Performance {LAB + Improv} Sessions
Welcome to a joint session with our two ongoing projects, Performance LAB, curated by Vishnu Vardhani; and the Improv Sessions, curated by Sergio Castrillión.
We introduce and welcome – Andrew Bentley, Anastasia Artemeva, Yin Cheng-Kekott, Anu Keski-Saari, and Kathleen Heil – five performers, all of whom belong to a wide spectrum of performance genres and continuously cross genres even within their own praxes. Together, they weave and enmesh their practice with each other to create new performative meanings, through various interpretations of the Bodies.
Schedule:
Andrew Bentley (20 min.)
18:00 – 18:20
break 5 min.
Anastasia Artemeva (30 min.)
18:25 – 18:55
break 5 min.
Yin Cheng-Kokott (40 min.)
19:00 – 19:40
break 10 min.
Anu Keski-Saari (20 min.)
19:50 – 20:10
break 5 min.
Kathleen Heil (40 min.)
20:15 – 20:55
break 5 min.
Andrew + Anu – Improv Jam (20 min.)
21:00 – 21:20
break 20 min.
Improv Jams – open to public (60 min.)
Andrew Bentley uses all kinds of electronic devices when it comes to improvise. However, in his latests performances he has brought to the stage the classic Serge synthesizer, and has collaborated with different musicians. Bentley is a pioneer composer and performer of electronic music, as well as an educator and research tutor.
Anastasia Artemeva is a visual and relational artist, born in Russia, raised in Ireland, and currently based in Helsinki, Finland. Her work is developed through a process-oriented artistic practice, drawn from object making, performance art, art education, and research in human rights.
Тогда мы идем к вам/Then we are coming to you
In Russia in the 1990’s there was an advertisement on Tv of Tide detergent. The storyline went so that there were two kids sitting on the staircase of an apartment block building. Apparently, they were told to leave the house as their mother is “boiling”- washing clothes in a large pan of boiling water, heated on a kitchen stove. “Boiling” is a well-known practice that bleaches the clothes and returns them their whiteness. A man appears on the staircase and he is holding a box of Tide. He is there to demonstrate to the mother that it is possible to achieve this pure whiteness by simply washing the garments in the right detergent. The tagline goes as follows: “Are you still boiling? Then we are coming to you”.
Privacy of personal dwelling is a fundamental human right. It is unsettling to imagine that someone can just open the door and come into your home. However, the practice of carrying out searches in people’s homes as a way of threatening and intimidating citizens has been a common practice of police forces. This is often a first step before somebody is arrested or charged. People’s homes are being searched, people are being searched, their belongings and their bodies touched by force. The process of cleaning references the act of destroying evidence, getting rid of information, something that can be used against you. Time is a currency, luxury, and a curse.
*This performance may be unsuitable for people with allergies to strong smells of detergent*
Yin Cheng‐Kokott (b. 1989) is a Taiwanese dance artist, writer and tarot practitioner who is based in Berlin. Her work explores the somatic source of movement, bringing pleasure and authenticity to the act of making. She holds a bachelor’s degree in theater from National Taiwan University of arts. She has been working with Ashley Fure, Lilleth Glimcher, Okwui Okpokwasili, Peter Born, Nora Hänska, Doro Saykaly and Mia Lawrence.
SURRENDERING IN PROCESS The act of being aware of our breath and our footsteps is a political act in a world that demands and diffuses our attention at all times. This performance is an experiment to co-‐create an inclusive space of awareness in time. We will employ simple exercises such as slow walk, eye gazing and the expression of our voices. The audience will be carefully instructed and initiated into these techniques to articulate the performance together. We want to come together and co-‐create, slowly dissolving and transforming the audience into the performance. Our communal ritual is guided and enchanted by the poem “come to dust “ by Ursula K LeGuin.
Anu Keski-Saari’s outstanding cello technique breaks into a pure contemplative, spiritual, and meditative way of performing when improvising. Nevertheless, during her performances, there are constantly spontaneous and radical musical mood changes, which generate varied sonic atmospheres, ranging from well defined tone sounds to complete noise. Keski-Saari’s improvised work shows as well a wide technical and stylistic versatility throughout the whole instrument.
Kathleen Heil is an artist working at the intersection of text, movement, and performance. Her poems, stories, essays, and translations appear in The New Yorker, FENCE, The Guardian, and elsewhere. As a dancer, Heil has collaborated with various artists in the U.S. and Europe and performed her own choreography in New York, San Francisco, Berlin, and elsewhere. A recipient of fellowships and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, among others, she lives and works in Berlin. Find her on Instagram @kathleen_heil or at kathleenheil.net.
THE TENDERNESS MANIFESTO
Kathleen Heil’s work explores textual and corporeal language in an artistic practice at the intersection of poetry, dance, translation, and performance.
Under late capitalism, tenderness may be a lost belief, but it is precisely for this very reason — the difficulty by which it is ‘mapped’ onto an atlas of commodification — that it can manifest itself despite the forces of marketplace economics.
At the Museum of Impossible Forms, THE TENDERNESS MANIFESTO is a transmission tower in the form of dialogue, text, and dance: a performance signaling and receiving a call for care together with those present.
Museum of Impossible Forms is a cultural space, located in Kontula, Helsinki. It is a contested Space and it represents a contact zone, a space of unlearning, formulating identity constructs, norm-critical consciousness and critical thinking. Impossible Forms are those that erase and facilitate the process of transgressing the boundaries/borders between art, politics, practice, theory, the artist and the spectator. For 2019-2020, the Museum operates under the curatorial theme of ‘The Atlas of Lost Beliefs (For Insurgents, Citizens and Untitled Bodies)’
Museum of Impossible Formsis a safer space. It follows safer space policies to create a welcoming, inclusive, awesome environment.
Events at the Museum of Impossible Forms are completely free and accessible without prior booking.
Museum of Impossible Forms is accessible by lift with thresholds up to 4cm on the way. The toilet has no thresholds but is not spacious enough to meet accessibility standards. The nearest accessible toilet is located at Kontula metro station.
For directions, please refer to this Map.