|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||| ZONA DYNAMIC invites:::::
AMALGAMA is a collective audio-visual experience questioning the digital now, through the formation of an amalgamated field. It is an assemblage of 10 artist outputs, sharing a ground and a volume to create an immersive space welcoming and challenging its audience.
„ Hello there! Are you online? I can hear us“.
AMALGAMA is a fragile, and yet durable machinery, a cloud reflecting the new era state of mind. Breeding through a digitized system, advancing like a cyborg - a collector of post human signals, which is driven by an alternating playful control structure.
AMALGAMA is an operation to experiment with the complexity and value of the digital moment. A blue carpet invites the artists to come together, to occupy this territory of artistic identity and its polydimensional projection and presence. Are we empowered, when in collective to understand this moment of performance as tool to overcome opaque content of representation? Can we trust the rendered and shall we go further to transform the past into the prospective to stage the truth?
Live is not live - we just project and past is not past, if we stream it now:::::
Artists:
Willis Anne
FELL
Alan Gleeson
Eliza Goldox
Sabrina Gricourt
Sungho Haku
Holger Heissmeyer
Kritzkom
Infinite Livez
Hannah Rumstedt
initiated by ZONA DYNAMIC as part of the Transmediale Vorspiel program. https://vorspiel.berlin/
www.zonadynamic.com
A collaboration initiated by Jessica Ekomane with Mélodie Fenez and Silje Nes
FILTER is a series on conceptual sound art by Zona Dynamic. Each edition is a temporary collaboration between 3 artists channeled into a one-night sound scene.
VOYEURS - Month of Performance Art-Berlin, May 2014 - A review by Gauthier Lesturgie
During the Month of Performance Art, 2 x 2 x 2m white cube appeared within eight different public places in Berlin.
Eight moments during the « Month of Performance Art » in Berlin, a 2 x 2 x 2m white cube appeared in different public places in town. Each time the cube contained long duration performances by several artists.
Installed in streets and squares of the city, the enclosed space had an « anomalous » presence, even bizarre : an intrusion in which the viewer does not take part, in direct opposition to numerous actions within the public space, leaving the passers-by oddly incidental. We are superfluous, « aside ».
In the majority of performances, the artist’s body was (if not totally invisible) only perceptible through its contact with the box’s membrane : we grasp with difficulty the body as shadows : flat and sonorous shapes, more suggestive than truly « present ». However, three artists decided to tear holes or lacerate the canvas walls, thus inviting the spectator to take a voyeuristic position, a direct reference to the series’ title (« voyeurs »). A particularly eloquent choice was Tired of Being a Woman in which the artist, Anna Julia Amaral, surrounded by inflatable dolls, used her body as a medium of stereotyped expressions and attitudes.
With its mistreated « neutrality », the white cube, appropriated by the artists, becomes an intimate space, a political flag, a communication and narratives tool or else, a poetic microcosm.
Indeed, the « shell-sculpture » with its placement at symbolic locations in Berlin comes into existence as a one-day ephemeral monument : in front of the Cuban embassy (Ian Deleón, All That Is Solid Melts Into Air), Alexanderplatz (Sara Wellenkamp, Achilles Heel) or Rosa-Luxembourg-Platz (Claudia Kühn, Finger).
An enclosed place within an « open » space, one environment displaced within another, it works as a negative volume unveiling its surroundings. The cube, at once container and content, puts in inverted commas the inside action : a Russian dolls system which highlights the scale issue within the space it is implanted.
Thus, what we immediately perceive is not the « art » itself but its performance site, paradoxically invisible. Opaque and enclosed, the room is nonetheless a microcosm where the artists externalize and transmit their expressions, turning it into several symbolical forms : in front of the Cuban embassy, it became a cell, a representation of the frontier, at once geographical, cultural and autobiographic (Ian Deleón, All That Is Solid Melts Into Air). Absent of the artist herself, Natacha Mankowski’s proposal transformed the cube into a peaceful haven, both poetic and protective, gathering yellow canaries within an artificial and mineral oasis reminiscent of land art displacements (I Am An Oasis). At the heart of the 1st of May celebrations, Sara Zaltash used it as an alternative communication tool during an absurd quest where she searched for Sebastian Bechinger-English (My Name Is Sara Zaltash and I Am Looking For Sebastian Bechinger-English). In a courtyard in the Kreuzberg area, the cube became a sound sculpture instrument during the electrifying performance of Constantin Engelmann and Elisa Storelli (Trillenium). Or, with the fragile action of Claudia Kühn who, by touching the cube’s canvas with her finger, expressed illegible and evanescent messages in Fingers.
For the last event : both a retrospective and a conclusion of the eight performances, the cube was split up and scattered throughout the space of the Ding Dong Dom, the main venue of the Month of Performance Art. This time, contained inside a space which itself is paradoxically open (the Ding Dong Dom is essentially constructed with windows), the cube’s facades were used as projection surfaces for recorded videos of the individual performances. Several actions interspersed the evening as outside-the-cube echoes or even re-enactments of some performances. Meanwhile, sound artist Willis Anne spread his electronic pads : a contemplative soundtrack for the evening.
A collective project until the end, the reconstructed cube closed one final time around the four curators and the artist Natacha Mankowski (the only artist absent of the cube during her intervention). Slowly, black patterns appeared on the walls without permitting us to distinguish their authors. Calligraphic, indecipherable forms and messages painted by the « recluses » appeared before they escaped from the cube by cutting each wall. Destroyed from inside, the shell was left a ruin in the middle of the space: a powerful and liberating metaphor reminiscent of actions by Gutai, essential figure of the practices explored during this Month of Performance Art in Berlin.
VOYEURS - Month of Performance Art-Berlin, May 2014
Curated by Vincent Chomaz and ZONA DYNAMIC (Edgar Khandzratyan, Elisa Schönherr, Jorgina Stamogianno for the finissage).
