Annika Larsson, Danse Macabre, 2020 [41:00 min.]

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Research, Direction, Cinematography, Montage, Sound and Production: Annika Larsson / Additonal Camera & Sound: Paul Niedermayer, Michel Wagenplatz / Research assistant: Isabel Gatzke / Poetry & Words: Liv Fontaine, Music: Liv Fontaine, Rosa Farber and Edwin Stevens. Performers: Paul Niedermayer (artist), Michel Wagenchütz (artist), Liv Fontaine (artist), Samir Kennedy (dance, performance and sound artist), Sue-Gives-a-Fuck (drag queen and comedian), Ms Kevin Le Grand (drag queen), Matt Tedford aka Margaret Thatcher Queen of Soho (actor, writer and comedian), Andrea Spisto(theatre maker, poet, performer and producer) & Danni Spooner (dance artist) a.k.a. Taylor & Vincent and Haus of Anxiety.

DANSE MACABRE was shot in London in autumn 2019 during the protests and demonstrations related to Brexit dominated the streets but also in Winter 2020 shortly before the outbreak of Covid-19 radically re-structured the sphere of the public. Both events brought states of exception and a temporary suspensions of law. With a focus on dance and affectual politics, the film takes a closer look on what gestures and bodily expressions are provoked through the current state of crises, but also how order and disorder are inscribed in bodies and movements in public space. Through new friendships, disorder, dark humour, and erratic moving bodies and voices the film
explores acts of resistance, the politics of performance, visibility, and queerness in order to to bring up urgent questions around xenophobia, borders, and the politics of fear

Annika Larsson is an artist and is professor of time-based media at the HFBK Hamburg. Her work examines the entangled relationship between power, knowledge, embodiment, affect, and visuality within our digital and physical worlds. It looks into conventions and affects that structure the way we perceive, experience, and understand the relationship between images, matter, bodies, systems, and the social world. Engaged with the potential of (human and nonhuman) queer performativity, her work is interested in gestures, affects, rituals, and actions, in patterns of behavior that obscure or challenge power structures. Her works have been widely shown internationally at institutions including Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Basel; Fundacion la Caixa, Barcelona; Le Magasin, Grenoble; Kunsthalle Nürnberg, Nuremberg; ICA-Institute of Contemporary Art, London; ZKM, Karlsruhe; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; S.M.A.K., Ghent; and Musac, Lyon. She has participated in biennials such as the 49th Venice Biennial, the 8th Istanbul Biennial, and the 6th Shanghai Biennial, among others. Larsson lives and works in Berlin. Since 2018 she has led the artistic research project “Non-knowledge, Laughter and the Moving Image,” funded by the Swedish Research Council and done in collaboration with the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm and the HFBK Hamburg.