Hello everyone!
Moving house during the middle of a pandemic is not the one
It’s 9pm on a Sunday night and I’m running aorund the internet trying to find things to share. I think there’s some pretty cool things here this week. Hopefully I’ll get a chance to catch some.
Please enjoy!
Thursday 11th March
12 Euros
In the trilogy The Sorrows of Belgium, Luk Perceval, resident director at NTGent, zooms in on three dark chapters in Belgium’s past. In part two, Yellow, he looks back on the Flemish collaboration during the Second World War on the basis of a new play by Peter van Kraaij, mixed with other texts.
1933-1936. A young generation dreams of a new world order. From 1941 onwards, many of them join the Nazi ideology and go to the Eastern Front. Were they misled?
Were they really that naive? Author and dramatist Peter van Kraaij introduces a Flemish family: Staf, a member of the Dietse Militia - Black Brigade and his wife Marije; their son Jef, a member of the Flemish Legion on the Eastern Front; their daughter Mie, a member of the Dietse Meisjesscharen; Hubert, Staf’s brother and not involved in the collaboration; and Uncle Laurens, a priest and Marije’s brother. Their testimonies are combined with other voices. Among them: Channa, a young Jewish woman, and Aloysius, a soldier on the Eastern Front. Present too, responding to the call, are the Belgian Léon Degrelle, founder of the fascist movement Rex and active in the Walloon Legion, and Otto Skorzeny, an Austrian and decorated officer in the Waffen-SS.
Yellow is a multilingual choir that evokes the grim zeitgeist of the 1930s, supported live by the music of composer and multi-instrumentalist Sam Gysel.
MEME (pronounced ᐸᐸmeemᐳᐳ not me-me) by Proyecto Televética and [ANTI]materia
Available now
Free
Memes are the smallest ideological - viral - unit. They are created, intervened, distributed, viralized, rethought and diluted. Their materiality lies in the act of spontaneous generation and its consequent filtration through the light veil of the internet. What stories are told from these spaces? which voices are valid? who do these qualities of uncontrolled expansion attend to in the www? and what is their place within the socio-political context we inhabit? Although, historically, art has had the capacity to reflect its environments for reflection, criticism, contemplation, and adaptation, what does it mean to simplify and limit a series of practices validated and revalidated by exhibition spaces in order to talk about possible worlds? And what are the implications of eradicating formats, materials, and discourses from contemporary creation by generating a panorama of the possible "new" ways of inhabiting the world?
This online exhibition brings together a series of current socio-political positions that confront the prevailing conditions we inhabit and which, without a doubt, must change. The specific implications of memes as political entities lie in a detachment from authorship by appealing to dispersed collective logics such as dynamic archiving, post-digital thinking and community tactics that seek to resist censorship and the growing eradication of memories from the collective imagination.
From the beginning of the massification of the Internet in the mid-1990s, virtual space and the way it is inhabited began to be seen as a territory without borders where interactions could take place in multiple forms and power apparently expanded, generating an illusion of democracy and decentralization. Thus, a collective imaginary has been raised where it seems that what happens inside the screen is not real or does not have repercussions in the material world. We built the utopia of the Internet, conceiving it as an isolated environment, when, in reality, it has been overflowing off the screen for years into the political, economic and social realms, affecting our lifestyles and ways of acting.
By 1990, Joseph Nye coined the term soft power, putting it before the idea of hard power, which alluded to that exercise of power by a political actor who employs tactics of military force or monetary coercion. Soft power, Nye said, is that strategy that seeks to co-opt and attract the attention of other political actors through cultural and ideological means to influence their actions and decision making. Hard power uses material objects (tanks, police force) to try to force an outcome. While soft power is more programmatic and is largely exercised through psychological operations (psy-ops), and the export of ideologies and cultural values, often through media such as newspapers/magazines, film, television, museums, and cultural space programming, and more recently, the consumption of content on the Internet.
This exercise seeks to bring together an active ecology of meme creators to open a dialogue/debate in the face of current conditions and resist the soft power that cultural spaces exert on the narratives that surround us.
Tectonic Incantations Decomposition Rituals by Ayesha Tan Jones
Saturday 13th March
Free
In an interview with #DariaKhan, Ayesha talks about growing #mushrooms, #moss, and #chlorella as elements in the show; disintegration and re-birth; working in an abandoned swimming pool, and using the tools of speculative fiction and queer optimistic #dystopia to vision a regenerative future. The show is located at Underground Flower Offspace, and supported by Harlesden Highstreet
Ayesha’s new artworks expand from their previous operatic performances and the upcoming book, Parasites of Pangu commissioned by @serpentineuk.
Spoken wyrd, opera and the dance of death n life.
OPENING UP / CLOSING IN by Various Artists
From 8th March
Free
The title points to the dynamic ambivalence between opening up to new ideas and protecting what is consistent or known. In the announcement for the open call, we suggested themes that illustrate this complexity: multicultural, diversity, playfulness, humor, ambivalence, intuition, union and rebellion. Themes to which the artists have responded and which contextualize the exhibition.
Participating artists presenting performance art for video:
Aino El Solh, Hanne Klaas, Isabell Spengler, Lena Chen, Magdalena Kallenberger, Maicyra Leão, Mikala Hyldig Dal, Olga Sonja Thorarensen, Linnea Langfjord Kristensen, Sidsel Christensen and Mustafa Boga.
«The title also points to a site specific parallel for Rogaland Kunstsenter as it faces a forced uncertainty of staying or moving from its residence of 40 years. Screening the videos from inside the building opening up to and facing the square is a response to this situation».
Curator Anne-Marte Eidseth Rygh
«Uncertainty, while having a damaging effect on society, the economy and people’s mental state, is also a vital and necessary component of the act of creating art. But while it may largely have a positive influence on the creative process, uncertainty has a damaging effect in terms of producing and maintaining the arts.»
Curator Hans Christian van Nijkerk
The exhibition is produced by Performance Art Bergen (PAB) PAB Lokal and is presented in collaboration with director of Rogaland Kunstsenter (RKS) Jane Sverdrupsen.
Superhero Alter Ego by Holly Rush
Available Now
Pay what you decide
Superhero Alter Ego takes the idea of social media and digital comic books and satirises superhero archetypes to create a surreal, escapist narrative.
Follow our two superheroes Jesterius and Luci, in their surreal journey, from the sixth dimension to Manchester 2020 and the chaos that ensues, in four episodes using dance, creative writing, original music and Instagram filters!
Holly is an interdisciplinary dance practitioner who trained in Contemporary Dance at Trinity Laban and since then has honed a unique style of fusing elements of dance, physical theatre, performance art, poetry, Commedia dell’arte and clowning.
Superhero Alter Ego is a new Push 2021 commission from HOME.
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Below is a picture I found this week that I think is really cool. I hope you like it to.
Talk soon
Josh x