Experienz #2 – Performance & Live Art Platform
Materializing the Social
18–21 April 2013
Opening: 18 April, 7pm
WIELS – Brussels
Avenue Van Volxemlaan 354
1190 Brussels
info [at] experienz.org
www.experienz.org
www.wiels.org
Performances by: Davide Balula / Malena Beer / Oliver Beer / Hsia-Fei Chang / Giuseppe Chico & Barbara Matijevic / Antonio Contador / Guillaume Désanges / Carole Douillard / Ninar Esber / Esther Ferrer / Sergej Jensen / Liz Magic Laser / Estefania Peñafiel Loaiza / Dan Perjovschi
Talk, April 20th, 3:30pm:
Guillaume Désanges / Marc & Josée Gensollen / RoseLee Goldberg / Nathalie Guiot / Agnès Violeau
Young people’s workshops with Malena Beer & Pilar Jaramillo (Art Brussels)
Performative work by Sarah Crowner
Founding Director: Nathalie Guiot
Artistic Director: Agnès Violeau
An experimental, nomadic platform for live-action artistic practices, Experienz embarks on its second edition with four days of events based on live presence at the WIELS, the Belgian hub for contemporary art, parallel to the events of Art Brussels 2013. This mini-festival offers an eclectic roster of some fifteen artists from a rich range of backgrounds (Lebanon, United States, Ecuador, United Kingdom, Portugal, France, Taiwan). Titled Materializing the Social, this edition explores the biopolitical, following the concept forged in 1974 by Michel Foucault to designate the kind of power exercised not on geographical territories but on populations.
The artistic propositions here address ideas of resistance, bio-power, the government of self and others, the individual’s relation to the group and the norms governing relations between the physical and the social body. Conceiving art as a tool of transformation, in the spirit of the work of John Dewey and Allan Kaprow on art and the everyday, the propositions will stimulate dialogue between the artists and the public, while offering an urgent response to imposed political discourses by the energy of the active body and the capacity for empathy.
The Greeks had a term, parrhesia, which meant the capacity to state a clear position, to speak truly and affirm a personal conviction in public, but also a freedom of speech that put the person exercising it at risk, as opposed to flattery. It also means the desire to help other men progress. In The Dematerialization of Art Lucy Lippard and John Chandler describe the gradual replacement of art as object by “art as idea” and “art as action.” The authors show that the disintegration of art, anti-form, constitutes a new strength. In this emptiness, artists engage with the world in a different way; they “think with the body.” Through these notions and spectators’ entrance into a collage of events on which they can act, the elements come together for a renaissance of the forms of performance. Navigating between performances, dance, talks and performative readings, Experienz #2: Materializing the Social engages the public as an essential component of a practice that places the individual at the heart of the debate.
Complete information at www.experienz.org.
