Performance Project Liste 17
The young art fair in Basel has not only been an international platform for young galleries since the 1990s, it also initiated a special programme of performances in 2005. If you think of body-related stage performances, interventions in everyday-life-situations or lecture performances in the work of many artists in the past years, you could speak of a renaissance of performative formats in contemporary artistic practice. Unlike other exhibition spaces, an art fair is primarily an event – a platform for conversations and activities. You could speak of the fair itself in terms of an ongoing performative format that continues for a week. Within that framework, the artists of the 8th edition of the Performance Project, deal primarily with modifications of symbolic and economic exchange by negotiating the aesthetics of transfer.
Matteo Rubbi’s work often starts with a communal experience. Sometimes this is meant to happen within the setting of an exhibition. For this year’s Performance Project, Matteo Rubbi has re-designed War Games to be played by visitors and participants at the fair. The aspect of play itself involves a part of the design process as well as the negotiation of rules, as has been the case with previous games developed by Rubbi in collaboration with different audiences. The imaginary, sometimes even utopian, spaces of new games link a set of rather abstract aesthetic signs with broad cultural narrations of behaviour and fictional events.
“I really want this. I really want to seduce you.“ – Jasiek Mischke admitted to an audience at London’s 176 space. “Lecture“ may not be a truly accurate term for what happens when Mischke is speaking to an audience. Rather, the lecture takes the form of an imagined conversation with people he meets in art spaces. The artist addresses the audience directly and often questions what has been said beforehand. His performance for Liste Books are Heavy does not actually begin a fictious story but tells one about his situation at that very moment: an artist thinking and speaking to an audience.
A text bound to the political history of the Warteck area will be transformed into music by using a transcription method from John Cage. Taking this script as a point of departure for her work, Elena Bajo then begins to translate this musical syntax into a choreography of body movements in collaboration with actors, dancers and musicians. At Liste, The Absence of Work explores the structure of a former industrial facility now used for contemporary art, translating the site-specific tradition of Institutional Critique into a collective action space.
Over the past several years, Christian Ratti has introduced many alternative notions of the „beautiful“ to the art world by offering guided tours through conservation and animal protection areas. For Coat Check Ratti and his collaborators have left things at coat checks all over the world, primarily at art institutions – and they have never returned to pick them up. For the new edition of his work at Liste, Ratti has asked the participating galleries to contribute a ticket by following his example. The finger-size tickets are now forming an international collection of value replacements in people`s pockets.
Maybe you have met Filip Gilissen`s performer on your way to the fair offering you gold pens and keyrings. They advertise the title of his project to the public: It`s All Downhill From Here On – a sentence that will rise above the Basel skyline in huge letters for one night after the opening, hanging from a crane at a construction site in the city center. But what you see is not what you get. The bright look of Gilissen’s glamorous work is a rather contradictory one: setting great expectations and promising gratification on the visual level, while creating an open-ended question with respect to the actual meaning of its words.
Through various media, Quynh Dong puts the re-production of emotions through music and images on stage. Translated through different languages and cultural backgrounds, her songs tell of unfulfilled desires of love and passion. The group Drunger und Drüber (In Trouble) takes an expression from the local Bernese dialect as a point of departure and presents songs originating in Vietnamese and newly composed for Liste with lyrics in a Swiss idiom. Performing on the street in front of the fair, Dong and her band appear as almost transcendent figures of some sort of Kitsch while encountering the interface of the globalized art world with a local dialect.
Rubén Grilo works with the all too familiar aesthetics of infotainment. At Liste, an experiment with the vast amount of information presented to visitors will be conducted during the fair: Soft Drives. The artist is inviting a memory specialist to memorize as much information about the fair as possible. The performance (and its announcement) can be understood as a discreet exercise in embodiment, eventually becoming part of one stream of information. For visitors, a limited number of appointments on June 16 and 17, 2012, are available on request.
Trained both as a graphic designer and fine artist, Rebecca Stephany links contemporary arts` PR-language with ideas of social utopia in performances, publications and exhibition displays. On the Liste grounds, Stephany runs a temporary store, open daily for a few hours to the public, named Doppelwörter: Bilder, Bedeutung, Austreibung, Produktion. The setting combines the look of contemporary pop-up advertisement and live presentations of endangered crafts in local museums: the artist’s portfolio magnified and printed on weather-proof plastic, distributed by two young women in historic worker garb.
Programme overview:
- Continously during the opening hours of Liste: Christian Ratti
- Tuesday June 12 to Sunday 17 June: Rebecca Stephany, from 2 pm
- Monday 11 June: Elena Bajo, 4 pm / Quynh Dong, 6 and 8 pm
- Tuesday, 12 June: Filip Gilissen, 9:30 pm at construction site Malzgasse/Lautengartenstrasse, 4052 Basel
- Wednesday 13 June: Elena Bajo, 7 pm
- Thursday, 14 June: Jasiek Mischke, 3 and 6 pm
- Friday, 15 June: Matteo Rubbi, from 1 pm
- Saturday, 16 June to Sunday 17 June: Rubén Grilo, from 3 pm
Performances by: Rubén Grilo, Quynh Dong, Elena Bajo, Matteo Rubbi, Jasiek Mischke, Christian Ratti, Filip Gilissen, Rebecca Stephany
Location: Liste 17-The young art fair,Burgweg 15, 4058 Basel, Switzerland.