Performatik
The Brussels (Belgium) performance art biennale
18 to 29 March, 2015
Various locations
Brussels
Belgium
The festival seeks out the boundaries, unravels codes and stimulates meetings between performance arts and visual art. The binding element is the live event, the meeting between audience and performer, in the here and now.
Performatik 2015 presents performances, exhibitions and talks by over 35 artists and curators:
Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker / Bára Sigfúsdóttir & Noémie Goudal / Béatrice Balcou / Benoît Félix / Christian Bakalov / Collective 三 (3) / Donatien Grau / Esther Ferrer & Emilio López-Menchero / Gaëtan Rusquet / Germaine Kruip / Grace Schwindt / Hans-Ulrich Obrist / Heine Avdal & Yukiko Shinozaki/fieldworks / Hendrik Folkerts / Ivo Dimchev / Joëlle Tuerlinckx / Jonathan Burrows & Matteo Fargion / Karel Verhoeven & Yannick Franck / Manon de Boer & George van Dam / Marino Formenti / Marthe Ramm Fortun / Philipp Gehmacher / Ryoko Akama, Rie Nakajima, Miki Yui / Shannon Jackson / The Bouillon Group / Ulla von Brandenburg / Xavier Le Roy
The Performatik 2015 festival is organized by the Kaaitheater arts center in association with ten partners across the city, who all contribute their own expertise: Argos centre for art and media, Beursschouwburg, Bozar, CENTRALE for Contemporary Art, Don Verboven Exquisite Objects, Passa Porta, Q-O2, WIELS, workspacebrussels and ZSenne art lab.
Performatik 2015 contains two impressive conversions. Choreographer Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker rethinks dance in an exhibition in WIELS. Using her archive as a starting point, Joëlle Tuerlinckx creates a theatre performance at Kaaitheater.
The festival opens with a performance of the first major creation for theatre by German artist Ulla von Brandenburg. She takes us back to the philosophy of the utopian socialist Saint-Simon.
Performance cannot be pigeon-holed. Marthe Ramm Fortun takes audiences with her in a “conversation performance” in Bozar, Christian Bakalov deprives us of sight in a journey through the Kaaistudios. Quite a few artists respond to our hyperfast age with rituals that invite us to take our time: the ceremony of Béatrice Balcou, the “square dance” of Germaine Kruip, the 12-day-long piano performance of Marino Formenti, which merges art and life, private and public.
The disruption of viewing positions (theatrical spectator, museum viewer) is inherent to the cross-boundary genre that performance is. That is the subject of the new production by Xavier Le Roy and the exhibition by artist Benoît Félix, who also made contributions to the festival artwork.
The public space is also used: the streets by Esther Ferrer, the “grande dame” of Spanish performance art, and the town squares by the Bouillon Group, a young Georgian company. Following the Venice Biennial, they treat Brussels to a performance that depicts our relationship with the three monotheistic religions.
Throughout the Performatik festival, a series of salons are held where experiences are discussed with artists, critics and curators such as Shannon Jackson, Hans-Ulrich Obrist a.o.
Curators:
Performatik 2015 is curated by Katleen Van Langendonck (Kaaitheater), Rolf Quaghebeur (Argos), Tom Bonte (Beursschouwburg), Gerd Van Looy (Bozar), Carine Fol (CENTRALE), Don Verboven (Exquisite Objects), Julia Eckhardt (Q-O2), Dirk Snauwaert, Elena Filipovic (WIELS), and Marnix Rummens (Workspace Brussels).