Ingela Ihrmans work What are you doing here?. From Room for Performance / Shift at Bildmuseet 2018
YoungSoon Cho Jaquets work Dry Fish. From Room for Performance / Shift at Bildmuseet 2018
Performance by Elin Már Øyen Vister at Room for Performance / Shift at Bildmuseet, 2018.
Over an intense weekend at Bildmuseet and Norrlandsoperan, we fill our rooms with tought-provoking, political and poetic performances by artists and dancers from near and far.
The theme is Shift and the works presented move in borderlands. Where does the border run between human and nature? Is it possible to choreograph snails? What is a memory? Some of the acts are durational, others are performances that you experience from beginning to end.
Join walks, challange your perception of the performing body, attend the creative workshop or publish a text at the reflection station. There will also be music, socialising in the bar and conversations on art.
Selection
Lisa W Carlsson and Staffan Westerlund, Sweden
Black Holes
Seke Chimutengwende and Alexandrina Hemsley, United Kingdom
Horses and Heroes, re-enactment
Sally von Rosen, Sweden (art student)
Symphony of a Missing Room
Lundahl & Seitl, Sweden
Tie, Bind, Bond, Attach, Secure
Miss Vicc Repasi, Sweden/Hungary (art student)
Critique workshop
The History of the Circle Recounts
Elin Már Øyen Vister, Norway
Dry Fish
YoungSoon Cho Jaquet, South Chorea/Switzerland
In the Dark
Laura Cemin, Italy/Sweden (art student)
Palmyra
Bertrand Lesca and Nasi Voutsas, France/United Kingdom
Symphony of a Missing Room
Lundahl & Seitl, Sweden
What are You Doing Here?
Ingela Ihrman / Ögonblicksteatern, Sweden
Creative workshop and critique workshop
Grounding
(The performance starts outside Guitars the museum)
Roi Vaara, Finland
Alzheimer Café
Valentina Vetturi, Italy
Blue Kongo
Sindri Runudde and Julia Giertz, Sweden
Forecasting
Barbara Matijevic and Giuseppe Chico, Croatia/Italy
In the Dark
Laura Cemin, Italy/Sweden (art student)
Between the Airstrip and the Surrounding Forest
Gerd Aurell, Sweden
Slow Pixel
Cyril Leclerc and Elizabeth Saint-Jalmes, France
Interdine
Gaia Crocella, Italy
Symphony of a Missing Room
Lundahl & Seitl, Sweden
We Swim in One Water
Anastasia Savinova, Sweden/Russia
Round Table
Curators, participating artists and general public
Creative workshop and critique workshop
LISA W CARLSON AND STAFFAN / SELECTION
Scaled down, dignified and ritual, the artists bring forth everyday events and actions and allow for transformation of the meaning of everyday. With humour and seriousness and around a core of stories, they reflect on achievements, pains and threats. The shape and function of the site are important parts of the work.
Lisa W Carlson (b. 1949 Katrineholm) lives and works in Härnösand. With an artistic background in textiles and graphics, she has recent years worked with video, sound art and performance as a mean of expression. She is interested in social situations and mental processes and examines the femininity in different shapes.
Staffan Westerlund (b. 1950 Arjeplog) lives and works in Härnösand. He works with painting as his main expression, often with a social, political and aesthetic starting point in his oeuvre. He has been teaching film and photography since the early eighties. Performance and improvisation in collaboration with Lisa W Carlson is a new means of expression.
SEKE CHIMUTENGWENDE AND ALEXANDRINA HEMSLEY / BLACK HOLES
Weaving together poetic text and movement, Alexandrina Hemsley and Seke Chimutengwende come together to retell the history of the universe from the big bang through to the universe's death. Speculating on how to be with their bodies that carry histories of marginalisation and anti-blackness, Chimutengwende and Hemsley combine elements of Science Fiction, and personal narrative to propel the personal and the mythic onto a cosmic scale.
Alexandrina Hemsley and Seke Chimutengwende began working together in 2016. Exploring the potentials and problematics of Afrofuturism shapes their collaboration. They situate their bodies inside shifting and imagined landscapes, searching for hopeful possibilities amidst the harshness of past and present dystopias.
Black Holes is choreographed, written and performed by Seke Chimutengwende and Alexandrina Hemsley. It was co-commissioned by Cambridge Junction, The Place and Chisenhale Dance Space in London, and supported by Camden People's Theatre, Arts Council England, Trinity Laban and Greenwich Dance.
Dramaturgy: Season Butler
Set Design: Rosie Elnile
Sound Design: Xana
Lighting Design: Simeon Miller
Producer: Rachel Rogers
SALLY VON ROSEN / HORSES AND HEROES, RE-ENACTMENT
Horses and Heroes, re-enactment is a performance re-enactment that will be shown with the original footage (FlickFilm: Hästar och hjältar, video, 4.03 min, 2003), and enlightens the idea of working with re-enactments as a transformative process and a transition in time. FlickFilm is an extensive ongoing project that started in 2001 when Sally von Rosen was around six years old. Today, almost twenty years later, she is returning to FlickFilm, to explore the ways in which the process of working with an original footage that she both filmed and acted in when she was little can propel debate and produce questions on empowerment and agency through artistic feminist actions.
Using herself as an example, she has been re-enacting this footage to look into ideas about interpreting, depicting and representing a child or childish behaviour and closely observing the power struggle between these girls. From the perspective of the child, to herself now, as an adult. She has also investigated the tension or friction that seems to appear when an adult tries to play or behave as a child, something that to begin with seems comic and safe but after a while becomes uncanny.
Sally von Rosen (b. 1994) is studying her Master in fine art at Umeå Academy of Fine Arts, currently on an exchange to Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna in the class of Performative arts. She has a bachelor in Philosophy of aesthetics from Gothenburg University, and she also studied two years at Gothenburg School of Art. Her main focus is performance and video, often in a combination.
LUNDAHL & SEITL / SYMPHONY OF A MISSING ROOM
Symphony of a Missing Room is a project by artist duo Lundahl & Seitl (Sweden/United Kingdom). Exhibited inside museums as well as being a temporal museum about itself, it reflects back on its own chain of discoveries. As a composite artwork it exists in virtual parallel to the physical spaces it inhabits.
Over the course of the performance, an audio recording played through headphones guides the visitors through the work and, at the same time, physically through the museum by a guide holding the hand.
Christer Lundahl and Martina Seitl formed Lundahl & Seitl in 2003 as an antidisciplinary artistic collaboration. Their projects examine the relationship between human consciousness and the technological development of our culture and are often created specifically for a place, a medium or a situation. Lundahl & Seitl has shown works around the world, including at Tate Britain, Whitechapel Gallery and Royal Academy of Arts in London, at Martin-Gropius-Bau in Berlin, Wooran Foundation, Seoul, and at Nationalmuseum, the Royal Dramatic Theatre and Magasin III in Stockholm. 20 minutes interactive walk.
MISS VICC REPASI / TIE, BIND, BOND, ATTACH, SECURE
The performance Tie, Bind, Bond, Attach, Secure is a work that wants to highlight the intimacy and trust involved in BDSM, this being a rope bondage performance.
Vicc Repasi (b. 1992 Västerås) is a Swedish Hungarian student at the master's programme at Umeå Academy of Fine Arts, Umeå university. She is currently having an exchange in Bremen, Germany. Miss Vicc Repasi is the side of the artist's practice which deals with BDSM and fetishism.
ELIN MÁR ØYEN VISTER / THE HISTORY OF THE CIRCLE RECOUNTS
Elin Már Øyen Visters performance The History of the Circle Recounts/Gievlien mujttalis mujttale takes place in the city and along the Ume River/Ubmejen Jiännuo towards Bildmuseet and tells the story of how the three forn-norse Norns, Urd, Skuld and Verdandi are woken up from a more than 1000 year old deep sleep. They were trolled into this deep sleep when Catholic Christianity was forced upon the Sámi and Norse poluations of the north. As they awaken they realize the devastation that colonialisation, industrialisation and the ongoing ecological crisis has caused upon Sápmi and beyond. They begin chanting to call upon the the three Sámi goddesses Sáráhkká, Juoksákká and Uksáhkkáto ask for forgivness and for unity for the rescue of mother Earth.
Concept: Elin Már Øyen Vister (Norway) in collaboration with
Katarina Barruk (Sápmi/Sweden), Natali Abrahamsen Garner (Norway) and Sara-Helén Persson (Sápmi/Sweden)
Joiker: Katarina Barruk and Sara-Helén Persson
Singer: Natali Abrahamsen Garner and Elin Mar Øyen Vister
Choreography: Marianne Skjeldal (Norway) in collaboration with Elin Mar Øyen Vister (Norway)
Costume: Tokyo Twins - Anne Ødegård (Norway) and Simon Daniel Tegnander (Norway)
The piece is a comment on the forthcoming truth and reconciliation process between the Sami and the Norwegian state. It asks: How can a state that still insists upon denying sovereignity to Sápmi and continues it´s neo-colonial repression of Sámi rights to land and rights, take part in a reconciliation process? The performance works with the situatedness of the Ubmejen Jiännuo /Ume River, both past present and future. Connecting it to the Ubme/Ume Sámi history, horizontal movements from Ubmeje across the constructed national borders over to the "Norwegian" side.
The History of the Circle Recounts enacts the mantra of the polyphonic vocal arrangement created by Elin Már Øyen Vister and the Ubmejen Jiännuo yoik (The Ume river yoik) as performed by Katarina Barruk, from the 8-channel sound work currently exhibited at Bildmuseet, made for the exhibition Eco-Visionaries. Elin Már Øyen Vister created the performance The History of the Circle Recounts for Rum for Performance, with support from Bildmuseet, NBK and OCA - Office for Contemporary Art Norway.
Elin Már Øyen Vister (b. 1976) is a Norwegian artist and composer based in Røst, Nordland/Sápmi. Øyen Vister works within several artistic disciplines and has a broad audio and music background. They are occupied with listening as artistic practice they prefer to work site-specifically. By listening to the ocean, the sky, birds, mountains, buildings and people ́s oral and written stories, Øyen Vister seeks to include both the human and the non-human, the spoken and the un-told, in the nature-cultures we live in. Their work breaks with Western hegemonic narratives that have placed the human being in the centre, and instead focuses on landscape's innate stories and knowledge.
YOUNGSOON CHO JAQUET / DRY FISH
Dry Fish is a performance focusing on memories and origin. The artist investigates the impression of being in another place than the place of one's origin, and to be confronted with culture and memories.
YoungSoon Choo Jaquet comes from Korea and today she lives in Europe. She does not want to exoticize the Korean traditions, instead her intentions are to question our nostalgic approach towards our past and our memories. During the performance YoungSoon dresses up in dry fish and it gives her images of the past.
Three elements function as keys to my performance: the exploration of different relations with the viewer, the creation of a link between Asiatic and Occidental art and a persisting attention towards memory and origins. I am not trying to transmit my personal experience as a Korean living in Europe or to exhibit the folkloric particularities of my tradition. But witnessing and being part of a gap, I aim to put the viewer in a situation where he could confront himself with his own memory and culture. If it is built in an atmosphere of sharing, I believe that the presentation of an idiosyncrasy and a shift allows us to question our attachment to a culture and our relation with our past and our memories.
LAURA CEMIN / IN THE DARK
In the Dark is a movement-based performance which challenges our daily perception of time and space. The location and its architectural connotations move from being a background to a tool for new discoveries, a prosthesis perfectly fitting in its host. The tempo of the fluid, slow and often almost imperceptible motion makes the attendant face his need of speed and virtuosity imposed and embedded in the contemporary society. When boredom is felt, you can either escape or let it embrace you.
The performance is conceived as a casual encounter between the audience and the mover in non-places: spaces in between and without specific significance, where time is not spent and of which spatial elements are ignored.
In the dark, the limits of your body are no more definable. In the dark, you become space.
In the dark, all the senses are attuned and the reference points move inwards.
In the dark, there is nothing to view. In the dark, everything reveals with time.
Laura Cemin (f. 1992 Italy), is a young Italian artist working on the border areas of documentation, photography and performance. After obtaining a bachelor's degree in Photography and a degree in Ballet and Contemporary Dance in Italy, she moved to Umeå where she is currently attending the master's programme at Umeå Academy of Fine Arts, Umeå University. In her current work, she experiments with movements and performative gestures in a precise and almost scientific manner, posing questions about embodiment of perception, kinaesthetic empathy and physical thinking.
BERTRAND LESCA AND NASI VOUTSAS / PALMYRA
A two man show on revenge, the politics of destruction and what we consider to be barbarian, inspired by the destruction of cultural sites in the city of Palmyra, Syria. With humour in a serious matter, the artist duo Bertrand Lesca and Nasi Voutsas invites you to step back from the news and look at what lies beneath - and beyond - civilisation.
Winner of the Stockholm Fringe Festival Grand Prix 2017.
"weird, wonderful and strangely stressful" (★★★★ The Stage).
The ancient city of Palmyra was one of the best preserved in the world. Tourists flocked to visit the iconic temples of Bel and Baalshamin as well as the Arch of Triumph. Palmyra has changed hands throughout history, from the Roman Empire in the first century to the recent ISIS occupation.
Developed with support from Croquis BCN, Bristol Ferment, MAYK, Tobacco Factory Theatres, Nuffield Southampton Theatres, Ovalhouse, HOME and Arts Council England.
INGELA IHRMAN / WHAT ARE YOU DOING HERE?
A bunch from the forest moves around in Bildmuseet watching us, as we are watching them. Ingela Ihrman has created six costumes for six actors that portrays different creatures from the plant and animal world of the forest: a spruce cone, a pregnant shrew, a starflower, a pike, a fly and a horsetail grass.
Ihrman is interested in the border areas between performance, theatre and audio art. She tries to understand power relations in general and the relationship between human and nature in particular. Who is stranger to whom? If nature could speak, what would it ask us humans?
Ingela Ihrman (b. 1985) is an artist based in Malmö, Sweden. She has performed in her artistic designed costumes at art galleries in Sweden and abroad. Based on botanical, biological and culturally critical perspectives, she directs her gaze on human behaviour and western societal structures, not seldom with humour. The performance What are you doing here? was created in collaboration with director Maja Samuelsson and Ögonblicksteatern in Umeå.
GROUNDING / ROI VAARA
Roi Vaara is a pioneer in video, installation, performance and collective arts in Finland and internationally. He was born in Moss, Norway and currently lives in Helsinki and Budapest. Vaara has performed over 500 unique performances and his works have been presented in exhibitions in more than 50 countries. Vaara was awarded with Ars Fennica Award in 2005 and with Pro Finlandia honorary medal in 2010. Vaara is a member of the famous performance group Black Market International since 1988. He has lectured and held workshops in art colleges, universities and academies since 1989.
ALZHEIMER CAFÈ UMEÅ / VALENTINA VETTURI
Alzheimer Café (2014-) is an ongoing series of sculptural and sonic environments enconpassing performance-based works, whose focus is the relationship between memory and sound. Each work embeds a specific imagery, and is represented through a single iconic image.
Alzheimer Café I is a red pyramid. Commissioned by Kunsthalle Goeppingen, Germany, in 2014, the public art sculpture encloses two musical boxes, from which the sound of a bass part and a melody alternate. Alzheimer Café II (2014) is a cloud –a futuristic listening space. The performance, and the video installation from this work, was produced and acquired by MAXXI in Rome, Italy.
Alzheimer Cafè Umeå is premiered at Rum för performance and takes place at Norrlandsoperan. Conceived as a sound-based work, the performance represents a form of resistance to a condition of disappearence and decadence. All the works from the series Alzheimer Café include musical fragments sung or hummed by people affected by neurological disorders of memory, and have been realized in collaboration with health and medical centres, their staff, and their patients. With Alzheimer Café Vetturi creates a non-conventional, listening space in which intimacy takes on a public dimension.
Vetturi’s most recent solo shows and group exhibitions include: “Illuminate Art Festival”, Zug, Switzerland (2018); ALL’APERTO, Fondazione Zegna, Turin, Italy (2017); Quadriennale 16, Rome, Italy; Strauhof, Zurich, Switzerland; .Point Perf, Geneva, Switzerland (2016); MACRO Museum, Rome (2015); MAXXI Museum, Rome; Kunsthalle Göppingen, Germany; Tranzit.ro, Bucharest, Romania (2014); Istituto Svizzero di Roma, Rome (2013); Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin, Italy; Viafarini, Milan, Italy (2012).
Alzheimer Cafè Umeå is a project by Valentina Vetturi initiated in 2016, as part of the first Residency Program for Italian Visual Artists at the Italian Cultural Institute in Stockholm. Alzheimer Cafè Umeå is curated by Valentina Sansone and co-produced by: “Room for Performance”at Bildmuseet, Vita Kuben and Norrlandsoperan, Umeå, Sweden; The Italian Cultural Institute in Stockholm; Elektronmusikstudion (EMS), Stockholm.
BLÅ KONGO / SINDRI RUNUDDE OCH JULIA GIERTZ
Blå Kongo is an interactive art installation, which the audience can experience through their own movements and bodies. During the evening dancer Sindri Runudde and musician Julia Giertz will demonstrate their work in two shorter performances. With Blå Kongo Runudde creates new ways for us to think about and experience the hierarchy of senses, and to question our view of functions of the body.
Sindri Runudde is a choreographer, dancer and circus artist educated at DOCH in Stockholm. In 2015 he created the art installation Blå Kongo, as part of the tourning exhibition “Kännbart”. Blå Kongo also developed into the dance performance Blue Java.
Julia Giertz is in her work using sound as the basis of her artistic practice. By drawing on music, physics and our perception of sound, Giertz is mapping bodily and structural responses to vibration. Together Runudde and Giertz form “Ljudkroppskollektivet”, since 2017, working right now with the production “The Fish Dance and other cosmic confessions”.
FORECASTING / BARBARA MATIJEVIC & GIUSEPPE CHICO
Forecasting is based on a collection of amateur videos taken from the world’s largest video-sharing website: YouTube. On the stage, a performer manipulates a laptop on the screen of which are shown YouTube videos that had been selected to meet the human size scale. The screen becomes the site of intersection between the body of the performer and the two-dimensional world of images that represent other people in other places. The result is a dizzying hybrid experience, a zone of indeterminacy informed by the very nature of videos ranging from the banality of everyday situations, movements and objects and the possibility of their transformation into new tools of self-narration.
“As every new technology changes the world a little, it also changes our bodies in it. One could say that the internet flow is now in our blood, and that one might just as well learn to live with it – test it, spill it, transfuse it, clean it.” Barbara Matijević and Giuseppe Chico (idé och koncept)
BETWEEN THE AIRSTRIP AND THE SURROUNDING FOREST / GERD AURELL
”Hormoslyr was a herbicide that was sprayed over the Swedish forests during the 1960’s and 70’s to kill deciduous trees. In America, this chemical went under the name Agent Orange and was used in the Vietnam war. The spraying was most intensive in northern Sweden, and up to this day you can see traces of how the forest was reshaped by Hormoslyr. Instead of mixed forests with a high percentage of deciduous trees we are left with vast forests of spruce and pine.
In the forest by Lake Eggelats in Norrbotten in northern Sweden there is an old airstrip for herbicide planes. The forests around the airstrip were meticulously sprayed in the 1950’s and 60’s to eliminate birch. Today there are hardly any birch trees in the forest, only birch corpses in the moss. The drawing follows the border between the airstrip and the surrounding forest and documents everything that lies on this border. The art work is a way of visualising a border but also a way of re-locating a place through the act of drawing. Through this work I want to draw attention to a forgotten history that up to this day has large effects on the landscape.”
Gerd Aurell is a visual artist and senior lecturer at the Umeå Art Academy. In her artistic practice she often works in different forms of drawing, with a special focus on drawing as a performative action.
SLOW PIXEL / CYRIL LECLERC & ELISABETH SAINT-JALMES
Slow Pixel is a performance ballet for 176 living snails and two humans that evolve in an interractive plastic and sound installation. Every one of the 176 snails equipped with a technical dispositive becomes an autonomous luminous entity. The speakers are cardboard foldable and transformable volumes that are beeing eaten by the snails. Their presence sediments the time past, present and future. The video projection offers a trip in-between infinitely big and infinitely small.
During all the action, the two humans become the guardians of the environment, protecting, moving and fogging the snails. The snail induces a different sense of temporality than ours, and invite us to slow down. As a vanity, it proposes a relation to passing time in our world that gives speed such value.
GAIA CROCELLA / INTERDINE
Interdine is a meeting across borders, a civic classroom that takes place around a dinner table. Responding to the current refugee crises, Interdine discloses the issue of lack of integration, mass deportation and displacement on the dining table. Using food as a tool to enable encounters, it creates an intimate dialogue between actors. By using a menu that combines peculiar food coming from different parts of the world, each course is followed by a short presentation which leads to a political and emotional discussion.
Interdine was originally born in my home kitchen, and has grown in scale to occupy diverse public spaces in the city of Umeå. Opening up to the public domain, the mission of Interdine is to involve other inhabitants to become hosts of future Interdinesin order to bring participation and raise awareness with the hope to come closer to a possible solution.
Welcome to Interdine on Sunday 9 September, 15:00
The discursive dinner is an open event inviting everyone who wishes to participate and come closer to the issue of refugee seeking and integration on a global and local level. We will celebrate human transactions in space through food, and will take all guests through Interdine's multiple scales of action. The ultimate goal of the discursive dinner is to spread the practice of hosting and find future hosts for Interdine in Umeå. The dinner will take place at Bildmuseet's open terrace and invites volunteers to become part of the food making team. Starting at 15:00 on the election day, the event will be the ending celebration of the performative week.
Gaia Crocella (f.1993 Italy) is an architect with postgraduate degree in Immediate Architectural Intervention and Activism from Umeå School of Architecture, Umeå University. Her thesis focused on the analysis of the moral role of architecture in a world characterised by mass displacement and migration and the subsequent need for integration. With the aim to address issues of social integration she has developed the participatory project involving local residents, organisation's, refugees, and newcomers.
ANASTASIA SAVINOVA / WE SWIM IN ONE WATER
Anastasia Savinova, born near Ural Mountains in Russia, but now works and lives in Umeå. In recent years her focus has shifted to ecologies, exploration of the connection and boundaries between human and nature and human's place in the environment. Her practice spans photography, drawing, text, collage, video and performance. Her work has been shown in Sweden, Germany, Israel, USA, The UK, Spain, Italy, and Norway.
Interconnected through water, we are together in a watery siblinghood: all born from the sea. Global Ocean, the vast body of water, envelops the Earth, and our bodies too contain much water within. All waters are interrelated, so are all living things. A sample of Global Ocean, created in the performance, brings together waters, stories, cultures, places, and people.
