Polis / Special Projects: Performing the Gallery
Curated by Chiara Vecchiarelli, “Performing the Gallery” explores the potential of performance in contemporary art. The project focuses on one particular tool for creating and transmitting value: the art gallery.
Artists and Workshops:
Krõõt Juurak & Alex Bailey, Sleeping Workshop led by a dog
2 Feb, 2 – 3 pm, Arte Fiera, Cinema – Service centre
In Performances for Pets Krõõt Juurak and Alex Bailey challenge the dominant pet-human contract, in which pets perform affective labour for food and board, the two artist propose to give back more. Pets, the artists argue, also deserve culture. And thus they have specialized in performing for pets. Performances for Pets dramatize fundamental questions pertaining to art: Can an animal have an aesthetic experience? Are artists the “pets” of their societies? How do we understand and compensate the labour of pets? Where does the working conditions of Pets and artists overlap?
For Artefiera Bologna Krõõt Juurak and Alex Bailey have devised a sleeping workshop, which will be taught by a dog. Usually we think of the training of pets as a oneway transmission. However studies in auto-domestication have shown that the domestication is mutual. Pets are training owners to the same degree as owners are training pets. In this workshop we dedicate an hour to learn from a dog. A local dog with special skills in sleeping, will be introduced to the participants. And the participants will try to learn about sleeping from the dog. The workshop further questions the relation between humans and pets, and the relation between knowledge transmission and production at large.
Pavel Sterec, Silver Academy
3 Feb, 2 – 5 pm, Arte Fiera, Cinema – Service centre
Inspired by institutions such as the council of the elders, the status of “professor emeritus”, and in general the imagery of the sage, the Silver Academy proposes a temporary university of senior citizen. Academies of the third age introduce the possibility of an antithesis to today’s mainstream utilitarian view on learning. Simultaneously a temporary installation, tableau, and social sculpture, the event stages a meeting of people who did not give up on education even if they are no longer in the productive age to share with a public motivations and reflections on “non-utilitary” studies and correlation between wisdom and age.
Hana Lee Erdman, Companionship and Telepathic Elegance
2-3 Feb, 6 – 8 pm, Fondazione Collegio Artistico Venturoli
This performance of companionship applies principles of interspecies relations through choreography and image making in order to expand a possible repertoire of human relations. The work proposes the exhibition space as a social art space, and a vital arena for designing and collecting strategies for being together. Diverse registers of visuality and sensibility generate a place of public intimacy and sensitivity proposing the practice of being together as a creative one.
Valentina Desideri, Political Therapy
4 Feb, 2 – 5 pm, Arte Fiera, Cinema – Service centre
“Political Therapy” is a practice originally invented by Valentina Desideri, which she has spread to various public and private contexts over the past five years, alongside with “Fake Therapy”. Both Political and Fake Therapy play with the fundamental premises of therapy – practiced and modified by anyone, anywhere, the roles of the therapist and patient being arbitrary and interchangeable, no cure is intended or guaranteed. On the contrary a celebration of problems unfolds thoughts and images through touch and conversation. “Anyone is welcome to practice it. The practice of Political Therapy develops as it happens.”
Find out the full program of Polis /Special Projects: Performing the Gallery on Arte Fiera website.
