The Performative Minute

Patrick Staff + Cara Tolmie @ KW, Apr 7

5 April 2016

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.**

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Hanne Lippard @ KW, Oct 2

1 October 2014

Performance artist Hanne Lippard is taking over Berlin’s KW Institute for Contemporary Art with a “reading for fans” titled The Performative Minute this Thursday, October 2 at 7pm.

The reading performance comes as the first of what will become a weekly ritual, with the invited artist working to record and reflect current developments of the performance art scene, and Lippard’s Thursday reading takes on the topic of the office environment as a potential Eco-system, “deployed by the human endeavor to seek success”.

She takes a critical view to the rat race of modern life, using a to-do list as a metaphor for the exhaustive and endless cycles with life and its echos – “to-do, to-do, to-do” – which appears as both a rhythmic and primal thumping of the heart and a ceaseless call to command.

See the KW exhibition page for details. **

Header image: Hanne Lippard. Photo by Marseille Sifrar. Courtesy the artist.

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