a spoonfull of…

Scoop a handfull of people’s talks, raw and still warm, then shut them inside a soundman’s cabin. Make the audience sit the other way round.

Framed by a narrow stripe of the cabin’s window, there is a trio of faces who, lit from under, can’t but look like marzipan heads of selected Roman Emperors.

The three practice a dada decomposure of echoes of a day before yesterday. By a diarrhoea of words streaming the madrigals way, the men peck daily banalities to pieces – absurd fragments that get an entirely different shape.

Just add some lentils and sundried tomatoes, then rush a cage on the stage.

ridiculusmus (performance)

exhausting metamorphosis

She appears, with long black hair, wearing a grey dress. She throws away all of that, without interrupting her moves that stay somewhere between a ground beetle’s agony and a dog dreaming about chasing a rabbit. She fights tied up waves of a black mattress.

The struggle finishes the moment she puts on a cream skirt and a smart shirt. She walks on the waves, much relaxed now, they seem to have no trouble holding the weight of her bare soles. She stamps on, hits the mattress to provoke it, to make it draw aside and swallow her.

The audience holding glasses of wine gets spattered a little.

Patty Chang

Entwistle

(performance)

Round a Roundhouse

Sand scratches under soles, solid damp walls form a web of corridors – narrow and blind.

Stepping out of darkness while making no move at all – objects.

Wardrobe. (A couple of doors in fact, but such a resemblance is much better to handle)

It’s doors opened a bit. There’s a strip of light leaking out – it runs across the floor

and rests against the wall. The light doesn’t come from inside the wardrobe though. It just acts that way. It gives the wardrobe a false hope it contains something – a swarm of fireflies or a figure holding a torch that burns with no drive to fume.
2 Doors (Remembering my father) (2000)

Door, slide projector, shoes

Door.

Light licks the treshold.Seems to be a day behind the door’s mat glass belly.I grip the

door handle, expecting to get a proper shower of light. Nothing.
On (2000)

Functioning door, neon, perspex

Table, book, candle.

All wearing the light of their own projected selves.
Imaginary Light (2000)

Table, extinguished candle, book, slide projection

Boat

Fast asleep, with night sky reflected by the boat’s own petrified sea. The night stands still, holding its breath.
The Sea of Unknowing (1996)

Modified wooden boat, black pigment, water, toy boat and nightlight

David Johnson

quest for space

and they came close to me
from above
hanging
waiting till I touch them
once I find them
in the cloud of smoke
those
anchors

I touch one
and it takes me up
high above the ground
only to pump my flesh
with 220 volts

there are two rows of us
hanging out there motionless

but somehow we wake up
to what dream?

but somehow we make it back on earth
which earth?

There go the dancers – spending most of their time on stage fighting each other. Every time there is one or a couple igniting something, a reaction causing another reaction, multiplying, erupting into a seemingly chaotic mess and collapsing into silence again.

In other words a guy stamps heavily on the ground, trying to squash a girl under his soles. But she keeps tossing that hard he misses every time.
Then another guy turns up and stamps just once. That’s enough to make his adversary collapse. Soon more and more such predators appear, so when the whole stage is stamping and tossing happily, a true master turns up and, by stamping his foot just once, he makes all kiss the ground.

and so on and so on…a picture of evolution switching forms.

Ultima Vez (dance)

homogenise

A former C&A store.
No sad mannequins wearing spider webs.Just a continuous purr of blue conveyor belts.
Workers in blue overals busy putting something in
yellow boxes.A terrible sight of a fridge being slowly and painfuly disassembled, stripped to its
very core and far beyond. Soon there is no fridge, just an anonymous herd of spare parts.
The moving belt hurls to darkness of a machine that goes…

Once back on daylight, there are no spare parts any more, just pearls, ready to grant a shape to a plastic bag.

A private universe on its way to almost very nothing. All men equal, no matter if a SAAB or a pilot pen with a missing top.

No piano. No slow motion farewel shot. The credits follow:
pack of Hello Kitty chopsticks
878 pieces of data media
green plastic toy of american soldier holding his walkie talkie, found in the street
392 pieces of clothing
…

Michael Landy Break Down (self-consuming installation)

more downbreak

gutshaker

Sitting on a floor made of rough wooden planks. Above me a concrete shell of a deconsecrated chapel.The reading session has begun – citing the finest chapters of the Revelation. The very start is a news coverage of a trial of Balkan War criminals, served by a female voice – a synthesized voice, roughly as warm as liquid nitrogen.

The war criminal content smoothly shades into passages from the Old Testament. The voice recedes, giving way to something distant but inevitably coming closer and closer. It could be traffic pulsing at a spagetti junction, but soon it gains more power, turning into continuous din of thunder.

The sound starts touching the audience, at first very gently, but then, with the growing intensity, it is rather irrational slapping and I give up searching for comparisons the moment the vibrations invade my body. Their hectic frequency makes my eyes slip out of focus,the interior of the chapel turns into a TV image suffering from poor reception. We face wind coming from the floor – a sound gale trying to re-arrange our entrails.

Earthshaker (sound performance)

repetitive vanities

Video 1

A muffled laughter of a tripple bear who’s trying hard to slice a log with a rather solid coping saw, while banging his right elbow against the wall of a barrel where the animal is sealed in.

Video 2

The tearsome hunter’s wet epilogue. Having boarded a flatboat after a long walk across a melodious forest he moves slowly to the centre of a pond and moors the boat to a pole. There he stands, slowly aiming his duo of barrels against the bottom of the boat. A shot echoes round and he sits down, waiting…waiting.

Video 3

A certain decorator trying to reach the white ceiling above him, infinitely falling off his stepladder in a way as majestic as the Wagner’s leitmotif looping in the background. There seems to be not much difference between reaching the stars and reaching a lightbulb. The decorator’s hat always goes first. When he runs out of patience, he will have a try to rule the world.

Peter Land

The Failure In the Face of Reality

Sysiphosian collection

kunstonline

Galeri Nicolai Wallner

particles staging a friendly match (live report)

…and there is the blue one, being the first to spot the olive one, though she is not able to turn in her direction and keep her in sight. The moment she attemps that, she steps in the pink one’s way, which leads to identical reaction of the green and olive ones. The blue one, however, is not about to give up her discovery and releases the pink one who unites with the remaining couple in form of a gravity cluster. This doesn’t last too long and the initial try to make it to some symmetry turns back to chaos again. Reaching the final, at least one of the particles must stay in motion, or at least pretend that. The players in order of appearance: the green one – sterile and mechanical, the olive one – with a thought stranded on her lips, the blue one – conscious, the pink one – containing all. The surface does not necessarily have to match the interior as well as the rule stick to inflexibility.
system + rothko (dance)

beyond the rainbow

There’s a family, maybe on their way to jet off for a booked-in-advance pack of memorable moments.
There’s the little daughter in the lead, battling fatigue with excitement. Her mother and father do their best to stay in tow, taking turns in carrying their youngest daughter.
The problem is there is no gate 9 in front of them, no check-in counters behind them – there is just void space all over them.
Their eyes are fixed on a huge timetable which fails to get closer and which nobody but them can see.
There’s nothing to move away from, nothing to get closer to, just an invisible conveyor belt under their feet.
Surrounded by nothingness, the family doesn’t give up their hope of catching their flight.Hans Op de Beeck (video)

still

hansopdebeeck

Woven land

There in front of us, lays an alley which has no road to border, however, it still evokes an old bypass with wrinkled side strips.
The imaginary road ascents a little, revealing no more landscape, so the feeling of standing at the foot of the end of the world is admittible.
The light coming out of a garage is woven out of fine thread – it pours in a grey landscape covered with plastic trees that cast…woven shadows.
Michael Raedecker

Ins and Outs (acrylic and thread on canvas)

Ins and Outs

Tate