Farkhondeh Shahroudi, Rana Hamadeh, Anna Anderegg: 
The theatre in each one of us

In the three-part project The theater in each one of us, Kunstverein Arnsberg explores and investigates how processes and spaces of theater are given a form in visual art and in our everyday life. Driven by an interest to look at the (a)social bonds of us humans and what happens when the social get staged, the project allows to explore the woven threads and original meaning of the theatrical throughout various perspectives.

The series begins with a solo exhibition by Farkhondeh Shahroudi—a sculptural fabric of poetic, social and political texture. In Shahroudi’s sculptures and installations, carpets evolve into mobile gardens, into heterotopic spaces. They release imagination and give form to that feeling of Not-Belonging that is characteristic of the artist in exile. Her work addresses translocated movements of people who are at the mercy of others, uprooted or dislocated, moving between places and worlds as if in a play. Many figures in her work are reminiscent of traditional Iranian theater, where actors, spectators, and animals blur into a single entity on the street. Images, bodies, and narratives are transformed through her handwriting, through sewing and weaving with different materials, into a synthetic universe that oscillates between social and asocial, political and private, public and intimate, between language and illegibility. Shahroudi's performance Sang Zani (April 15) is an adaptation of a traditional Iranian mourning ceremony about injustices.

Rana Hamadeh’s operatic practice blurs the boundaries between art, theater, and exhibition-making and tests out different models for collective thinking and study. Her long-durational projects evolve in sequential chapters, manifesting as large-scale sound compositions with complex network designs, machinic interactions, audiovisual installations, stage sets, texts, and conversations. Her work deals with the infrastructures and technologies of justice—linguistic, legal, and performative—understanding justice through the modalities of measuring, spectacles, and “machinic opera.” In her solo exhibition at Kunstverein Arnsberg, Hamadeh is showing the 3D animation film-installation part of the growing Standard_Deviation series of works, all of which venture through Sophocles’s famed tragedy, Oedipus Rex. From dreams to trance to horror to phantasmagorical tableaux vivants, the 22-min film is mainly reminiscent of cut scenes in a computer game. Accompanying this installation, Hamadeh will present new studies for an upcoming series of cartographic-sculptural off-shoots of the animation film. Timely questions arise from Hamadeh’s reconstruction of Sophocles’s tragedy surrounding the entanglements of desire, destiny and technology and their economies of reproduction. How—in the midst of our contemporary tragedies—can we desire differently? And what technologies can we invent to mediate such a desire to desire differently?

Just as in traditional Iranian theatre, where actors and audience mingle in public space, the third chapter of the programme expands in the streets of Arnsberg and engages directly with the citizens. The work Silver Boom by artist Anna Anderegg is a performative intrusion of senior women into public space questioning, when and why a woman’s body becomes invisible. The piece questions the relationship between urban space, gender and age. Besides the choreographic performance in public space, a video installation at Kunstverein Arnsberg with works created in collaboration with video artist Nina Gazaniol are shown. They are portraits of the participating women, showing a documentary anthropological insight into their personal lives and thoughts. The performance Silver Boom (June 29-30) is produced in collaboration with the Cultural Office of Arnsberg.

The theatre in each one of us is funded by Stiftung Kunstfonds as part of the NEUSTART KULTUR program. Kunstverein Arnsberg is supported by the city of Arnsberg, Brauerei C. & A. Veltins and Sparkasse Arnsberg-Sundern.

Kunstverein Arnsberg is a non-profit institution located at the historic centre of Arnsberg. Since 1987 the institution develops a local and international programme of exhibitions and public projects, amongst others, it has presented exhibitions by Santiago Sierra, Alfredo Jaar, Julieta Aranda, Erwin Wurm and Susan Philipsz.  kunstverein-arnsberg.de. 

Artistic Director: Pauline Doutreluingne

For press inquiries please send an e-mail to: carolauehlken@gmail.com