Masquerade
A screening and lecture series curated by If I Can’t Dance, I Don’t Want To Be Part Of Your Revolution
Francesco Bernardelli, Lars Bang Larsen, Dominic Eichler, Yann Chateigné Tytelman
29.10.2009/17.11.2009/08.12.2009/12.01.2010
All programs start at 7:30 pm
Piet Zwart Institute
Mauritsstraat 36, Rotterdam
This autumn and winter the curatorial platform If I Can’t Dance, I Don’t Want To Be Part Of Your Revolution presents a series of screenings and lectures by Francesco Bernardelli (art critic and curator), Lars Bang Larsen (freelance writer and curator), Dominic Eichler (artist and writer) and Yann Chateigné Tytelman (curator and writer) in the frame of the current edition focusing on the notion of the masquerade.
If I Can’t Dance…’s main focus within the operational and ideological frame of performance is the potential of performativity and its diverse typologies. If I Can’t Dance… works along the systematics of collaboration with institutions and artists. Operating from its new research centre in Amsterdam, If I Can’t Dance… produces projects and programmes that have evolving manifestations in different, international institutions. The basic tone is set by the artists who are invited to develop new pieces, staged in repertory.
As a counterpoint to the edition’s long-term artists’ projects unfolding within an international geography, If I Can’t Dance… presents a programme of performances in the series If I Can’t Dance Tonight in Frascati Theatre in Amsterdam, as well as a thematic project organized in collaboration with the Master of Fine Art programme of the Piet Zwart Institute in Rotterdam. Within this framework, If I Can’t Dance… will organize conversations between Ruth Buchanan(artist and researcher at Jan van Eyck Academy, Maastricht) and Binna Choi (director of Casco, Utrecht), Yael Davids (Amsterdam-based artist) and Vanessa Desclaux (curator at Bloomberg Space, London), as well as between Aurélien Froment (Dublin-based artist) and Myriam Van Imschoot (writer and researcher at Jan van Eyck Academy, Maastricht). Grant Watson (curator at MuHKA, Antwerp) and Frédérique Bergholtz (director of If I Can’t Dance…, Amsterdam) will have a conversation with The Otolith Group (London-based artists Kodwo Eshun and Anjalika Sagar) and Will Holder (London-based graphic designer).
Why Masquerade? If we understand the cultural history of masquerading as an accessing of alterity in a situation of social conformity, then we think it is interesting to readdress this notion today precisely because there has never before been such an intense reinforcement of the cult of the individual. Despite years of serious questioning of the construction of subjectivity through feminism, post-colonialism, post-communism and other intellectual and activist strategies, we seem to have been overtaken by events. Consumer culture strategically reinforces individualism – the channels of new media provide endless possibilities for intense self-articulation and yet where does this bring us in relation to the complex understanding of the constructions of singularity and other emancipatory possibilities? Reading the mask right now and addressing a sense of alterity in a moment of unilateral governmentality or status quo seems prescient.
For more information, please see www.ificantdance.org or www.pzi.wdka.nl
Piet Zwart Institute
Postgraduate Studies and Research
Willem de Kooning Academy/Rotterdam University
Mauritsstraat 36
NL-3012 CJ Rotterdam
T: 0031-(0)10-794 7405
F: 0031-(0)10-794 7406
E: fineart@pzi.wdka.nl
W: www.pzi.wdka.nl