THE BODY THAT MOVES

Platform 82 | Powered by Zilberman 
Goethestraße 82, 10623 Berlin

Heba Y. Amin, Andrège Bidiamambu, Ekin Bernay, Rose Lejeune, Judith Raum, Margarita Tsomou, Erinç Seymen and Lauryn Youden

26 April – 22 June, 2024

Platform 82 presents a performance program exploring (body) politics, colonialism, love, and destruction, where sensory experiences intertwine with political statements. For performance artists in the 1970’s, the personal was political. Invited to The Body That Moves are artists and lecturers who consider our current interactions and power relationships. How do they influence our sensual experiences? The contributions, while different in approach and form, concern the battle between exaltation of individual autonomy and acknowledgment of human dependency. 
 
As defined by the philosopher Byung-Chul Han, Eros embodies an ancient force that necessitates the presence of 'Otherness' and self-destruction for the purpose of self-reinvention. If we perceive art as an attempt to comprehend the intricacies of the world, something that can surprise and move our thinking and feeling as we know it - then performance emerges as  the ultimate encounter with an unknown Other. By directly confronting the  audience, the artist finds new ways of looking at the world, whether through eye contact, auditory engagement, or palpable presence, the performer is able to shock, confront or question the audience's reality.
 

I was trying to develop a completely new, nonvoyeuristic approach to the female body as something other than a visual object. I wanted to find out what happens when you leave behind the voyeuristic mode and confront people with reality. But that's what was so interesting for me to discover: People don't want to see reality. It's a pretty simple idea, really, this question of how we deal with reality. When something is constructed, when it's projected onto a screen, it's acceptable, but it's different when it's there in front of you in a public space.      - Valie Export, 2012 [1]

Throughout the  history of performance art, many great performers have used the encounter with an audience in order to convey political messages. The element of confrontation and the shock of self-inflicted violence were themes explored by performance artists such as Valie Export, Carolee Schneeman, and Marina Abramović. They appealed to a sense of accountability that occurs with the audience when watching, or being around violence. Through sensual approaches, pain and the body, these artists made their confrontation with the audience acutely known and felt.
 
Today, we are re-considering the concept of connection, as our notions of autonomy, community, and Otherness transform. According to Byung-Chul Han we live in a narcissistic society, in which there is only sameness. We are seeking our own reflection in our surroundings, afraid to lose ourselves in front of the Other. Artists such as Selma Selman and Florentina Holzinger are exploring themes of  destruction and romanticising violence in order to affect and create a community. Meanwhile, according to Lynne Segal, we are unaware of our existing interdependencies:
 

In these days of unbridled individualism, we often remain unaware that we ground our sense of self only in and through our continuing ties to others—family, friends, strangers, even enemies—who are themselves products of their own social belongings. From first breath to last gasp, we rely upon those around us to help us stay human and to make sense of our lives. [2]

This program considers (body) politics, colonialism, love and destruction within performance in its most broad definition: the engagement with an audience. We research if The Body That Moves can still be a source of inspiration, a confrontation, a true encounter. The program features performances, lectures and lecture performances by Heba Y. Amin, Andrège Bidiamambu, Ekin Bernay, Rose Lejeune, Judith Raum, Margarita Tsomou, Erinç Seymen and Lauryn Youden. 

Erinç Seymen graduated from Mimar Sinan University of Fine Arts, Painting Department in 2006 and received his MA from Yıldız Teknik University Art and Design Faculty, with a thesis about Bob Flanagan, who continues to be an inspiration for him. During this lecture Welcoming Discomfort he will speculate on how discomfort can be utilised both in terms of artistic production and construction of imagery. How can we distinguish discomfort from feelings of shock and horror? Is it just a milder and more tolerable sibling, an aftermath of those feelings, or is it a slow acting poison that sticks with you longer? Erinç Seymen’s articles have been published in various magazines on topics such as militarism, nationalism and gender issues. Since 2002, he has participated in several solo and group exhibitions in İstanbul, Ankara, Berlin, Vienna, Paris, London, Helsinki, Eindhoven and Lisbon.

Andrège Bidiamambu is a Congolese-French performer based in France. He started dancing in 2008, attracted by funk style dances and mainly by locking. Through the years, he has developed, finessed and mastered a distinctive motion, fed by diverse styles like Contemporary Dance, Capoeira, Congolese traditional dances and Tai Chi. Andrège is internationally recognized in his main style of Locking and he has participated in numerous international competitions in China, Japan, France and Amsterdam. Additionally, he is teaching and judging in dance competitions. In the mood for harmony is Andrège Bidiamambu’s first solo piece accompanied with a soundscape by Mackenzy Bergile. It is the first essay of a decade-long research on movement, an introspective journey, a quest of the self following the ability to unfold the intricate dimension of being.

Judith Raum presents a lecture performance on British secret-agent Gertrude Bell and her field photography in Mesopotamia. Bell’s movements in the Middle East as archaeologist and European woman were part of a problematic intersection of colonial powers and interests. The lecture performance looks at her photographs as an impossible site for disturbances and distortions of the related attitudes. Do Bell's photographs challenge the regime of the gaze and the scientific conformism of the time? In the course of the performance, the notion of the shadow becomes the central formal and narrative element. Judith Raum adapted her lecture performance piece, consisting of a dense interplay of text, image projection and sculptural action originally produced for the Live Works Performance Act Award in Dro, Italy in 2018, for the spaces of Platform 82. 

Ekin Bernay has an MA Dance Movement Psychotherapy from Roehampton University and has been working clinically as a DMP. She has experience in adult mental health, autism, primary schools and refugee children. In her live artwork Ekin is working towards merging the DMP findings with a wider audience through performative workshops. Her work focuses on the healing qualities of performance art. She uses text, sound and choreographic situations to direct the audience. As a dance therapist Bernay works in adult mental health and schools. Ekin will create a site specific performance for Platform 82. She is represented by International Performance Art Platform Performistanbul. 

You’re seeping into my bloodstream is a 1.5 hr poetry reading, performative lecture and auto-theoretical essay on love ruled by disease, examining its sick and vampiric tendencies for subsistence. This performance delves into Lauryn Youden’s continued exploration of chronic illness as near-death experience, or a “time of ‘non-death’”. As a term coined by Gruppo Di Nun in Revolutionary Demonology, “time of ‘non-death’ speaks of the mysterious presence of absence, a world populated by impersonal forces and entities, that although not alive, cannot be called dead”.  For Youden, the term becomes inextricably intertwined with the canon of lesbian vampire literature and its metaphors for disability, disease and queer Crip lust. In this realm of the undead, the terrifying angels of Rainer Maria Rilke co-exist with tragic heroines from meta-fictional K-dramas, relive 2015 psycho-thriller bimbo comedies, and sit through many a BPD girl dinner. Interwoven with Youden’s personal accounts of illness, limerence and immortal deviance, she threads together cross-generational fact and fiction, relating to forms of Crip collectivity and its underworld networks of care.

Egyptian artist Heba Y. Amin grounds her work in extensive research that looks at the convergence of politics, technology, and architecture. Techno-utopian ideas, as manifest in characteristic machines of colonial soft power, are at the heart of Amin’s work. Starting from the idea that landscape is an expression of dominant political power – Heba Y. Amin looks for tactics of subversion and other techniques to undermine consolidated systems and flip historical narratives through a critical spatial practice. She previously presented lecture performances such as The General’s Stork and Operation Sunken Sea. At Platform 82, she will introduce a new project. 

Rose Lejeune is an experienced curator and consultant with particular expertise in working with artists whose practices have strong multidisciplinary, performative, digital, public or social elements. She is the founding director of Performance Exchange – a dispersed live programme across commercial galleries in London. Highlighting the work done by commercial galleries to support performance and multi-disciplinary practices, Performance Exchange creates new forms of support for performance through a programme of presentation combined with detailed acquisition information for each work, and an acquisitions fund for three museums to purchase work from the programme. 

Dr. Margarita Tsomou is Greek and holds a doctorate in Cultural Studies. She works as author/journalist, dramaturg, presenter and curator and is mainly based in Berlin. Since January 2019, she has been Curator for Theory and Discourse at HAU – Hebbel am Ufer in Berlin. She is the publisher of the pop feminist Missy Magazine and writes for print and radio: Die Zeit, taz, Frankfurter Rundschau, WDR, SWR and others. She regularly participates as speaker and presenter in panel discussions with guests like Chantal Mouffe, Josef Vogl, Saskia Sassen, Diedrich Diederichsen and Annie Sprinkle. In February 2018, she received her doctorate as scholar of the artistic-scientific graduate college “Versammlung und Teilhabe: Urban Public Spheres and Performative Arts” (HafenCity University Hamburg/Fundus Theater/Kampnagel). She is part of the artistic-activist group Schwabinggrad Ballett and the publishing house bbooks Berlin. 
 

The senses crave sources of maximum information; the eye benefits by exercise, stretch, and expansion towards materials of complexity and substance, . . . conditions which alert the total sensibility - cast it almost in stress - extend insight and response, the basic responsive range of empathetic-kinesthetic vitality.      - Carolee Schneemann, 2003 [3]

[1] Fore, Devin, “Valie Export” in: Interview Magazine, August 24, 2012
[2] Lynne Segal, “Interdependencies: All that is really worth the doing, is what we do for others.” from the publication Interdependencies: Perspectives on Care and Resilience, February 15, 2024
[3] “Imaging Her Erotics: Essays, Interviews, Projects”, p.47, MIT Press