A Theatre Cycle | Episode #3 | Clemens Von Wedemeyer & Maya Schweizer, Keren Cytter, Anja Kirschner & David Panos, Tino Sehgal
23 May 2013
Keren Cytter, Showreal, May 23rd, 2013. Teatro Valle Occupato, Rome
Keren Cytter, Showreal, May 23rd, 2013. Teatro Valle Occupato, Rome
Keren Cytter, Showreal, May 23rd, 2013. Teatro Valle Occupato, Rome
Keren Cytter, Showreal, May 23rd, 2013. Teatro Valle Occupato, Rome
Keren Cytter, Showreal, May 23rd, 2013. Teatro Valle Occupato, Rome
Keren Cytter, Showreal, May 23rd, 2013. Teatro Valle Occupato, Rome
Project by Nomas Foundation in collaboration with Teatro Valle Occupato
Curated by Cecilia Canziani and Ilaria Gianni
Assistant curator: Ilaria Carvani
May 23rd, 2013 at 9pm
Teatro Valle Occupato, via del Teatro Valle 21, Rome
Clemens Von Wedemeyer & Maya Schweizer
Rien du Tout, 2006
35mm, hdv, color
30’
Rien du Tout is a film based on the draft of the play Catastrophe by Samuel Beckett. The work is an accurate depiction of the precarious working conditions which increasingly determine our social life today. It does not do this, however, in the style of a social report with a predictable punch line, instead, Clemens von Wedemeyer and Maya Schweizer create a series of scenes that could take place during rehearsals for a play. This alienation reveals the dependencies, insecurities and resistance which determine the labour relations between the characters even more clearly. Each of these relations is different, the camera focuses on details, stays restless until it gathers together all the protagonists in a surprising final tableau which shows a society where everything falls apart while everyone remains dependent on everyone else. Rien du Tout won the prize as best film at the International Short Film Festival Oberhausen 2006.
Keren Cytter
Show Real Drama
40’
Script: Keren Cytter
Performed by: Susie Meyer, Fabian Stumm
Show Real Drama is written and directed by Keren Cytter, and based on the life of her two actors, Susie Meyer and Fabian Stumm, who play themselves onstage, blending reality with fiction. Having graduated from the University of Acting in Salzburg, Meyer and Stumm soon find themselves unemployed and isolated from the entertainment business in the old Europe. After countless failed attempted to get hired, they decide to write a script for scenes that they would one day like to act. Show Real Drama is a play about how to live, how to act and how to perform being actor. The two actors flip between scenes that refer to relationships and memories, reality, and the false drama of making a show reel. In this piece, Cytter and her cast tell us about love, desire, loss, and the unpredictable nature of human communication, mixing up the standard codes, stories, and images normally used to describe them.
Anja Kirschner & David Panos
Living Truthfully Under Imaginary Circumstances, 2011
HD Projection
33’
Living Truthfully Under Imaginary Circumstances is a film that explores the acting exercises developed by Sanford Meisner.
Meisner’s techniques paradoxically deploy an unnatural training routine of intense repetition and observational feedback to stimulate 'authentic' emotion and spontaneity in performance.
They remain highly influential on American cinema and drama today. The film looks at the relationship between drama and performance, ideology and subjectivity, combining footage of young actors working with Meisner’s exercises with material from the history of theatre and cinema. It interrogates the meaning of 'emotional truthfulness' in post-modern naturalism and its blurring of the distinction between dramatic artifice and seemingly 'primal', 'human' impulses, whilst simultaneously foregrounding the hypnotic, open-ended, and affective force of Meisner's method.
>Tino Sehgal
Untitled
4’ 30’’
The Orchestra:
Massimo Nunzi, conductor
Vanessa Cremaschi, violin
Mervit Nesnas, violin I
Chiara Tofani, violin II
Roberta Palmigiani, viola
Kyungmi Lee, cello
Pierpaolo Mastroleo, contrabass
Veronica Colantoni, oboe
Claudia Galli, bassoon
Milena Savelloni, bassoon
Mariele Ecca, horn
Giuseppe Calabrese, horn
Fabio Gelli, trumpet
Mattia Collacchi, trombone
Max Filosi, clarinet Bb
Alessandro Tomei, clarinet Bb
Pierpaolo Ferroni, drums
Stephane Pelegri, drums
Fabio Cuozzo, drums
Artists’ biographies
Keren Cytter was born in 1977 in Tel Aviv (Israel) where she studied Visual Arts at the Avni Institute of Art. She lives and works in Berlin. With her work, always experimental and surreal, Keren Cytter tries to analyze the meaning of conflicts both in the private sphere and in the interpersonal relationships.
The tragicomic register chosen by the artist, plays and at the same time confuses the viewer bringing him to observe the daily life in a new way.
In addition to videos, Keren Cytter develops movies and drawings, she has written three novels and two theater pieces. In 2008, she formed the Dance International Europe Now, a group of dance and theater.
Solo exhibitions (selection): Keren Cytter: Video Art Manual, Noga Gallery of Contemporary Art, Tel Aviv (2012);
Keren Cytter: Keren Cytter: Don’t trust Americans, Schau Ort, Zurich (2012);
Keren Cytter: Based on a True Story, Oakville Galleries, Oakville (2012); Keren Cytter: Avalanche, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (2011); Avalanche, Pilar Corrias & David Roberts Art Foundation, London (2011);
Moderna Museet, Stockholm; Kunsthaus Baselland (2010); Galerie Christian Nagel (2010); Keren Cytter, Hammer Museum Project Series, Los Angeles (2010); Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven (2010);
History in the Making (with D.I.E Now), Tate Modern Turbine Hall, London (2009); Performa 09, New York (2009)
Group exhibitions (selection): Whitstable Biennale – UK; International Project Space, Birmingham (2012); The Deutsche Bank Series at the Guggenheim: Found in Translation, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (2011);
Based in Berlin, Berlin (2011); Videonale 13, Kunstmuseum Bonn (2011); CA
3rd Thessaloniki Biennial of Contemporary Art, Thessaloniki (2011); Future Generation Art Prize: 20 Shortlisted Artists, PinchukArtCentre Kiev (2010); 8th Gwangju Biennale, Gwangju (2010);
Fare Mondi 53rd International Art Exhibition, La Biennale di Venezia (2009);
The Generational: Younger Than Jesus, New Museum, New York (2009); Television Delivers People, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2008); Manifesta 7, Trentino (2008).
Anja Kirschner (Munich, 1977) and David Panos (Athens, 1971) live and work in London and Athens. Since 2006 their works combine documentary, literary and historical sources and reference popular genres such as sci-fi, soap opera and action adventures, developing narratives that are rooted in the political conflicts of today. The two artists reconstruct and rewrite the past in order to highlight the present time and its different perspectives. Often in their films ruptures and political transformations reveal social contradictions, generating new cultural forms and a different order of class. In 2011 they were the winners of the Jarman Award.
Solo exhibitions (selection): Ultimate Substance, Secession, Vienna (2012); Extra City, Antwerp and Neuer Berliner Kunstverein, Berlin (2012); Lights, Tears and Real Abstractions, Artists Space, New York (2012), Living Truthfully Under Imaginary Circumstances, Transmission Gallery, Glasgow (2012); The Projecting Stage, castillo/corrales, Paris (2011), The Empty Plan, Staatsgalerie Stuttgart, Stuttgart (2011); Kunsthall Oslo, Oslo (2011) and Focal Point Gallery, Southend (2010/11).
Group exhibitions (selection): The Magic of the State, Beirut, Cairo and Lisson Gallery, London (2013); HELL AS, Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2013); Liverpool Biennial (2012); British Art Show 7 (2010/2012)
Tino Sehgal was born in 1976 in London. He lives and works in Berlin.
Sehgal studied both political economics and choreography, working in dance before focusing on “constucted situations” that involve one or more people in a unique experience at the same time, intimate and collective. Photographs or other form of documentation are not allowed in order to focus all the attention on the time and the space occupied. Existing solely in the moment of their enaction, Tino Sehgal’s pieces live on in the memory of those who witness them.
Tino Sehgal has been nominated for the Turner Prize 2013.
Solo Exhibitions (selection): This Situation, IMMA, Dublin; Tino Seghal, Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal (2013); The Unilever Series: Tino Sehgal, Tate Modern, London (2012); Tino Sehgal, Kunsternes Hus, Oslo (2011); Filipovic, Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt (2011); Number Three: Here and Now, Julia Stoschek Collection, Duesseldorf (2010); This is not about, CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, San Francisco (2009); Tino Sehgal, Nicola Trussardi Foundation, Villa Reale, Milan (2008), German Pavillion, 51st International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia (2005)
Group shows (selection): 55th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia (2013); dOCUMENTA (13), Kassel (2012); 8 1⁄2, Nicola Trussardi Foundation, Stazione Leopolda, Florence, Italy (2011); Here and Now, Julia Stoschek Collection, Düsseldorf, Germany (2010); Sexuality and Transcendence, Pinchuk Art Centre, Kiev, Ukraine (2010).
Maya Schweizer was born in Maisons-Alfort in France in 1976, and lives and works in Berlin. In 2007 she completes her studies at the Universität der Künste of Berlin.
Maya Schweizer is an artist and film director, whose works explore the themes of immigration, integration and cultural differences, often using the documentary form so to reveal at best the complexity of reality. In 2008 she obtained the Villa Aurora Artist Grant from the Goethe-Institut of Los Angeles and the fellowship Karl-Hofer. Her woks have been presented in exhibitions and film festivals worldwide.
Solo exhibitions (selection): Edith Seeshow´s Notes, Kunstverein Langenhagen (2013); It´s not about nothing, Galerie Katharina Bittel, Hamburg (2012); Metropolis, Report from China, Frankfurter Kunstverein (2011).
Group exhibitions (selection): Letters & Words, Galerie Katharina Bittel, Hamburg (2013); Zurück nach Morgen, Galerie für zeitgenössische Kunst, Leipzig (2013); Avantgarde ist keine Strömung, D21 Kunstraum, Leipzig (2012); Die Stadt, die es nicht gibt, Ludwig Forum Aachen, Aquisgrana (2012), What about the Ghosts in Town, The Brno House of Arts, Brno (2012).
Clemens von Wedemeyer was born in 1974 in Göttingen, Germany. He lives and works in Berlin and he is currently granted of a fellowship at the German Academy in Rome, Villa Massimo. After studying photography, in 2002 he graduated from the HGB Academy of Visual Arts Leipzig.
The artist creates installations and videos poised between reality and fiction, full of historical references and metaphoric images as if they were short documentaries. The linearity of the narrative, however, is often interrupted in order to show the changes and developments within the structures of power that, in his films, are primarily reflected on architecture, spatial relationships and social attitudes.
Solo exhibitions (selection): MAXXI, Rome (2013-upcoming); The Fourth Wall, St. Paul Gallery, Auckland, Dunedin Public Art Gallery, Dunedin, New Zealand; Paco das Artes, Sao Paolo (2012), The Repetition Festival Show, Galleria Civica Trento, Trento (2011); Sun Cinema, Galerie Jocelyn Wolff, Paris (2011), Metropolis, Report from China, FrankfurterKunstverein, Frankfurt (2011).
Group exhibitions (selection): dOCUMENTA (13), Kassel (2012) Intense Proximity, La Triennale Paris, Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2012); Eurasia: Geographic cross-overs in art, MART, Rovereto (2008), 4th Biennial of Contemporary Art, Berlin (2006).