The Commons Series
… renegotiates relationships between individual and social bodies. The series itself is an intense process that manifests artistic production as a direct consequence of the relations between the individual and social. Spaces of commoning are formed through relational capacities, which are themselves constructed through both the competence and incompetence of the people involved. As discoursal spaces, the commons consistently expresses the potential to destabilise the very notion of what is and is not competent. This potential within commons to rearticulate personal experience as political implications is situated within the aesthetic realm in order to question the contingent nature of co-authored-ness. Within The Commons Series, publicness is the focus of research. The notion of publicness is explored through spatial and affective confict. Publicness thus emerged through ways of imagining a situation; the very situation that, without the Commons Series, would not be otherwise evoked. For example, the Sammlung MdR intervened in existing museum collections and used the already extant artifacts in the given museum as a tool for creating new readings, understandings, misunderstandings, and thus new life, not only for the collection, for but its public. The Commons Series events set out to position the MdR collection presentations within a particular museum collection in relation to the notion of “becoming,” and therefore to create a continuum of interconnected actions and materializations. Instances of generative discovery and integrative process and display strategies created a shared experiment for combining exhibition practices, discussions, and sound in search of a reformulation of the agency of the artist.
Transnational Art’s Commons, Bern Biennale (CH) 2014 and Kunstencentrum BUDA (B) 2016; Project space festival, 2014 at Grüntaler9; Institute für Alles Mögliche and the Allierten Museum, 2015 Berlin. With Aleks Slota, Yan Gi Cheng, Teena Lange, Frank Homeyer, Daniel Kok, Patricia Reed, Philippine Hoegen, etc…
VerlegtVerlag Series
copyman // copymachine // copyroom: a space that has always been there. The project is the means for meeting distance. Alternatively, one can ask: what is essential for calling a space, a space? We keep our distance, that foreseeable distance – always still ahead of us – materialized in the room. To let the space appear as creativity appears; the copy machine raises its voice. If the space can be a metalogue, so can the copy machine. We raise the machine, the space, the idea from the dead by referencing its etymology: copy –, co – opulent or copia– means abundance. VerlegtVerlag and its imprint COYOTL YOURNAL was conceived together with Nicolas Y Galeazzi as a public rewriting of biographical facts, devised for free transformation into a storyboard for the future. The performance-installations instigate the production of an Autobiographiction: the first Best-Selling-Autobiography ghostwritten by its audience. It is an artistic research instrument that creates frameworks for performance on paper, linking by consequence the British artist Damien Hirst’s famous For the Love of God [diamond skull] with Libya’s Kolonel Gadaffi.
Batlic Circle Festival, Museum for contemporary Art, KIASMA, Helsinki; Belluard Bollwerk International arts Festival, Fribourg (CH); Burning ice Festival, Kaai Theater and Bains Connective art Lab, Brussels. With Elke Van Campenhout, Lilia Mestre, Heike Langsdorf, Jörn J. Burmester, Pilvi Porkola, …
Gridiron Hotel Series
Can we use art as a metaphor for the entire world – similarly, perhaps, to the way Baroque theatre considered the stage its metaphor? At the GRIDIRON HOTEL, we give substantial emphasis to process-based research and present situationally-rooted and/or contextually-oriented forms of mediation (such as interventions, encounters, performances, events, talks, presentations, publications, web logs …). In these reflective (and self-reflexive) processes, we seek how to stimulate various forms of exchange (e.g. between music, performance and the visual arts) that might generate new and meaningful artistic practices. The versatile and modular infrastructure of a generic hotel offers a rich opportunity to maintain an intimate, colloquial relation to the development of inquiry through artistic practice. To this quotidian structure, we draw numerous artists together whose work crosses disciplinary divides. The GRIDIRON HOTEL is a collective project that roots its public activities in Belgium with a three-day-long premier, entitled the 48 hours initial hospitality incident (48hihi). During their stay at the GRIDIRON HOTEL, the artists organized performances, workshops, screenings, interventions, and a public debate about the ways art worlds (informal and heterogeneous networks and formal institutions) can be conceptualized and facilitated as research fields for social change and cooperation.
Skulpturenpark Berlin; Museo Tambo Quiquincho, La Paz, Bolivia; Netwerk / center for contemporary art, Aalst, Belgium; GfKFB Berlin; Harburger Bahnhof, Hamburg; Kunsthalle Luzern (CH) with Mika Hannula, Lise Nellemann, Inga Zimprich, Stephan Geene, Mari Brellochs, Armin Chodzinski, Florian Feigl, …
The Muffie Series
is created as an artistic research structure for urban dramaturgical and social interventionist projects. The series features the Muffie as a general title for every encapsulated act, and thus a brand name emerges from the act of titling the series. Muffie is thus a label and ‘quality certificate’ for a range of products and services developed in cooperation with changing partners. The first Muffie product was launched in November 1998 under the name dummy 3, a three-day therapy package for communication infections.
Flutgraben e.V. / BEGA.tec; Galerie Kunstpunkt Berlin; Galerie K&S, Berlin and Cluj / Rumänien; Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin; Belgian Institute for architecture and Urban Planning. With Barbara Frieß, Karen Irvine, Ebbe Stub Wittrup, Bruno Vandermeulen, …
