Move This! – A Symposium on Choreography and Performance in Relation to Visual Arts

Time: 1 PM – 5 PM
Venue: Start at Moderna Museet Malmö and then continue at Malmö Art Academy
Language: English
Free entry, but limited seats.

The exhibition Objects and Bodies at Rest and in Motion is based on The Moderna Museet collection, in particular the so called New York Collection donated to the museum in 1973, and explores the relationship between the human body and objects in a space. It focuses on a group of artists who were all active in New York during the 1960s and 1970s. Choreographers and performance artists presented in the exhibition are, among others, Simone Forti, Yvonne Rainer, Trisha Brown, and Bruce Nauman. They are all presented in relation to visual artists such as Donald Judd, Frank Stella, and Carl Andre to highlight the connections between the (minimalist) art object and the body.

Today, we’ve seen a renewed interest in these topics, and choreography has a given place not only on dance stages, but also in contemporary art institutions. Another recent example of this in the region is the exhibition William Forsythe – In the Company of Others, currently on view at Kunsthal Charlottenborg in Copenhagen.

This symposium will provide an opportunity to consider and discuss, both from a historical and a contemporary perspective, the mutual influence and cross-fertilization of visual arts, performance-based art and choreography.

Speakers and performers (in order of appearance)
Magnus af Petersens, Luca Frei, Christine Brorsson & Jonna Tideman, Josefine Wikström, Mr. Rice & peanuts, Mathias Kryger

Moderna Museet Malmö
Magnus af Petersens is Senior Curator and Head of Collection at Moderna Museet in Stockholm and Curator at Large at Whitechapel Gallery, London, where he was Chief Curator until recently. At Moderna Museet he has curated several solo exhibitions as well as group exhibitions like Explosion: Painting as Action (2011) and Eclipse: Art in a Dark Age (2008). He was the curator of The Nordic Pavilion at the Venice Biennale 2011, and he also curated Future Histories with Arseny Zhilyaev and Mark Dion at Tre Oci in Venice 2015.

Magnus af Petersens will introduce the exhibition Objects and Bodies at Rest and In Motion, and the curatorial thoughts behind it.

Luca Frei is a Malmö-Based artist born 1976 in Lugano, Switzerland. He studied in Lugano, Edinburgh, New Haven and Malmö. Alongside solo exhibitions at Kunsthaus Glarus, Bonner Kunstverein and in Lunds Konsthall, he has participated in numerous Biennials (31st Ljubljana Biennial of Graphic Arts; 6th Momentum Biennale, Moss, Norway; 12th Cairo Biennial; 3rd Prague Biennial; 9th Istanbul Biennial). Furthermore he was represented in several group exhibitions, for example in the Kunsthalle Fridericianum in Kassel; in the Centre Georges Pompidou Paris; in the Moderna Museet in Stockholm; in the Van Abbe Museum Eindhoven; and in the Kunsthalle Zürich. Recent exhibition displays include Tate Liverpool and Malmö Konsthall.

For Objects and Bodies at Rest and in Motion, Frei directed a new version of Simone Forti’s dance construction See-Saw (1960). At the symposium Frei will introduce his version and its relation to the current exhibition. Moreover, dancers Christine Brorsson and Jonna Tideman will perform Forti’s dance constructions See-Saw and Slant Board (1961).

Malmö Art Academy
Josefine Wikström, is a writer, critic and lecturer whose research revolves around performance and labour. She is a lecturer at DOCH (Stockholm University of the Arts) and a visiting lecturer at Goldsmiths, University of London. She writes for MUTE, Texte Zur Kunst, Kunstkritikk, Afterall, Paletten and Frieze and is an associate editor of Philosophy of Photography. She is currently undertaking a PhD at the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy, Kingston University, where she investigates the concept of performance within contemporary art from the standpoint of concepts of labour in Marx, Adorno, and other thinkers.

Under the title ”Productive Contradictions: The Centrality of the Score in Some 1960s Performance Practices”, Josefine Wikström will discuss how a number of international art institutions have in the last decade or so attempted to recuperate the importance of 1960s performance practices to the history and understanding of contemporary art in general. Many of the performance practices that have been explored in these exhibitions came out of a reconceptualised idea of the musical score. This focus on the score made these performance practices explore fundamental contradictions such as those between event and score, task and dance, subject and object, body and mind, ideality and materiality, and science and art. This talk explores the centrality of the score and the productive contradictions the use of the score implied in Simone Forti’s and some other artists’ practices. In its attempt to point at the constitutive character of performance through its productive contradictions, the talk also attempts to argue for performance practices fundamental importance in contemporary art more generally.

Mr. Rice & peanuts (born 2009, Copenhagen, Denmark) is a Malmö based artistic duo consisting of Sanna Blennow and Robert Logrell. Mr. Rice & peanuts, the stubborn unit, operates in the expanding choreographic field. Mr. Rice & peanuts occupy themselves with the ability to understand this vague field and to produce choreographic situations that sometimes are danced and often written. Currently, Mr. Rice & peanuts are between part one and two in the trilogy SOLID IS THE NEW VAGUE. This trilogy addresses manifestos and choreography from 1965 to today, and will result in a publication, The Ultimate Manifesto of Vague Assumptions, 2017.

ELR+PLUS is a lecture consisting of words, images and bodies that circles around Mr. Rice & peanuts’ seven day long choreographic installation Event Lady Rainer (Inkonst, Malmö 2015), where Yvonne Rainer’s ”No manifesto” (1965) dictated the conditions for the process. ELR+PLUS invites the viewer to critically participate in Mr. Rice & peanuts’ operational logic, straight into the opposition between being and non-being, to the subjects planned to be erased. By the way, what happened to them? About the writing of history, emancipation and the economy of presence when means of production fail.

Mathias Kryger, (born in 1977, lives in Copenhagen) works as a freelance curator, artist and art critic. He recently curated the exhibition William Forsythe – In the Company of Others at Kunsthal Charlottenborg. Mathias Kryger writes for Politiken (the largest Danish daily newspaper) and for the Scandinavian online arts’ press: Kunstkritikk.

Seeing the work as preparations for what could be referred to as the molecular revolution (borrowing from the French radical philosopher and psychotherapist, Félix Guattari), Mathias Kryger examines the institutional frameworks of existence and frantically scrutinises the concept of performance understood as: labour, competition, achievement, administration, execution, pursuance, collectivity, disagreement and resistance.

Mathias Kryger will introduce the themes that permeate William Forsythe’s practice, and share his thoughts on the constellations of works in the exhibition William Forsythe – In the Company of Others.

Programme group
Andreas Nilsson & Ana María Bermeo Ujueta (Moderna Museet Malmö) together with Maj Hasager & Laura Hatfield (Malmö Art Academy/Critical and Pedagogical Studies)