Prelude to SWAMPING: River Biographies
9. – 30. Juni 2024
A project by Kunstverein Arnsberg in collaboration with the city of Arnsberg as part of the Summer of Culture Arnsberg 2024
Opening: 09.06.2024, 3 PM, with collective performance at 3 PM
Location: Lichthaus Arnsberg, courtyard of the Wedinghausen monastery
Opening hours: Thu–Fri. 5 - 7 PM, Sat–Sun 3 - 7 PM, Performances every Sunday at 3 PM
Performances jeweils Sonntags um 15:00 Uhr
To take part in the participatory performance, please register in advance at kontakt@kunstverein-arnsberg.de (limit of 20 participants per performance)
Located between the sky and the underground, water is always in a moving relationship with stone. This also applies to the renaturalized Ruhr, which should not be entered at present due to landscape protection. We learn about the way of the walking river. Pourous limestone leading the water underground to reappear elsewhere. Pebbles that travel with the water and rebuild the landscape. The farmers hand that redirects the flow away from farmland, the industrialist hand taming rivers into straight channels and the hand of the city that, a hundred years later, lets it run wild again. For a month in June this year, there will be an opportunity to gather in the courtyard of Wedinghausen Monastery to engage in a process of re-naturalizing the body.
River Biographies is an odyssey into the geology of the body as well as of the land, emphasizing that which is not human but of which you are a part. Taking the form of an hour-long session where an audience of 20 people explore embodiments of natural elements of stone and water to form a river collectively, the artwork exists somewhere between performance and a space for healing and repair.
Like the life of a river is a measure of the health of a local ecosystem, River Biographies are living artworks where the shifting collective ability of the group passes through the artworks score. Each half of the group embodies the qualities of water and stone, respectively, to physically explore their relationship; the way in which stone affects the flow of the water and how water forms the topography of rock and stone, directing the water’s flow, and how both affect each other’s temporalities. As an ongoing project, River Biographies is an international co-production and collaboration between institutions located on rivers and waterways, including the Southbank Center (Thames), Chronus Art Center (Huangpu River), Liljevalchs Konsthall (Stockholm River) and Istanbul Modern (Bosphorus).
Just as the global water cycles connect the world‘s rivers, the artwork is created anew for each new body of water in collaboration with local people (here with the project‘s exploration and adaptation to the Ruhr), but carries within it the memories and knowledge of the previous locations, which are preserved in the choreography of the artwork.
Although it is a live artwork, it will also be shown as an ongoing sound installation with participatory performances every Sunday at 3pm.
Lundahl & Seitl live and work in Stockholm. Their immersive projects reinterpret the medium of the exhibition as interpersonal processes about choreography, matter and time. They have been presented around the world, notably at the Royal Academy of Art (UK), Gropius Bau (DE) and Accelerator Stockholm (SW), Chronus Art Centre (CN), the 8th Momentum Biennale for Nordic Contemporary Art (NO), Centre Pompidou Metz (FR), the 3rd Kochi Muziris Biennale (IN) and with the commissioned work „Echoes of Alternative Histories“ at Staatstheater Kassel during Documenta Fifteen.
www.lundahl-seitl.com
SWAMPING (2024 - 2026) explores how changing ecologies manifest themselves in artistic practice, particularly at the interface between water and land, between physical and mental ideological landscapes. SWAMPING serves as a projection surface to pose various socially and ecologically inspired artistic questions. In addition to a selection of new and existing works by established and emerging international visual artists, Kunstverein Arnsberg invites young artists from various disciplines as well as ecologists and activists over a period of two years (2024-2026) to jointly create an artistic sensibility and imagination for an ecological past, present and future: a collective performance, four solo exhibitions, and a transdisciplinary symposium.
Für weitere Informationen und Pressematerial wenden sie sich bitte an: carolauehlken@gmail.com
Gefördert von der Stiftung Kunstfonds Bonn, der Hochsauerlandkreis und der Stadt Arnsberg.
