Anticipation
JAK (Germany), Jonas Dahlberg (Sweden), Abigail Levine (United States)
Curated by Tina Plokarz
Anticipation is a group exhibition that explores sculpture across the media of installation, video and dance. Bringing together three visual and performance artists who employ sculpture as physical props and conceptual elements in their practice, the exhibition invites spectators to construct anticipated narratives through the lenses of their own pasts, presents and futures. Anticipation seeks to trigger curiosity about the constructedness of individual identities and sociocultural relations. It investigates transformative and performative strategies of contemporary art practice while bringing into focus moments of imagination, anticipation and aspiration.
The exhibition features the installation “Indescribable Scenes” (2018) in combination with the acrylic painting “S#2” (2017) by visual artist JAK (Germany), the new performance “Restagings No. 2: Of Serra (to movement)” (2018) by choreographer and dancer Abigail Levine (United States) and the video installation “View Through a Park” (2009) by Jonas Dahlberg (Sweden). Gradually shifting the focus over the course of May and June 2018, this unique stage-setting of artistic practices bridges the gaps between the real and imagined props that support each of our individual worlds.
The exhibition is free and open to the public from May 4 to June 29, 2018 at Vox Populi. The sculptural installation by JAK and the performance “Of Serra (to movement)” are on display in Gallery 1. “View Through a Park” is screened in the Black Box in the month of May.
IMAGES
THE ARTISTS
Multidisciplinary artist JAK appears solely through artistic actions and installations. JAK combines painted text panels and miniature habitats of domestic furniture and public objects in site-specific installations. Like props for stage scenes, these displays, including “Indescribable Scenes” (2018) and “S#2” (2017), become the starting points for JAK’s ongoing film production “Soul Blindness,” which contemplates the construction of reality and the realness of the artist. Like sculptural evidence in a fictional search for the elusive artist, the installation entangles the spectator in a play between filmic illusion and subjective narration. JAK’s sculptural and video installations aim to reveal the inextricable relationship between identity and society. JAK has exhibited throughout Europe, the United States and Asia, including recent solo exhibitions “SOUL BLINDNESS – fall into indescribable scenes” (Germany, 2017), “A Sustaining Life” (United States, 2016), “CUT TO:” (Germany, 2015), “Soul Blindness – Prolog” (Taiwan, 2014) and “The Boundary” (Korea, 2012), and has received multiple honors, including the 2013 Artprize Stiftung Buchkunst Frankfurt for the publication JAK (edited by Demian Bern and JAK for EXP.edition, novel “JAK” by Hamed Taheri). – www.info-jak.de
Interlacing film and sculpture as well as the domestic and the public, Jonas Dahlberg’s video installations work at the intersection between art and architecture, the personal and the political. “View Through a Park” (2009), presented in the Black Box in the month of May, takes the viewer on an endless voyage through the night. Bathed in mysterious lights of black-and-white like a film noir, the silent short film is recorded with a single camera movement from the interior of one apartment, through an idyllic city park, into the opposite apartment and back. The emptiness and stasis of the ambiguous atmosphere belie the viewer’s immediate experience of the life-size projection and reveal the construction of a set design that models Gramercy Park, the only remaining private park in Manhattan. On the constant edge of suspense, “View Through a Park” invites spectators to narrate their personal dreams and anticipations into the film. Jonas Dahlberg is known for his winning proposal for 22 July Memorial Sites in Norway as well as his ongoing series of video works that utilize experimental methods drawn from cinematic language. Exploring duration and sequence and their connectedness to the politics of space, his films are the basis for an analysis of sites, movements and time. Dahlberg was trained at the Malmö Art Academy and has since then exhibited internationally, including at the ArkDes Architecture Museum Stockholm (Sweden, 2018), Kunstmuseum Bonn (Germany, 2013) and Leeum Samsung Museum of Art (Korea, 2007), as well as Manifesta 4 (2002), the Venice Biennial (2003), the São Paulo Biennial (2004), and more. He has also created several stage designs for theaters and operas, including Verdi’s Macbeth at Grand Théâtre de Genèva (Switzerland 2012) and Grand Teatre Liceu Barcelona (Spain 2016) and the now touring “Alles wieder gut” for Franui (Austria, Netherlands, Germany and France, 2017 and 2018). – www.jonasdahlberg.com
Drawing from visual and performance art alike, the performances of choreographer and dancer Abigail Levine examine our embodied experience of time, physical work and the differences in our repetitions. During the month of June, Levine will present the second part of her “Restagings” series, based on conceptual and sculptural practices in the United States in the 1960s. Her new performance installation “Of Serra (to movement)” translates the precariousness and interdependence in Richard Serra’s iconic “Prop” sculptures into the immediacy of performance. Serra’s transitive verb-list from the 1960s envisions sculptural objects as subjects of action in space – to fold, to roll, to prop. Levine substitutes “propped” steel forms with the physicality and gravity of human bodies in order to reconsider the sculptural objects as performance score in themselves. Her performance foregrounds time, labor, and spatial encounter while interrogating today’s understanding of bodies as objects, and vice versa. On four days in June, Levine will perform in the space both alone and accompanied or substituted by Philadelphia artist Vitche-Boul Ra. Abigail Levine’s works have been presented at numerous venues, including the Movement Research Festival, Danspace Project (United States), SESC São Paulo (Brazil), Benaki Museum (Greece), Prisma Forum (Mexico) and Taipei Fringe (Taiwan). She trained and performed with Marina Abramović in her MoMA retrospective (2010) and will return to MoMA to dance in choreographer Yvonne Rainer’s early works in fall 2018. She holds a Masters in Dance and Performance Studies from New York University and is Mellon Artist-in-Residence at the Center for Performance Research. Levine is currently a visiting professor in Dance at Wesleyan University. – www.abigaillevine.com
Join the artist at Vox Populi and witness the physical transformation of sculpture. Abigail Levine will perform both alone and accompanied by Philadelphia artist Vitche-Boul Ra. Sound design by composer Paula Matthusen.
• Friday, June 1, 2018, at 6pm and 7pm (duet)
• Thursday, June 7, 2018, at 4pm and 5pm (solo)
• Sunday, June 17, 2018, at 2pm and 4pm (solo)
• Wednesday, June 20, 2018, at 5pm and 6pm (duet), followed by a conversation with Tina Plokarz
Concurrently, Abigail Levine will also perform Of Serra (to movement) for four consecutive days from June 11-14, 2018, 4-7pm at Fridman Gallery, 287 Spring Street in New York City.
Of Serra was kindly supported by residencies, funding, and assistance from the Center for Performance Research (CPR), Centro Mexicano de la Música y Art Sonoras (CMMAS), Marina Abramovic Institute (MAI), and New Music USA.
THE CURATOR
Tina Plokarz is a curator and member at Vox Populi. She is interested in the intersection between visual and performance arts, particularly themes of spatiality, participation, perception and narration in contemporary art. Her recent projects include “time/scale” for Philadelphia Contemporary (United States, 2017), “Saeculum” (United States, 2017), and “Obsessions and Surreal Worlds” (Germany, 2015). She has worked with various artists, including Anike Joyce Sadiq, Emma Sulkowicz, and Hamish Fulton, as well as in international institutions in Germany, including the KW Institute for Contemporary Art (Berlin), Villa Merkel (Esslingen), and the Hamburger Bahnhof (Berlin). She received a double major in Art History and Theater Studies from the Free University Berlin. Presently she is assistant curator at Philadelphia Contemporary.