The Schwules Museum Berlin presents the performance art exhibition Intimate Spaces. Guest curated by the artist collective postspace, this exhibition invites international performance artists to create week-long, live, interactive performances during the museum’s opening hours.
Intimate Spaces is situated inside the small Kabinett room within the main exhibition space, where the exhibition Paradise is concurrently on display. In seven weekly rotations and three special events during the Long Night of Museums on August 26th, the participating artists will create new site-specific environments and invite the museum visitors to become part of the performances that they develop within this intimate space.
The museum visitors are encouraged to participate by entering the room and interacting with the artists, thus taking part in the creative process that leads to the realization of the artwork. The intimacy and success of these performance works rely on the input and involvement of the museum visitor, who has the possibility to take on new roles and meanings, and to allow a variety of new relationships, connections, and meanings to emerge. Through these processes, the traditional concepts of the museum visitor and the ritual of museum-going are transformed and brought into question.
The exhibition Intimate Spaces presents varying perspectives of present-day identity politics, and will be a contemporary and performative complement to the historical and artistically classical material on display at the Schwules Museum.
The participating artists:
Gil and Moti are a duo of interdisciplinary artists who live and work together since 1994. In order to construct a new identity, they moved out of Israel to live and work in Holland in 1998. A year later Gil and Moti publicized their life by choosing to make their home into a gallery space. Their motivation derives from the need to be close to the public and also out of interest in the limits of privacy and its socio political contexts.
Sabina Jacobsson is an Oslo based artist working with video, objects, installations, and performances. She is interested in notions of narrativity, the reliable/unreliable narrator, leading and misleading the viewer, and uses simple situations where the title extends the meaning of the work, or a narrative context to give the work several layers. The use of humor and irony is a pivotal agent in her work and reinforces social and political issues.
Wrench & Franks are Writers and Performers from London, who work with video, puppetry and animation. They use environmental staging with video to mix live action with animated forms and artificial settings. They are interested in the way entertainment co-opts scientific and historical fact, the tradition of the sideshow booth and the shop window.
Ane Lan is a Norwegian artist, whose videos and performances address the complex interrelationship between media, the body, the viewer and society itself with its preconceptions and its judgments. The characters he produces present themselves as both private and public, both fiction and reality. It is as if his artistic sincerity is too overwhelming and ultimately draws a blind between us and his stage.
Matthew Lutz-Kinoy & Sylbee Kim are artists from the United States and South Korea who are collaborating in Berlin by developing videos that are presented alongside choreographed responses, and implement large sculptures, props and costumes. In their on going investigations in time based media, the interaction between prerecorded footage and live action is an exciting development for these two fresh performers.
Arthür is a French performance artist currently living in Berlin. She has studied and developed various circus and dance techniques, theater and interventions. In her work she explores the subversion of gender and sexuality through minimalistic and/or campy techniques.
Boskovic & Stankovic are a Berlin and Belgrade based artist duo that create videos, installations and per-formances that deal with their reactions to the provocations of everyday life by creating fictive spaces – campy environments constructed through narratives – in which the happening attempts to invert the focuses of social relations through means of humor.
Oreet Ashery is a London based artist. Her interdisciplinary practice encourages a dialogue between live art, interventions, video, sound, photography and text. The work is site specific and mutates according to the location and event; galleries, live art, film festivals, site specific locations, the streets, clubs and domestic settings.
Andrew Kerton is living and working in London. He creates increasingly layered performances which explore the possibility of shifting time, place and action when live or recorded performance activates with, or in, temporal media. In his work, Andrew examines myth within the context of theatre, whilst raising an eye-brow at restrictive social conditioning, multi-cultural unease and his own vaudevillian tendencies.
postspace is an artist collective that was formed at the end of 2005 by Berlin-based artists Tsvika Solan and Andreas Warisz. Postspace operates without a gallery of its own to organize performance events, film, and video screenings that take place at various locations.
Curator: postspace