Patrick Staff and Cara Tolmie will present Litmus Shuffle at Berlin’s KW Institute for Contemporary Art on April 7.
Presented as a part of the gallery’s current performance programme, ‘The Performative Minute’, Tolmie and Staff have been working on ‘Litmus Shuffle’ for a while, at least since 2014. They describe it as a ‘choreographic collaboration’, which collects the by-products, detritus or excesses of a shared ‘life’ and ‘work’ along with the communication that forms it, examining its possible transformation into reusable material.
The work this time will be posited in the context of the Secret Surface exhibition, which each event of ‘The Performative Minute’ including niv Acosta’s performance ‘Clapback‘ has been curated in relation to.
Both artists push the form of art and what it can include into a realm of personal, unbecoming, unrealised —or unrealisable. In this way they embrace what they describe in the press release as ‘superficial exchange’ (emails, sending photos to each other on their phones) rather than avoid this material, because “revelations of identity-constructing may be observed as they unfold” in time and space.
See the KW website for more details.**