If I Can’t Dance I Don’t Want To Be Part Of Your Revolution
18 Dec 2008 - 19 Apr 2009
© Olivier Foulon
El soliloquio de la escoba (Nueva York) [The Soliloquy of the Broom (New York)], 2008
Fotografía. 57 x 47cm.
El soliloquio de la escoba (Nueva York) [The Soliloquy of the Broom (New York)], 2008
Fotografía. 57 x 47cm.
IF I CAN’T DANCE I DON’T WANT TO BE PART OF YOUR REVOLUTION
Edition III. Masquerade. Episode 2
December 18th, 2008 - April 19th, 2009
Curators: Frederique Bergholtz & Annie Fletcher
Artists: Keren Cytter, Jon Mikel Euba, Olivier Foulon, Suchan Kinoshita, Joachim Koester, Sarah Pierce
Starting on 18th December, sala rekalde will become the locale of the travelling platform If I Can’t Dance, I Don’t Want To Be Part Of Your Revolution, a curatorial project that investigates the evolution of performance and its different typologies within contemporary art. The project began in 2005 in the Netherlands as an initiative in parallel to the theatre festivals Festival a/d Werf in Utrecht, Boulevard in Hertogenbosch and De VeenFabriek in Leiden. In the first edition, the group explored notions such as theatricality and mise-en-scène, commissioning artists to produce new works for a specifically theatrical context. In the second edition, the project was centred on the feminist legacy within contemporary art, examined through performance.
The platform has been presenting its reflections on these questions in different European centres such as de Appel Arts Centre (Amsterdam), MuHKA (Antwerp), and the Overgaden Institute of Contemporary Art (Copenhagen). The third edition, “The Masquerade”, which consists of a prologue and four episodes, aims to reflect - together with artists and other collaborators - on the present-day relationship between identity and the public space. After starting in Copenhagen, this latest edition will travel to different European centres including de Apple Arts Centre (Amsterdam), sala rekalde (Bilbao) and the Project Arts Centre (Dublin), with the tour concluding in the Van Abbemuseum (Eindhoven, the Netherlands).
The third edition is centred on the masquerade, exploring its historical trajectory in psychoanalysis, feminism and performance. The curators are especially interested in the post-structuralist philosopher Judith Butler’s reflections on Joan Rivieres’ work Womanliness as a Masquerade (1929), in which gender is analysed as act, behaviour, set of manipulated codes and attire, rather than as an essential aspect of an intrinsic identity. On the other hand, Notes on Gesture (1993) by Giorgio Agamben reflects on the loss of gesture and how this fact has created an obsession with it. Gesture is what prompts us to think about masquerade in the context of experience within the social, the group. The third edition will explore aspects such as ritual, gestures, normalised behaviour facing transgression.
This edition started on 23rd August 2008 in the Overgaden Institute of Contemporary Arts of Copenhagen, where the six participating artists pooled their reflections on the masquerade, presenting the process of their works at that stage. Since then the artists have been developing their project within the different episodes of the program that will conclude in 2010.
From 18th December 2008 until 19th April 2009, the travelling platform will be at sala rekalde, which will become a meeting place for generating ideas, dialogue and reflection around the project. By extension, the city of Bilbao will host different workshops, talks and reading groups directed by artists forming part of If I can’t dance... Throughout this second episode, the artists will be presenting their projects in two different parts spread over the time of the exhibition. They will be organised as follows:
1st Part. Keren Cytter and Oliver Foulon, from 18th december 2008 to 19th april 2009.
2nd Part. Jon Mikel Euba, Suchan Kinoshita, Joachim Koester and Sarah Pierce, from 10th april 2009 to 19th april 2009.
Keren Cytter. Work
The work of Keren Cytter is principally based on the screenplay. She creates scenarios, dialogues, monologues, always alternating reality and fiction, allowing the screenplay itself to form part of the everyday scenario of the films. Midway between the style of the French Nouvelle Vague, the precepts of Dogma films and the aesthetics of video-art, the narrative in Cytter’s works flows between documentary cinema, melodrama and the sitcom, in which the characters and the plot develop in short episodes. Her work is mainly concerned with interpersonal relationships, which are concentrated around sex and love, cruelty and fear, envy, hatred, jealousy... The repetition of both language and montage helps to intensify the issues dealt with in her work.
At sala rekalde, Keren Cytter will present a series of performances and a new film.
Oliver Foulon. Work
As the central issue of his works he takes the reproduction of historical pictures and contemporary works of art. He uses the photographic camera as a tool for note-taking, organising the images he captures in sequences in which time is not necessarily chronological. His work takes the form of a compilation of photographs, which is his way of structuring his interests, subjects, ideas and proposals.
At sala rekalde, Oliver Foulon will present his project The Soliloquy of the Broom, which is centred on the concept of masquerade in relation to painting. As his starting point he takes the work Jo, the Beautiful Irish Woman, painted by Courbet in 1865, revealing the circumstances in which his systematic search for the four copies of the work took place, besides presenting a special talk-performance.
Suchan Kinoshita. Work
Musical and theatrical elements alternate in her work, and are interlaced with visual and architectural elements. The subject of her artistic practice is usually the contact between public and private aspects of life. The objects Kinoshita normally uses belong to everyday life (used light bulbs, coffee filters or teabags) and are representative of the simplest aspects of reality. Moving around Kinoshita’s work, the spectator undergoes a sensorial experience, which is at the same time a proposal for interaction. The artistic context in which her proposals are shown is what emphasises their most artistic and poetic aspects.
At sala rekalde, she will bring together the different roles of director, spectator and performer within her proposal.
Jon Mikel Euba. Work
In his participation in the second episode of If I can’t dance, dedicated to the feminist legacy within contemporary art, Jon Mikel Euba considered certain aspects of performance such as representation and identity. In May 2007, in the context of the A/D Werf festival of music, theatre and visual arts, he presented the works Re:Horse and RGB Horse, in which, making use of a script, he stimulated public participation. Meanwhile a film was being shot and at the same time projected simultaneously on two screens. A great quantity of residual material was generated by the performance, which progressively became a component part of the work, essential to its evolution.
In Bilbao, Jon Mikel Euba will hold a workshop entitled Re:Writing Re:Horse in collaboration with students from the Fine Arts Faculty of the University of the Basque Country, to reconsider and analyse the artistic strategies of this performance.
Joachim Koester. Work
His work has recently been linked to the unconscious gesture, as shown by the work presented at the recent edition of Manifesta 7. Joachim Koester presented a projection at Trento in which unconscious and convulsive gestures could be appreciated, occurring in the tarantella dance. Since the Middle Ages, tarantism has been treated in the south of Italy as a disease that could be cured through the wild dancing that was provoked by the rhythms of the pizzica or the taranta.
Ever attentive to the gesture, at sala rekalde Koester will be venturing into the unexplored territory of the body and the mind.
Sarah Pierce. Work
In recent years, Sarah Pierce has been using a great variety of platforms in her creative activity; the body of her work consisting of talks and exhibitions or archives. Pierce’s interest is now centred on the relationships between the radical practices of the 1970s and contemporary art, connecting historical documents on proposals and performances with workshops aimed at art students. Taking public demonstrations in different universities of the United States as her starting point, Sarah Pierce explores the progressive contemporary erosion and the emptiness of the gesture in this type of action.
At sala rekalde, she will include the film piece It’s time Man, It Feels Imminent to approach this idea.
Brief biography of the participant artists:
Keren Cytter (1977) currently lives and works in Berlin. She studied at the Avni Institute in Tel-Aviv and de Ateliers, Amsterdam. Recent solo shows of her work were exhibited in Witte de With, Rotterdam (2008), Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig, Vienna (2007) and the KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin (2006). Cytter’s work has been included in numerous group exhibitions, such as in the Yokohama Triennale (2008), “Manifesta 7” (2008), the Biennale de Lyon (2007) and “Television Delivers People” in the Whitney Museum of American Art (2007).
Jon Mikel Euba (1967) is based in Bilbao. Solo exhibitions of his work include “Condensed Velázquez” in Soledad Lorenzo Gallery, Madrid (2008), “Jugando con piedras”, Moisés Pérez de Albéniz Gallery, Pamplona (2007) and “Kill ́em all” in the Fundació Antoni Tàpies, Barcelona (2003). Euba’s work was also part of “Les Rencontres Internationales” in Paris, Madrid and Berlin (2008), the Istanbul Biennale (2005) and the Busan Biennale, Korea (2005).
Olivier Foulon (1976) lives and works in Berlin. He studied at the Ecole de Recherche Graphique in Brussels and the Jan van Eyck Academie in Maastricht. Solo exhibitions of his work include “redites et ratures” at Museum Abteiberg, Mönchengladbach (2007), “Sprung in die Neuzeit – Un seul ou plusieurs loups?” at Dépendance, Brussels (2007) and “Blind Mans Buff” in Marres, Maastricht (2004). Recent group exhibitions include “Delusive Orders”, Muzeum Sztuki (2008), Lodz, “Speaking of which”, Le Comptoir du Livre, Liège (2007) and the “Prix de la Jeune Peinture Belge” (first prize), Palais des Beaux-Arts, Brussels (2005).
Suchan Kinoshita (1960) lives and works in Maastricht. She studied contemporary music at the Music Academy in Cologne and art at the Jan van Eyck Academie in Maastricht. Kinoshita teaches at the Kunstakademie in Münster, Germany. Solo shows of her work were exhibited in the Ikon Gallery, Birmingham (2006), Galerie Nadja Vilenne, Liège (2006), Marres, Maastricht (2004) and the MuHKA, Antwerp (2002-2003). Recently, her work has been included in the 7th Shanghai Biennale (2008), Skulptur Projekte Münster (2007) and “A for Alibi” in de Appel, Amsterdam (2007).
Joachim Koester (1962) works and lives in New York and Copenhagen. He studied at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen. Solo exhibitions of Koester’s work include “My Frontier is an Endless Wall of Points”, Moderna Museet, Stockholm (2007), “Numerous Incidents of Indefinite Outcome”, Extra City, Antwerp (2007) and “Le Matin des magiciens”, Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2006-2007). His work was recently included in “Manifesta 7” in Italy (2008), the “8th Sharjah Biennial” (2007) and “Black is Black”, SMAK, Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst, Ghent (2007).
Sarah Pierce (1968) works and lives in Dublin. She studied at Cornell University and the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program. Currently she is preparing a PhD Curatorial/Knowledge at Goldsmith University in London. A solo exhibition of Pierce’s work was mounted in Project Arts Centre in Dublin (2006). Her work was included in various group exhibitions, such as “Nought to Sixty” at ICA London (2008), “Left Pop”, in the 2nd Moscow Biennial (2007), and If I Can’t Dance... – “Feminist Legacies and Potentials” in MuHKA, Antwerp (2007-2008). She set up (together with Annie Fletcher) the ‘Paraeducation Department’ as part of “Tracer” in Witte de With (2004) and curated (together with Grant Watson) “Enthusiasm!” a radio broadcast programme for the Frieze Art Fair (2006).
This show has received the support of:
Mondriaan Foundation
European Union, Culture Programme (2007- 2013)
SNS Reaalfonds
Amsterdams Fonds voor de Kunst
Prins Bernhard Cultuurfonds
Netherlands Foundation for Visual Arts, Design and Architecture (Fonds BKVB)
Seacex
Danish Arts Council
Programmed activities
Reading Group
In 2006, and as part of the project If I Can’t Dance.... an open reading group was initiated in Holland. The group composed by artists, theorist and other cultural agents aimed to produce knowledge around diverse aspects of the practice of the performance and its links with other political fields. sala rekalde will continue with this iniciative hosting a monthly reading group coordinated by Aimar Arriola, member student of the Program of Independent Studies (PEI) of the MACBA. The reading group will reflect on the masquerade from a varied discursive perspective.
Edition III. Masquerade. Episode 2
December 18th, 2008 - April 19th, 2009
Curators: Frederique Bergholtz & Annie Fletcher
Artists: Keren Cytter, Jon Mikel Euba, Olivier Foulon, Suchan Kinoshita, Joachim Koester, Sarah Pierce
Starting on 18th December, sala rekalde will become the locale of the travelling platform If I Can’t Dance, I Don’t Want To Be Part Of Your Revolution, a curatorial project that investigates the evolution of performance and its different typologies within contemporary art. The project began in 2005 in the Netherlands as an initiative in parallel to the theatre festivals Festival a/d Werf in Utrecht, Boulevard in Hertogenbosch and De VeenFabriek in Leiden. In the first edition, the group explored notions such as theatricality and mise-en-scène, commissioning artists to produce new works for a specifically theatrical context. In the second edition, the project was centred on the feminist legacy within contemporary art, examined through performance.
The platform has been presenting its reflections on these questions in different European centres such as de Appel Arts Centre (Amsterdam), MuHKA (Antwerp), and the Overgaden Institute of Contemporary Art (Copenhagen). The third edition, “The Masquerade”, which consists of a prologue and four episodes, aims to reflect - together with artists and other collaborators - on the present-day relationship between identity and the public space. After starting in Copenhagen, this latest edition will travel to different European centres including de Apple Arts Centre (Amsterdam), sala rekalde (Bilbao) and the Project Arts Centre (Dublin), with the tour concluding in the Van Abbemuseum (Eindhoven, the Netherlands).
The third edition is centred on the masquerade, exploring its historical trajectory in psychoanalysis, feminism and performance. The curators are especially interested in the post-structuralist philosopher Judith Butler’s reflections on Joan Rivieres’ work Womanliness as a Masquerade (1929), in which gender is analysed as act, behaviour, set of manipulated codes and attire, rather than as an essential aspect of an intrinsic identity. On the other hand, Notes on Gesture (1993) by Giorgio Agamben reflects on the loss of gesture and how this fact has created an obsession with it. Gesture is what prompts us to think about masquerade in the context of experience within the social, the group. The third edition will explore aspects such as ritual, gestures, normalised behaviour facing transgression.
This edition started on 23rd August 2008 in the Overgaden Institute of Contemporary Arts of Copenhagen, where the six participating artists pooled their reflections on the masquerade, presenting the process of their works at that stage. Since then the artists have been developing their project within the different episodes of the program that will conclude in 2010.
From 18th December 2008 until 19th April 2009, the travelling platform will be at sala rekalde, which will become a meeting place for generating ideas, dialogue and reflection around the project. By extension, the city of Bilbao will host different workshops, talks and reading groups directed by artists forming part of If I can’t dance... Throughout this second episode, the artists will be presenting their projects in two different parts spread over the time of the exhibition. They will be organised as follows:
1st Part. Keren Cytter and Oliver Foulon, from 18th december 2008 to 19th april 2009.
2nd Part. Jon Mikel Euba, Suchan Kinoshita, Joachim Koester and Sarah Pierce, from 10th april 2009 to 19th april 2009.
Keren Cytter. Work
The work of Keren Cytter is principally based on the screenplay. She creates scenarios, dialogues, monologues, always alternating reality and fiction, allowing the screenplay itself to form part of the everyday scenario of the films. Midway between the style of the French Nouvelle Vague, the precepts of Dogma films and the aesthetics of video-art, the narrative in Cytter’s works flows between documentary cinema, melodrama and the sitcom, in which the characters and the plot develop in short episodes. Her work is mainly concerned with interpersonal relationships, which are concentrated around sex and love, cruelty and fear, envy, hatred, jealousy... The repetition of both language and montage helps to intensify the issues dealt with in her work.
At sala rekalde, Keren Cytter will present a series of performances and a new film.
Oliver Foulon. Work
As the central issue of his works he takes the reproduction of historical pictures and contemporary works of art. He uses the photographic camera as a tool for note-taking, organising the images he captures in sequences in which time is not necessarily chronological. His work takes the form of a compilation of photographs, which is his way of structuring his interests, subjects, ideas and proposals.
At sala rekalde, Oliver Foulon will present his project The Soliloquy of the Broom, which is centred on the concept of masquerade in relation to painting. As his starting point he takes the work Jo, the Beautiful Irish Woman, painted by Courbet in 1865, revealing the circumstances in which his systematic search for the four copies of the work took place, besides presenting a special talk-performance.
Suchan Kinoshita. Work
Musical and theatrical elements alternate in her work, and are interlaced with visual and architectural elements. The subject of her artistic practice is usually the contact between public and private aspects of life. The objects Kinoshita normally uses belong to everyday life (used light bulbs, coffee filters or teabags) and are representative of the simplest aspects of reality. Moving around Kinoshita’s work, the spectator undergoes a sensorial experience, which is at the same time a proposal for interaction. The artistic context in which her proposals are shown is what emphasises their most artistic and poetic aspects.
At sala rekalde, she will bring together the different roles of director, spectator and performer within her proposal.
Jon Mikel Euba. Work
In his participation in the second episode of If I can’t dance, dedicated to the feminist legacy within contemporary art, Jon Mikel Euba considered certain aspects of performance such as representation and identity. In May 2007, in the context of the A/D Werf festival of music, theatre and visual arts, he presented the works Re:Horse and RGB Horse, in which, making use of a script, he stimulated public participation. Meanwhile a film was being shot and at the same time projected simultaneously on two screens. A great quantity of residual material was generated by the performance, which progressively became a component part of the work, essential to its evolution.
In Bilbao, Jon Mikel Euba will hold a workshop entitled Re:Writing Re:Horse in collaboration with students from the Fine Arts Faculty of the University of the Basque Country, to reconsider and analyse the artistic strategies of this performance.
Joachim Koester. Work
His work has recently been linked to the unconscious gesture, as shown by the work presented at the recent edition of Manifesta 7. Joachim Koester presented a projection at Trento in which unconscious and convulsive gestures could be appreciated, occurring in the tarantella dance. Since the Middle Ages, tarantism has been treated in the south of Italy as a disease that could be cured through the wild dancing that was provoked by the rhythms of the pizzica or the taranta.
Ever attentive to the gesture, at sala rekalde Koester will be venturing into the unexplored territory of the body and the mind.
Sarah Pierce. Work
In recent years, Sarah Pierce has been using a great variety of platforms in her creative activity; the body of her work consisting of talks and exhibitions or archives. Pierce’s interest is now centred on the relationships between the radical practices of the 1970s and contemporary art, connecting historical documents on proposals and performances with workshops aimed at art students. Taking public demonstrations in different universities of the United States as her starting point, Sarah Pierce explores the progressive contemporary erosion and the emptiness of the gesture in this type of action.
At sala rekalde, she will include the film piece It’s time Man, It Feels Imminent to approach this idea.
Brief biography of the participant artists:
Keren Cytter (1977) currently lives and works in Berlin. She studied at the Avni Institute in Tel-Aviv and de Ateliers, Amsterdam. Recent solo shows of her work were exhibited in Witte de With, Rotterdam (2008), Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig, Vienna (2007) and the KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin (2006). Cytter’s work has been included in numerous group exhibitions, such as in the Yokohama Triennale (2008), “Manifesta 7” (2008), the Biennale de Lyon (2007) and “Television Delivers People” in the Whitney Museum of American Art (2007).
Jon Mikel Euba (1967) is based in Bilbao. Solo exhibitions of his work include “Condensed Velázquez” in Soledad Lorenzo Gallery, Madrid (2008), “Jugando con piedras”, Moisés Pérez de Albéniz Gallery, Pamplona (2007) and “Kill ́em all” in the Fundació Antoni Tàpies, Barcelona (2003). Euba’s work was also part of “Les Rencontres Internationales” in Paris, Madrid and Berlin (2008), the Istanbul Biennale (2005) and the Busan Biennale, Korea (2005).
Olivier Foulon (1976) lives and works in Berlin. He studied at the Ecole de Recherche Graphique in Brussels and the Jan van Eyck Academie in Maastricht. Solo exhibitions of his work include “redites et ratures” at Museum Abteiberg, Mönchengladbach (2007), “Sprung in die Neuzeit – Un seul ou plusieurs loups?” at Dépendance, Brussels (2007) and “Blind Mans Buff” in Marres, Maastricht (2004). Recent group exhibitions include “Delusive Orders”, Muzeum Sztuki (2008), Lodz, “Speaking of which”, Le Comptoir du Livre, Liège (2007) and the “Prix de la Jeune Peinture Belge” (first prize), Palais des Beaux-Arts, Brussels (2005).
Suchan Kinoshita (1960) lives and works in Maastricht. She studied contemporary music at the Music Academy in Cologne and art at the Jan van Eyck Academie in Maastricht. Kinoshita teaches at the Kunstakademie in Münster, Germany. Solo shows of her work were exhibited in the Ikon Gallery, Birmingham (2006), Galerie Nadja Vilenne, Liège (2006), Marres, Maastricht (2004) and the MuHKA, Antwerp (2002-2003). Recently, her work has been included in the 7th Shanghai Biennale (2008), Skulptur Projekte Münster (2007) and “A for Alibi” in de Appel, Amsterdam (2007).
Joachim Koester (1962) works and lives in New York and Copenhagen. He studied at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen. Solo exhibitions of Koester’s work include “My Frontier is an Endless Wall of Points”, Moderna Museet, Stockholm (2007), “Numerous Incidents of Indefinite Outcome”, Extra City, Antwerp (2007) and “Le Matin des magiciens”, Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2006-2007). His work was recently included in “Manifesta 7” in Italy (2008), the “8th Sharjah Biennial” (2007) and “Black is Black”, SMAK, Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst, Ghent (2007).
Sarah Pierce (1968) works and lives in Dublin. She studied at Cornell University and the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program. Currently she is preparing a PhD Curatorial/Knowledge at Goldsmith University in London. A solo exhibition of Pierce’s work was mounted in Project Arts Centre in Dublin (2006). Her work was included in various group exhibitions, such as “Nought to Sixty” at ICA London (2008), “Left Pop”, in the 2nd Moscow Biennial (2007), and If I Can’t Dance... – “Feminist Legacies and Potentials” in MuHKA, Antwerp (2007-2008). She set up (together with Annie Fletcher) the ‘Paraeducation Department’ as part of “Tracer” in Witte de With (2004) and curated (together with Grant Watson) “Enthusiasm!” a radio broadcast programme for the Frieze Art Fair (2006).
This show has received the support of:
Mondriaan Foundation
European Union, Culture Programme (2007- 2013)
SNS Reaalfonds
Amsterdams Fonds voor de Kunst
Prins Bernhard Cultuurfonds
Netherlands Foundation for Visual Arts, Design and Architecture (Fonds BKVB)
Seacex
Danish Arts Council
Programmed activities
Reading Group
In 2006, and as part of the project If I Can’t Dance.... an open reading group was initiated in Holland. The group composed by artists, theorist and other cultural agents aimed to produce knowledge around diverse aspects of the practice of the performance and its links with other political fields. sala rekalde will continue with this iniciative hosting a monthly reading group coordinated by Aimar Arriola, member student of the Program of Independent Studies (PEI) of the MACBA. The reading group will reflect on the masquerade from a varied discursive perspective.