Faculty of Action – Live-performanceutställning
Tredagars performance, samtal och workshops
Takvåningen, Färgfabriken
Medverkande konstnärer: Diana Agunbiade-Kolawole (SWE/UK), Jessie Kleemann (GR), Harold Offeh (UK), Katarina Pirak-Sikku (Sápmi), Florence Peake & Eve Stainton (UK), Rúrí (ICE), Malin Ståhl (SWE), Anita Wernström (SWE)
Faculty of Action is an exhibition that consists of performance works and takes place on the top floor of Färgfabriken during three consecutive days. In addition to these performances there will also host workshops and a seminar.
The exhibition is about being in the room; being present here and now, and for visitors to experience the art as temporary, shifting and dynamic. In this sense, Faculty of Action is a unique exhibition experience with eight performance artworks occuring simultaneously or overlapping with one another. Here, we make room for performance as an artform – while creating a space where the artwork represents a whole, rather than parts of a program. Faculty of Action wants to highlight the potential of contemporary performance art and it’s power to explore the unknown in different ways.
Contributing artists
Diana Agunbiade-Kolawole (SWE), Jessie Kleemann (GR), Harold Offeh (UK), Katarina Pirak-Sikku (Sápmi), Florence Peake & Eve Stainton (UK), Ruri (ICE), Malin Ståhl (SWE) Anita Wernström (SWE).
A catalogue in English is produced to accompany the exhibition. The catalogue lends its aesthetics from fanzines, with contributions by the participating artists, the IntraGalactic arts collective and Färgfabriken. There is also a text by Diana Taylor about the question of what performance can do. The catalogue is made in a small limited edition and is partly produced on site during the course of the exhibition, documenting the new knowledge and ideas that arise.
On Sunday the 21st of October an international seminar will be held, with a discussion on what types of spaces are being given to performance today and how performance can take place as an art form.
Both the exhibition and the seminar aim to investigate the current position of performance art on the global and local contemporary art scene; while creating and testing the shapes of a temporary space for an art form that is in transition. The art space and the public programme, together with the new catalogue, become a platform for dialogue.
IntraGalactic arts collective is an artist-run initiative in the form of a non-profit organization, which is connected to the Swedish Association of Art Organizations. The collective was formed in 2014 and works in the field of visual arts. The group has satellites in Stockholm, Vingåker and Östersund. IntraGalactic arts collective is interested in art production focusing on meetings and conversations, and arranges a range of activities like residences, exhibitions, workshops, performance labs and seminars. For several years, IntraGalactic arts collective has explored performance art through Performance Lab together with artists, inviting audiences to participate both in the process and the finished works.
About the artists
Diana Agunbiade-Kolawole lives and works in Stockholm and London. Her works utilise lens and non lens based photography, these manifests in a variety of outputs such as installations, performances, prints and moving image. She is educated at the Royal Institute of Fine Art, Stockholm, Sweden and École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts, Paris. Her works has been shown in places like the Thielska gallery in Stockhom and at Tate Britain in London. Her works can be found in the collection of Stockholm Läns Landsting, Uppsala Läns Landsting and Brucebo Foundation in Sweden as well as Kingston University in London. She also enjoys collaborating and participating in other people’s performances.
Jessie Kleemann from Upernavik, Greenland, is a performance artist and poet. She is trained as a printmaker at the former Grafisk Værksted (now known as the “Artschool”) and as well as an actress at the Tuukaq Theatre in Denmark. Her art includes videoworks, installations and many performances. She has also worked with the performance group The Wolf in the Winter. In her performance practice she explores the different discourses of ethnocentrisities marked on the greenlandic woman self, as in the bodily expressions as well as that gaze which one would call is stigmatizing the female other. Experimenting with materials and costumes where the act of dressing or undressing becomes a fierce cultural statement her works breaks apart from colonial esthetics.
Harold Offeh is an artist working in a range of media including performance, video, photography, learning and social arts practice. He lives in Cambridge and works in London and Leeds where he is currently a visiting tutor at the Royal College of Art and Goldsmiths College. He often employs humour as a means to confront the viewer with historical narratives and contemporary culture and is interested in the space created by the inhabiting or embodying of history. Offeh is educated at the University of Brighton and the Royal College of Art in Stockholm and he has exhibited and performed performance works at Publics in Helsinki, The Tetley in Leeds and Tate Modern, London.
Katarina Pirak Sikku lives in Jokkmokk, to where she returned after graduating with a visual arts degree at the Umeå Art Academy. She investigates landscapes, borders and traces. She has been noticed for her engagement in the Swedish race biological material. She has, from an inside perspective, explored how it feels to be one of those affected and examined, Her project departured in the question ‘can grief be inherited?’. She uses her own body to feel, describe and experience. In recent years she has had a number of noted solo exhibitions and her work has been shown at Moderna Museet in Stockholm among other venues.
Florence Peake’s practice encompasses visual art, dance and performance. By encouraging chaotic relationships between the body and material, Peake creates radical and outlandish performances, which create temporary alliances and micro-communities within the audience. Florence Peake’s work has been shown at Palais de Tokyo, Yorkshire Sculpture Park, Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art in Gateshead and Hayward Gallery in London.
Eve Stainton, based in London and educated at London Contemporary Dance School, is an artist working across performance, dance and digital collage making. Her practice often takes the shape of queer and intimate collaborations exploring desire and vulnerability as a form of protest against normative attitudes. She co founded The Uncollective with Michael Kitchin where movement based and experimental art works are created. Her collage work is an alternative way to view the format of choreographing the experience of space. Eve Stainton’s work has been shown at Tangente Theatre in Montreal and Tate Britain.
Rúrí, who lives and works in Reykjavik, has long been one of Iceland’s most distinguished artists. She works with everything from large-scale works in landscape to photography, sculpture and multimedia, but performance art has a prominent role in her production. Environmental degradation and politics are recurring subjects, in parallel with an overall interest in time, relativity and the volatility. Her works are conceptual but at the same time express sensory experiences. Rúrí’s works are represented in many private and public collections in Iceland and internationally and she has participated in a large number of individual and group exhibitions in Europe, Asia and the United States. In 2003 she represented Iceland at the Venice Biennale.
Malin Ståhl, who lives in Östersund, is a visual artist working with landscape as site and medium, based on performance. The physical body plays an important role in her work, where movement, silence and listening strategies are used to create space for exploring time and space. She is educated at Slade School of Fine Art in London and the Iceland Academy of the Arts. Her works have been shown at the Modern Museum in Stockholm, the Barbican Art Gallery in London and the Living Art Museum in Reykjavik.
Anita Wernström is an artist, based in Stockholm. Through performance, installations, video and collage, she deconstructs her world, focusing on the politized body and visual pleasure. Based on postcolonial and feminist theories, she has developed an intuitive, emotional conceptual language with both humorous, activist and poetical outputs. She has studied at the Slade School of Fine Art in London and her works has been shown at Bloomsbury New Contemporaries and Camden Art Center in London and Fullersta Gård in Stockholm.
Program
Friday October 19
17-20: Performances by the artists, on-going. Workshops, register at reception. Release of the exhibition catalogue (limited numbered edition) Live press for catalogue. Färgfabriken’s cafe opens the bar in the top floor.
17:30-18 Workshop: Kneading Paradise – Florence Peake & Eve Stainton
18-20: Harold Offeh ‘Selfie Choreography’, drop in or register with louise@fargfabriken.se to secure a spot
18:30-18:40 Workshop: Collective Breath with Malin Ståhl
19-19:40 Workshop: ‘Preparing mentally, physically and emotionally for a performance – discussion with Rúrí’
Saturday October 20
11-17: Performances by the artists, on-going. Live press for catalogue.
13-15: Harold Offeh ‘Selfie Choreography’, drop in or register with louise@fargfabriken.se to secure a spot
Söndag 21 oktober
11-17: Performances by the artists, on-going. Live press for catalogue.
11-12:30: Harold Offeh ‘Selfie Choreography’, drop in or register with louise@fargfabriken.se to secure a spot
13-15: Seminar, keynote speaker Adelaide Bannerman (UK), panel with the artists, discussion with audience. Moderator Therese Kellner, curator at Accelerator, Stockholms University.
Read the seminar program in full here.
*About Harold Offeh’s ‘Selfie Choreography’: join the artist for a free workshop exploring how the body is mediated by cameras and technology through themes of movement, photography, the city and narcissism. This workshop discovers how we can use phones and selfie sticks as apparatus to capture and survey our own bodies. The project is part of Offeh’s ongoing interests in ‘tooling’ the body, exploring ways to use the body and physical and social experiences as tools for investigating identity and how it’s constructed. The workshop is open to all, but people of colour and LGBTQI+ are encouraged. Please bring along your mobile phone, all other materials will be provided.
Register to ensure a spot, with louise@fargfabriken.se. Language: English.
Supported by
Stockholms stad,
Statens kulturråd,
Konstnärsnämnden,
Nordic Art Association (NKF)