation of space, figure, and object. Working from the elements of his previous installation ,Urban Remains (2012), Avissar constructs a kind of playground, theatre stage, sheltering cave, or habitat–a place of artistic production. The film shows him costumed, appropriating the space through handcrafts, painting, and play. Like the space, the character is engaged in a constant process of transformation. His clothes, approach to objects, and relationship to the environment all vary, but not according to any discernible underlying system. In some scenes, the figure, objects and space form a self-contained, colourful artistic synthesis; in other scenes, this unity is broken up in order to draw attention to the mutability of the relationship structure. What is sought here is not clearly definable, but rather the communicative process that arises out of the human use of space.

Watch excerpts of Diary Videos.

Alexa Wilson & Oliver Connew – The Resistant Body Series

The Resistant Body Series is an ongoing generative succession of collaborative interventions, activations, creations, exchanges, and activisms of performance, video and writing around the idea of “the resistant body”. This particular work within the series began in 2016 at Entitle Conference in Stockholm, as a performance around the notion of privileged bodies and borders. One of the main focuses of this work is interrogating personal boundaries using the camera as a means of creating distance, control, and intimacy. The presence of a camera vastly alters dynamics between people and cultures in the form of spectacle and in/exclusion of social groups. The artists engage with these ideas through improvisation, movement, and text, incorporating live-feed projections to see how cameras control and alter behaviours, create power dynamics, and also provide the potential for intimacy and transformation.

The concept of the series does not distinguish the body as a singular entity, but includes also notions of “a body of people”, “a body of text”, “a body of water” , “a body of meaning”; how resistant bodies may interact, unite, exchange or clash with one another at this pivotal historical moment in which discourses around ecological, economic and socio-political sustainability move beyond catch-phrases and into action. In this sense, resistance is constructive, rather than simply contrarian.

Der Acker Stadt Palast ist ein Ort, in dem etablierte Künstler und Newcomer sich begegnen, um zu experimentieren und zeitgenössische Diskurse zu reflektieren. Der Fokus, der erst 2012 gegründeten Spielstätte neben Schokoladen in Berlin-Mitte, liegt auf der Verbindung von zeitgenössischem Tanz und Neuer Musik. Der Acker Stadt Palast bietet der freien Szene neuartige Schnittstellen zwischen diesen Kunstformen. Darüber hinaus ist der Acker Stadt Palast neugierig auf die verschiedensten ästhetischen Formen des Tanzes und des Theaters.