27/11 2020 19:00 (CET) Screening: John Smith, Twice (2020) HD Video, 3.00 min, colour, sound

The Screening will take place in the Zoom Webinar (interaction & questions are welcome). It can also be viewed through the Vimeo Live Stream

“Just when I thought I was up to speed with it all, I received an email from London’s Kate MacGarry Gallery, alerting me that a new video by the formidable John Smith was premiering on Instagram and would be available for one week. I clicked immediately. In the three-minute Twice (2020), Smith stands in front of a mirror, singing “Happy Birthday” in a minor key, like a funeral dirge, twice, as he washes his hands. Cut to Boris Johnson advising the public to contain the spread of coronavirus by doing exactly this—well, minus the minor key. Otherwise, the UK prime minister says, “for the vast majority of people in this country, we should be going about our business as usual.” Smith ends with a title card that twists the knife: “Made in London during the sixth week of the lockdown, when Britain’s COVID-19 related death toll reached 25,000.” With a tremendous economy of means, Smith marshals his dry humor in the service of outrage at the incompetence and cruelty of a Conservative government that has decimated the capacities of the NHS and other social services throughout a decade of austerity, now as ever ruling in the interests of the rich, the rest of the country—and particularly the most vulnerable—be damned. For Twice, so concise and timely, online exhibition was a perfect fit.” Erika Balsom, Art Agenda, 2020

27/11 2020 19.05 CET Introduction with Olympia Bukkakis.

The Introduction will take place in the Zoom Webinar (interaction & questions are welcome). It can also be viewed through the Vimeo Live Stream.

OLYMPIA BUKKAKIS is a drag and dance artist. In 2009 she started to perform in Melbourne, Australia. Since moving to Berlin in 2012, she has organised various queer performance nights in Berlin, including Get Fucked, Apocalypse Tonight and Queens Against Borders. In 2018, she completed the SODA Master's degree at HZT with her piece Tales From a State of Shemergency. Her piece Gender Euphoria celebrated its premiere at the Sophiensæle within the Tanztage Berlin 2019. Most recently she showed: Work on Progress (HAU), Under Pressures (Gessnerallee, Zurich) and Boys Night Out (Abbotsford Convent, Melbourne), and A Touch of the Other (Sophiensaele, Berlin). Her podcast Slurry is available on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.

27/11 2020 19.30 (CET) Screening: Danse Macabre (2020), Annika Larsson.
HD Video, 42.00 min (not final version), colour, sound

The sceening can viewed on the Vimeo Live Stream.

Filmed and Edited by Annika Larsson. Additional camera/sound and conversations by Paul Niedermayer and Michel Wagenschütz. Done in collaboration with the performing artists Liv Fontaine, Samir Kennedy, Margaret Thatcher Queen of Soho, Sue Gives A Fuck and Tylor & Vincent (Danni Spooner and Andrea Spisto) a.o. Sounds/Music by Rosa Farber, Edwin Stevens and Annika Larsson. Lyrics by Liv Fontaine.

Danse Macabre was shot in London last autumn as the protests and demonstrations related to Brexit dominated the streets, but also this spring shortly before the outbreak of Covid-19 radically re-structured the sphere of the public. Both events brought states of exception and a temporary suspension of law, that are present in the movements of the bodies in the film, who navigate along the lines of predictable and unpredictable routes and in states between dancing and being danced by technology.

Annika Larsson is an artist, researcher at RIA Stockholm and Professor at HFBK Hamburg. She is working mainly with film, video, performance and installation. Her works have been widely shown internationally, at institutions including Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Basel; Fundacion la Caixa, Barcelona; Le Magasin, Grenoble; Kunsthalle Nürnberg, Nürnberg; ICA-Institute of Contemporary Art, London; ZKM,Karlsruhe; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; S.M.A.K., Gent and Musac, Lyon. She has participated in biennials such as 49th Venice Biennial, 8th Istanbul Biennial and 6th Shanghai Biennial among others. Her research project Non-knowledge, Laughter and the Moving Image investigates how the Moving Image and the Laughing Body could become agents for new thought, acts, and embodiment. The research project is done in collaboration with RIA Stockholm and HFBK Hamburg.*

27/11 2020 20:15 (CET) Performance by Liv Fontaine

The Performance will take place in the Zoom Webinar. It can also be viewed through the Vimeo Live Stream.

Liv Fontaine is an artist based in Glasgow, UK. She works across performance, writing, video, illustration and photography. She is interested in private lives and pathological lies and particularly the space that exists between the performance and the personal.

Her current work examines stock characters and familiar narratives relating to ‘The Woman on the Edge’. She focuses on the idea of hysteria and wild desperation as the only adequate response to society. Under the performance pseudonym VIV INSANE she creates live shows that challenge notions of patriarchal privileges and sexual stereotyping and the subsequent violence of these - all the while examining her own complicity in this total orgy of depravity.

Liv Fontaine will be performing a short text she has written especially for the event reflecting on her role in Danse Macabre.

27/11 2020 20:30 (CET) Conversation: Danse Macabre with Annika Larsson, Liv Fontaine, Samir Kennedy, Michel Wagenschütz and Paul Niedermayer.
Moderated by Olympia Bukkakis.

The conversation will take place in the Zoom Webinar (interactions & questions welcome). It can also be viewed through the Vimeo Live Stream.

27/11 2020 21.15 (CET) Screening: I was / I am (1973), Barbara Hammer
16 mm film on video, 5:44 min, b&w, sound

The screening can viewed on Vimeo Live Stream.

The films of Maya Deren (1917-61) opened a door for me as a young artist. I referenced her film Meshes of the Afternoon (1945) in my first 16 mm film .. I transition from a princess with a white gown and tiara into a motorcycle dyke wearing leather. By now I had my own bike, a 750cc white BMW, which I bought in Germany, had flown to Philadelphia, and drove across the US with my first woman lover, Marie, who had her own 650cc black BMW.

With a career spanning fifty years, Barbara Hammer is recognized as a pioneer of queer cinema. A visual artist working primarily in film and video, Hammer created a groundbreaking body of experimental work that illuminates lesbian histories, lives and representations. Stated Hammer, "My work makes these invisible bodies and histories visible. As a lesbian artist, I found little existing representation, so I put lesbian life on this blank screen, leaving a cultural record for future generations." Barbara Hammer was born in 1939 in Hollywood, California. She lived and worked in New York until her death in 2019.

28/11 2020 11:00 (CET) Screening: Hope Hunt and the Ascension into Lazarus (2015), Oona Doherty

The screening can viewed on Vimeo Live Stream.

A distillation of the Male.
Thumping sweaty theatre. Go on a journey through a dirty Europe between violence and the sublime.
Hope Hunt attempts to deconstruct the stereotype of the working-class male, and raise it up into a Caravaggio bright white limbo.
It is a hunt for hope.
A distillation of the Male.
Thumping sweaty theatre. Go on a journey through a dirty Europe between violence and the sublime.
Hope Hunt attempts to deconstruct the stereotype of the working-class male, and raise it up into a Caravaggio bright white limbo.
It is a hunt for hope.

link to reading: player.vimeo.com/video/745447573

28/11 2020 11.30 (CET) Reading: The Feeling of Plague, Kelina Gotman.

The reading will take place in the Zoom Webinar. It can also be viewed through the Vimeo Live Stream.

Kélina Gotman is Reader in Theatre and Performance Studies in the English Department at King's College London, and author of Choreomania: Dance and Disorder (Oxford University Press), Essays on Theatre and Change: Towards a Poetics Of (Routledge), co-editor of Foucault's Theatres (Manchester University Press), and translator of Félix Guattari's The Anti-Oedipus Papers (Semiotext(e)/MIT Press), as well as plays and other texts, including Marie NDiaye's The Snakes (Cue Press). She writes regularly on critical and cultural theory, history of ideas, philosophy of science and medicine, performance, dance, including choreographic practices broadly construed, translation, language, writing, and more, and has worked internationally in theatre and other genres, for museums, festivals, and collaborations across media and critical platforms. She is currently editing the four-volume Theories of Performance: Critical and Primary Sources (Bloomsbury), and a co-edited volume on performance and translation, as well as working on new writing articulating practices of truthful speech and critical care. She was Hölderlin Guest Professor in Comparative Dramaturgy at the Goethe-Universität Frankfurt, Visiting Professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and has held other visiting or guest positions at the Slade School of Fine Art, Cornell University, and Bard College.

This intervention articulates a response to the 'feeling of plague', through scenes, tableaux, moments, historiographical reflection, and exploration of the intimate space of hope, alienation, together-feeling and fear. It continues to probe the boundaries of language and form, working with an episodic structure that approaches tableau and film.

28/11 14:00 Screening: The Handsworth Songs (1986), Black Audio Film Collective
Single channel 16mm film transferred to video, 58 minutes 33 seconds, colour, sound
Director: John Akomfrah Producer: Lina Gopaul

The screening can viewed on Vimeo Live Stream.

A film essay on race and civil disorder in 1980s Britain and the inner city riots of 1985, Handsworth Songs takes as its point of departure the civil disturbances of September and October 1985 in the Birmingham district of Handsworth and in the urban centres of London. Running throughout the film is the idea that the riots were the outcome of a protracted suppression by British society of black presence. The film portrays civil disorder as an opening onto a secret history of dissatisfaction that is connected to the national drama of industrial decline.

The ‘Songs’ of the title do not reference musicality but instead invoke the idea of documentary as a poetic montage of associations familiar from the British documentary cinema of John Grierson and Humphrey Jennings.

Handsworth Songs won Britain’s most prestigious award for Documentaries the British Film Institute Grierson Award Best Documentary in 1986.

28/11 2020 15:15 (CET) Reading: The Devil, Caspar Heinemann

The reading will take place in the Zoom Webinar. It can also be viewed through the Vimeo Live Stream.

28/11 2020 15:30 (CET) Screening: Subjective Hill (2019), Yulia Lokshina and Angela Stiegler.
HD Video, 30.00 min, colour, sound

The screening can viewed on Vimeo Live Stream.

Imagine, behind that hill there is the enemy.
In SUBJECTIVE HILL (2019), the documentary filmmaker Yulia Lokshina and the visual artist Angela Stiegler follow a long-term virtual reality study on affective behaviour in stress situations, conducted in cooperation with the Geneva police force at the Swiss Center for Affective Sciences at the Geneva University under the supervision of Professor David Rudrauf.

Where lies the difference between real and looming danger? In a simulation, perception and projection are combined in order to predict the outcome of a situation or prevent its escalation. The learning mechanisms to control body and mind are studied in the laboratory.

SUBJECTIVE HILL (2019) operates in an experimental setup in order to examine the purpose and effects of simulation, both virtual and real, and the affective reactions they cause. A body cam traverses a series of rooms, slipping into various roles space by space: From a police officer patrolling a red light district in Geneva, intruding into a private living room as a friend in the South of France, to then end up in an imagined theatre of war. Focussing on the influence of prior beliefs on our perception of reality, this setup follows the logic of the Virtual Reality experiment at the laboratory of the Centre for Affective Sciences in Geneva, where confrontational situations of police officers were simulated to enable the examination human affective states. Within this documentary approach, the body cam a camera used in police work and worn right on the chest – is transferred into a narrative fictional context of a subjective gaze.

Yulia Lokshina (B. 1986, Moscow) and Angela Stiegler (B. 1987, Munich) meet at the crossroads of documentary filmmaking and visual arts in the interest of linking the two areas in their work. Since 2014, Yulia and Angela have been working together in various constellations in the context of a series of art and film productions. In 2017/2018 they were awarded the one-year media art scholarship of the Munich Filmschool and the Kirch Foundation to produce the art and science collaboration SUBJECTIVE HILL and were further supported by the EOFA Residency (Canton Switzerland Geneva) and the CISA in Geneva. Their film has been awarded the videodox-Förderpreis (2019) and screened at CAC Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève (2019), IIPPE International Conference, Lille FR, (2019), Goethe-Institut Paris, FR (2020), A.K.T „Risikogruppen“ Pforzheim, DE. Currently Angela holds a teaching position at the Akademie der Bildenden Künste Nürnberg. Her latest works are on view in the solo show „I treat my friends as sculptures“ at Françoise Heitsch Gallery in Munich. Yulia has started an artistic PhD at Filmuniversität Babelsberg Konrad Wolf after graduating from HFF Munich with „Rules at the assembly line, at high speed“ (2020), a documentary film on labour migration and questions of social inclusion. They continue working together and are currently preparing „Schmarotzerbrücke“, a collaboration with residents of a contentiously named street in Munich.

28/11 16:00 (CET) Conversation: with Caspar Heinemann, Yulia Lokshina, Angela Stiegler, Jasmin Schädler, Isabel Gatzke a.o Moderated by Olympia Bukkakis

The conversation will take place in the Zoom Webinar (interactions & questions welcome). It can also be viewed through the Vimeo Live Stream.

Yulia Lokshina (B. 1986, Moscow) and Angela Stiegler (B. 1987, Munich) meet at the crossroads of documentary filmmaking and visual arts in the interest of linking the two areas in their work. Since 2014, Yulia and Angela have been working together in various constellations in the context of a series of art and film productions. In 2017/2018 they were awarded the one-year media art scholarship of the Munich Filmschool and the Kirch Foundation to produce the art and science collaboration SUBJECTIVE HILL and were further supported by the EOFA Residency (Canton Switzerland Geneva) and the CISA in Geneva. Their film has been awarded the videodox-Förderpreis (2019) and screened at CAC Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève (2019), IIPPE International Conference, Lille FR, (2019), Goethe-Institut Paris, FR (2020), A.K.T „Risikogruppen“ Pforzheim, DE. Currently Angela holds a teaching position at the Akademie der Bildenden Künste Nürnberg. Her latest works are on view in the solo show „I treat my friends as sculptures“ at Françoise Heitsch Gallery in Munich. Yulia has started an artistic PhD at Filmuniversität Babelsberg Konrad Wolf after graduating from HFF Munich with „Rules at the assembly line, at high speed“ (2020), a documentary film on labour migration and questions of social inclusion. They continue working together and are currently preparing „Schmarotzerbrücke“, a collaboration with residents of a contentiously named street in Munich.

Jasmin Schädler was born in Illertissen in 1989. After completing her bachelor’s degree in physics and cultural studies, she studied theater directing at the Academy of Performing Arts Baden-Württemberg and in the master art praxis at the Dutch Art Institute.
The overarching subject of her work is the questioning of knowledge hierarchies. Coming from an intersectional perspective she investigates the relationship between space, perception and identity in both analog and digital. In doing so, she deals with data collection, reporting and the questioning of conventions of knowledge production.
She is a fellow of Kunststiftung Baden-Württemberg und Künstlerhaus Stuttgart and a founding member of the performance collective die apokalyptischen tänzerin*nen, as well as a founding and board member of the association InterAKT Initiative e.V., which realizes music and performance projects in the Stuttgart area.

Isabel Gatzke has a MA in Dramaturgy from the ZHDK in Zurich. Her practice as a dramaturge is mostly based in the field of dance and performance where it is concerned with questions around the moving body, image and sense-making as well as forms of relating to each other that are not structured in a logic of »power over«. She is an research assistant for the artistic research project Non-knowledge, Laughter and the Moving Image

Olympia Bukkakis, Queen of the Heavens and of the Earth, Empress of Despair, and Architect of Your Eternal Suffering, Olympia Bukkakis began performing while completing a BA in social theory at Melbourne University in Australia and kick-started the local alternative drag scene with her party Pandora’s Box. She has collaborated with Australian queer theatre company Sisters Grimm on a number of projects including Summertime in the Garden of Eden.Since moving to Berlin in 2012, she has organised, curated, and hosted various queer performance nights including Get Fucked, Fancy, and Apocalypse Tonight. Since 2015 she has organised and hosted Queens Against Borders, a performance event in solidarity with trans and queer refugees. In recent years she has begun to perform in contemporary dance and performance contexts, performing in Jeremy Wade’s Between Sirens and Human Resources and in 2019 she completed a Masters in Solo Dance Authorship at the Inter-University Centre for Dance (HZT) in Berlin with her graduation piece Tales From a State of Shemergency. Her most recent full length work Gender Euphoria premiered at Sophiensaele in Berlin as part of the 2019 Tanztage festival. Her practice is situated within, and inspired by, the tensions and intersections between queer nightlife and contemporary dance and performance.

28/11 2020 17:30 (CET) Recorded Conversation + video excerpts from Lay them all down (2020), Dana Michel & Tracy Maurice

A recorderd conversation between Dana Michel, Tracy Maurice, Isabel Gatzke and Annika Larsson around Dana Michel's and Tracy Maurice's collaborative work Lay them all down (2020).

The recorded conversation and the video excerptsc an viewed on Vimeo Live Stream.

An installation of Lay them all down can be viewed on site at HFBK Hamburg 27-28 Nov 2020 (19.00-19.00.)

In Lay them all down (2020), as Michel moves through physical frustration with humor and candor, Maurice drives the camera over the floor, amplifying all sounds, using her body as a tripod that advances and collapses. This is not mere documentation, but a video and performance laboratory that asks if mutual understanding can come from really looking at each other. Both Michel and Maurice dress and undress, follow each other, and create dichotomies around closeness, dimension, speed, and noise. Dancer, filmmaker, camera, and audience are all engaged in the simple yet elusive action of focused observation. Dana Michel and Tracy Maurice film and wear objects that propel them outside comfort and cliché. What remains is the intuitive outburst to be seen and be together, regardless of outcome.

Dana Michel defies expectations of dance through experimentation and live imagery. During her performances we see remote controls, chains, a dolly, miniature furniture, a microphone. Michel rubs against surfaces, throws things, puts oversized clothes on and takes them off, tries to make a song, wraps herself in rugs. These seemingly unimportant tasks, repetitive and apparently mindless movements, become a mode of reflecting “on the labor and effortlessness of being a person.” Michel’s way of moving through space and garments channels anger, sex, confusion, force, vexation, and pleasure. She is having private thoughts in public, small tournaments of conquer and defeat without clear resolution. This instinctive playhouse disrupts all identity impositions. Dana Michel tears apart assumptions by covering and uncovering stereotypes with hilarious and difficult bodily interventions.

Her collaborations with Tracy Maurice intensify this quest. An interdisciplinary artist and filmmaker, Tracy Maurice explores the correlation of analogue and digital, live and recorded, often using film as a medium where two or more concepts coexist.

Tracy Maurice is a multi-disciplinary artist who works across mediums in art, design & video. Her research-based practice involves material exploration and analog techniques ( inspired by special effects from early cinema), as well as nature, science and dance. Her work has been exhibited at Lincoln Center Atrium (NY), Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal (QC), the 11th Berlin Biennale, & Nuit Blanche (TO). Maurice was the Creative Director for the band Arcade Fire & created album artwork, music videos & live content for the albums Funeral & Neon Bible, including the interactive music video for the band’s single, “Black Mirror.” In 2008, she won a Juno Award for Best Director of the Year for Neon Bible. She has given talks at Berklee College of Music, Pennsylvania College of Art & Design & taught at the IDFA Film Academy at the University of California at Berkeley.

28/11 2020 18:50 (CET) Screening: 20 Hz (2011), Semiconductor, HD Video, 4.59 min, b/w, sound

The screening can be viewed on Vimeo Live Stream

20Hz observes a geo-magnetic storm occurring in the Earth’s upper atmosphere. Working with data collected from the CARISMA radio array and interpreted as audio, we hear tweeting and rumbles caused by incoming solar wind, captured at the frequency of 20 Hertz. Generated directly by the sound, tangible and sculptural forms emerge suggestive of scientific visualisations. As different frequencies interact both visually and aurally, complex patterns emerge to create interference phenomena that probe the limits of our perception. Audio Data courtesy of CARISMA, operated by the University of Alberta, funded by the Canadian Space Agency. Special thanks to Andy Kale. 20Hz is co-commissioned by Arts Santa Monica + Lighthouse. Supported by the British Council. Commissioned for the Invisible Fields Exhibition at Arts Santa Monica, Barcelona. 2011-2012.

Semiconductor is UK artist duo Ruth Jarman and Joe Gerhardt. Over twenty years they have become known for an innovative body of work, which explores the material nature of our world and how we experience it through the lenses of science and technology. They occupy a unique position in the art world, blending, in philosophically compelling ways, experimental moving image techniques, scientific research and digital technologies.

28/11 2020 19:00 (CET) Performance: The Possessed Gaze, Jasmine Schädler (Webinar & Live Stream)

The Performance will take place in the Zoom Webinar. It can also be viewed through the Vimeo Live Stream.

The possessed Gaze - a video call performance

We mirror, externalise, divide, lose ourselves. The leftovers are not considered human anymore. We call them data and feed them into frameworks we call machines or algorithms. But we cannot forget these remnants all together. Remorsefully we start to anthropomorphize their new shells. Suddenly we live among aliens we created but actually we are only looking at amputated parts of ourselves.
Are you looking at me?
Mark is possessed by Algorithma.
They look through his eyes at everyone else.
The stars watch from above, streaming ethereal power, acting upon their destiny.

Jasmin Schädler was born in Illertissen in 1989. After completing her bachelor’s degree in physics and cultural studies, she studied theater directing at the Academy of Performing Arts Baden-Württemberg and in the master art praxis at the Dutch Art Institute. The overarching subject of her work is the questioning of knowledge hierarchies. Coming from an intersectional perspective she investigates the relationship between space, perception and identity in both analog and digital. In doing so, she deals with data collection, reporting and the questioning of conventions of knowledge production. She is a fellow of Kunststiftung Baden-Württemberg und Künstlerhaus Stuttgart and a founding member of the performance collective die apokalyptischen tänzerin*nen, as well as a founding and board member of the association InterAKT Initiative e.V., which realizes music and performance projects in the Stuttgart area.

Lay them all down (2020), 33.32 min loop
Dana Michel & Tracy Maurice

Video Installation on site at HFBK Hamburg 27-28 Nov 2020 in the Public Bathroom on the Ground Floor in Lerchfeld.

In Lay them all down (2020), as Michel moves through physical frustration with humor and candor, Maurice drives the camera over the floor, amplifying all sounds, using her body as a tripod that advances and collapses. This is not mere documentation, but a video and performance laboratory that asks if mutual understanding can come from really looking at each other. Both Michel and Maurice dress and undress, follow each other, and create dichotomies around closeness, dimension, speed, and noise. Dancer, filmmaker, camera, and audience are all engaged in the simple yet elusive action of focused observation. Dana Michel and Tracy Maurice film and wear objects that propel them outside comfort and cliché. What remains is the intuitive outburst to be seen and be together, regardless of outcome.

Dana Michel defies expectations of dance through experimentation and live imagery. During her performances we see remote controls, chains, a dolly, miniature furniture, a microphone. Michel rubs against surfaces, throws things, puts oversized clothes on and takes them off, tries to make a song, wraps herself in rugs. These seemingly unimportant tasks, repetitive and apparently mindless movements, become a mode of reflecting “on the labor and effortlessness of being a person.” Michel’s way of moving through space and garments channels anger, sex, confusion, force, vexation, and pleasure. She is having private thoughts in public, small tournaments of conquer and defeat without clear resolution. This instinctive playhouse disrupts all identity impositions. Dana Michel tears apart assumptions by covering and uncovering stereotypes with hilarious and difficult bodily interventions.

Her collaborations with Tracy Maurice intensify this quest. An interdisciplinary artist and filmmaker, Tracy Maurice explores the correlation of analogue and digital, live and recorded, often using film as a medium where two or more concepts coexist.

Tracy Maurice is a multi-disciplinary artist who works across mediums in art, design & video. Her research-based practice involves material exploration and analog techniques ( inspired by special effects from early cinema), as well as nature, science and dance. Her work has been exhibited at Lincoln Center Atrium (NY), Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal (QC), the 11th Berlin Biennale, & Nuit Blanche (TO). Maurice was the Creative Director for the band Arcade Fire & created album artwork, music videos & live content for the albums Funeral & Neon Bible, including the interactive music video for the band’s single, “Black Mirror.” In 2008, she won a Juno Award for Best Director of the Year for Neon Bible. She has given talks at Berklee College of Music, Pennsylvania College of Art & Design & taught at the IDFA Film Academy at the University of California at Berkeley.