Performance Weekend

Welcome to a September weekend of performance in and around Bildmuseet. The weekend has free admission, starting with an Art Friday and continuing on Saturday afternoon. As a visitor, you will experience different varieties of performance and can also participate yourself.

LILITH (Elin Lundgren and Petter Pettersson) gives an interactive performance that explores compliant group membership and rebellious individualism. Anna-Karin Rasmusson performs in an everyday realistic but twisted scenography and Geoff Robinson invites us to a sound walkabout where a potential future of the Ume River will be explored. Josefine Östlund creates a sculptural installation by the river together with a wheeled excavator.

The acts are performed continuously or repeated on several occasions so that you can experience them all. On Saturday, you can listen to a series of short talks with the participating artists in the café.

Participating performance artists:

Josefine Östlund / GRUND

Josefine Östlund uses her performative, site-specific method to explore the meeting between, body, material, and location. An excavator with a grapple moves back and forth, swinging around to unload material from its trailer, then passes it to the artist in a choreographed par de deux. The brutality of the location and the tracks left by the machine fascinate Östlund. The debris of forestry and building sites occupies the stage, materials that bear witness to mechanical violence. 
 
With detritus from the city and forest, held together by stretch wrap and packing tape, Östlund creates an arrangement on a raised stage. In the light from the excavator’s headlamps, visitors can witness the interaction of human and machine against the backdrop of the sedately flowing river. The installation is sculpted over the course of an evening and can then be viewed during the weekend. 
 
Josefine Östlund (b. 1990) graduated from the Umeå Academy of Fine Arts at Umeå University in 2020 with a Master’s degree. That same year, she was awarded Umeå Municipality’s arts scholarship. Östlund works exploratively and physically to create performances, sculptures, installations, paintings and videos.
The performance GRUND is produced by Bildmuseet with the support of Region Västerbotten.

Anna-Karin Rasmusson / ASSISTANS

Anna-Karin Rasmusson explores the relationship between personal assistant and client. The right of one to a meaningful life becomes grinding routine to the other. This interpersonal relationship is depicted as blank page, a tabula rasa, soon to be disfigured. Wounds open up and intimacy bleeds out; an inner world of inadequacy and need is revealed. The sets are designed around the home, an enclosed private space where only those inside know what is actually happening.
 
Rasmusson primarily works with video, animation, painting and installations. One of her most significant artistic points of departure is the emotional challenges presented by everyday life. She further develops her artistic practice in the work Assistance, improvising a live performance around the stage set and projections.   

Anna-Karin Rasmusson (b. 1983) graduated with a Master of Fine Arts from the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm in 2016. Her accolades include the 2016 Fredrika Bremer Award and the 2019 Stockholm City Cultural Award. She participated in the Moderna Exhibition at Moderna Museet in Stockholm in 2018. Rasmusson is based in Stockholm but has recently started a performance collaboration with the Vitsaniemi Institute in Tornedalen.

The performance is a co-production with Norrlandsoperan and Vita Kuben supported by Umeå Kommun.

LILITH (Elin Lundgren and Petter Pettersson) / Game Changer

Rebellious individualism, group compliance, and collective grief are all explored in Game Changer. Actors and audience alike move around in a gloomy nightclub atmosphere, all respectfully masked and wearing carnival feathers. The longing for intimacy, comfort, and experience is examined through gestures, rituals, and impulses. This newly produced work dissolves and shifts the boundaries between audience and actor, leaving audience members to choose the extent to which they wish to participate.  
 
LILITH is artists Elin Lundgren and Petter Pettersson. In this performance piece about community, group affiliation and exclusion, they build living images with absurd humour and a stripped-down, documentary narrative that touches on universal human concerns such as love, loss and grief. Lilith seeks to invade the viewer’s consciousness like white noise, hoping to understand what it means to be human.  
 
Elin Lundgren (b. 1973) and Petter Pettersson (b. 1972) have worked in various forms in the visual and performing arts since 1999. In 2007, the duo founded the acclaimed Lilith Performance Studio, an independent arena for practical artistic research with a focus on newly produced, large-scale performance artworks by invited artists from around the world. 
 
The music for Game Changer was written by Siri Jennefelt. The performance is a coproduction with Bildmuseet, Norrlandsoperan and Vita Kuben with the support of Umeå University.

Geoff Robinson (Melbourne) / Durational Situation/ Umeälven 3022

What will life look like on the shores of the Ume River a thousand years from now? How will we have affected the climate and ecological balance? Will we be in a new ice age? Or will the river have reclaimed its original course? These are the questions addressed by artist Geoff Robinson on his audio walk Durational Situation/Ume River/3022. Visitors can download the artist’s English-language guide to the walk, which begins at Bildmuseet, onto their smartphones.

Durational Situation/Ume River/3022 is a continuation of an earlier audio walk created by Geoff Robinson for the Re-Think Festival held in Umeå in 2021. The first audio walk compared two different river systems, the Birrarung in Australia and the Ume in Sweden, in terms of geological and colonial impact on the two specific sites on opposite sides of the planet.  The walk continues in this new work, but this time we leave history behind us to focus on the human impact on the future river landscape.

Geoff Robinson (b. 1973), Australia, is a Doctor of Philosophy in Art and Design and has a Master’s Degree in Media Art. He has received a number of awards since graduating in 2000. During autumn 2022, he has a residency in Umeå funded by the Swedish Arts Grants Committee’s International Programme for Visual and Applied Arts (IASPIS).

Schedule

Friday 16/9 Art Friday 17.00-21.00

17.00–21.00 

ASSISTANS by Anna-Karin Rasmusson 
Installation and video projection with live performance at 17–18 and 20–21

18.00-20.00
Game Changer / LILITH (Elin Lundgren and Petter Pettersson)
Ongoing performance, admission until 19.30

18.00-20.00
GRUND / Josefine Östlund
Ongoing performance

17.00-21.00
Durational Situation / Umeälven 3022 by Geoff Robinson
Ongoing audio walk (30 min)

DJ during Art Friday:
17.00-21.00
Dim Spirit (DJ Set)
Dim Spirit is Joel Dunkels, a multidisciplinary musician and artist from Umeå, current with the debut album "Clear Recent History".

17.00-21.00
Open Workshop

Saturday 17/9 12.00-17.00

12.00–17.00 
ASSISTANS by Anna-Karin Rasmusson 
Installation and video projection with live performance at 12–13 and 15-16

15 min artist talks:
12.30 Josefine Östlund
13.30 Anna Karin Rasmusson
14.30 Geoff Robinson (in english)
15.30 LILITH (Elin Lundgren and Petter Pettersson)

13.00-15.00
Game Changer / LILITH (Elin Lundgren and Petter Pettersson)
Ongoing performance, admission until 2.30 pm

12.00-17.00
Durational Situation / Umeälven 3022 by Geoff Robinson
Ongoing audio walk (30 min)

12.00-17.00
GRUND / Josefine Östlund
Sculpture in Öbackaparken outside the Bildmuseet created on Friday