Combat Zone

in: Performance » 2019

IN / BETWEEN
Per­form­ance­fest­iv­al @ Kun­sthalle Gießen
24.08. - 25.08.2019 
cur­ated by Dr. Nadia Is­mail

Combat Zone
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Images by Rolf K. Wegst

The per­form­ance fest­iv­al fo­cuses on a cent­ral facet of con­tem­por­ary art.
The Eng­lish word per­form­ance is defined as the act of present­ing or demon­strat­ing some­thing in front of an audi­ence. Per­formers, how­ever, con­sciously turn against the­at­ric­al­ity and drama, against fixed texts and played ac­tions, against the fixed space of the stage and against pos­sible re­pe­ti­tion. Per­form­ance art re­places per­man­ent works with eph­em­er­al, tran­si­ent and un­re­peat­able ac­tions and is thus con­ceived as a cri­tique of the art mar­ket, which ori­ent­ates it­self around the sale of products. Per­form­ances artist­ic­ally gen­er­ate dif­fer­ent real­it­ies, they cre­ate situ­ations for new ex­per­i­ences and ne­go­ti­ate the present.

In order to trace the per­form­at­ive in an in­ter­dis­cip­lin­ary man­ner, the Kun­sthalle Gießen presents the per­form­ance fest­iv­al IN/BETWEEN in co­oper­a­tion with the Neuer Kun­stver­ein Gießen e.V. and the In­sti­tute for Ap­plied Theatre Stud­ies at the Jus­tus-Liebig-Uni­versität. Over a peri­od of two days, vari­ous artists will per­form live in the Kun­sthalle and the Kun­stver­ein, while the stu­dents of Ap­plied Theatre Stud­ies will use their works in urban spaces to con­nect the two loc­a­tions. The title IN/BETWEEN refers to the geo­graph­ic­al loc­a­tion of the fest­iv­al both with­in the in­sti­tu­tions and in the urban space out­side. Many of the fea­tured artists work in a par­ti­cip­at­ory man­ner, in­volving the audi­ence dir­ectly in the per­form­at­ive ac­tion. Sev­er­al works act as in­stall­a­tions and ac­tiv­ate a set­ting with­in the frame­work of their per­form­ances that is also ac­cess­ible to vis­it­ors ir­re­spect­ive of the artist’s pres­ence.

Artists
Kun­sthalle: Akademie (Ben Kaufmann, René Stessl), Baby of Con­trol, Mag­dalena Kita, Evamaria Schaller, Thomas Zipp
Neuer Kun­stver­ein: In­sti­tut Av­ar­oid