The Extracurriculars: Michael Portnoy

Mike Kelley: Ghost and Spirit

11.10 2025

Stockholm

In the final part of The Extracurriculars, Michael Portnoy reads Mike Kelley through his performance practice, tracing points of contact and productive friction. His talk explores role play and authority games, absurd systems, and the ways masculinity and power appear through rules of play.

The Extracurriculars: Michael Portnoy

Mike Kelley: Ghost and Spirit

Date

Saturday 11 oktober 2025

Time

16–17.00

Place

The Auditorium, floor 2

Language

English

Price

Free of charge, pre-registration required

Contact: Alexander Kateb, Moderna Museet

Michael Portnoy is an artist working across performance, choreography, film, sculpture, writing, and social architectures. With a background in dance and experimental theatre, he devises formats that choreograph speech, movement, roles, and attention through scores, games, and participatory systems. His practice prototypes new social grammars and modes of relation, with humour, abstraction, and engineered complications sparking invention and experimental intimacy. Portnoy’s work has been presented at dOCUMENTA 13, steirischer herbst, Kunstinstituut Melly, the Stedelijk Museum, the Centre Pompidou, among others. He is also a visiting lecturer at Malmö Art Academy.

As part of The Extracurriculars, Portnoy reads Mike Kelley through his performance practice for points of contact and productive friction. The talk follows engines the two share: role play and authority games, absurd systems that court derailment, humour as an operational method, architectures that script behaviour, and the recoding of pedagogy and ritual. From this ground, Portnoy traces how masculinity and power appear as performed protocols that shape bodies, attention, and relation.

THE EXTRACURRICULARS

The programme series “The Extracurriculars” is arranged in connection with the exhibition “Mike Kelley: Ghost and Spirit” at Moderna Museet.

On each occasion, an artist is invited to encounter Mike Kelley’s art through their own practice. The series reflects the influence of Mike Kelley’s art on generations of artists in different media and practices.

29 August 2025: Lisa Tan
12 September 2025: Jill Mulleady
19 September 2025: Madeleine Andersson
11 October 2025: Michael Portnoy

The title, “The Extracurriculars”, is taken from one of Mike Kelley’s iconic and unfinished series – “Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstruction”, which can be seen in the exhibition. Here, Mike Kelley uses performance and design to explore themes such as memory, repression and taboo.

“Extracurricular activity” can be translated as “activities outside the schedule” and is part of the American high school environment – a recurring motif in today’s pop culture, rife with clichés, teenage angst and trauma.

“The Extracurriculars” is a collaboration with Klubb Moderna.

Supported by The Mike Kelley Foundation.