Inextinguishable fire
The title of the piece references Harun Farocki’s 1969 film of the same name, which approaches the impossible task of effectively depicting the horror of napalm on film. Cassils’s gesture of self-immolation speaks to both the desire for–and the impossibility of–knowing such horror, even while decisively aiming to approach it. Though the stunt is a simulation of violence, it still presents real danger. This possibly volatile situation–and the attempt to control it–is captured to create an image where danger, empathy for those experiencing violence, and the privilege of removal from such circumstance operate simultaneously in one transparent performance.

Contraindre
Nous sommes tous et toutes prisonniers et prisonnières d’une nationalité, d’une condition sociale, d’un genre, d’une couleur de peau, auxquels la police et la répression d’État nous force à nous résigner. Ce film raconte comment souffrent les corps, sous les coups, la contrainte et l’humiliation. Le personnage de ce film parle de la répression policière en France, la place qu’il tient dans la société et ses efforts pour y échapper. Ses mouvements sont ceux de danseuses captées numériquement et réinterprétant des scènes d’agressions policières. Mis en regard avec la notion militaire de “théâtre d’opération”, et sans jamais que les agresseurs n’apparaissent à l’écran, cet ensemble mouvant édifie un portrait aux visages multiples, dont la souffrance est la somme de toutes les violences perpétrées par l’état français et sa police.

Jean-Philippe Rameau
Les Indes Galantes

The first merit of this new production, streaming with intelligence, is that Laura Scozzi and Christophe Rousset have read Fuzelier’s verses deeply. And of Rameau, we must add, so much the composer, perpetually dissatisfied with his poets, harassed them word for word, when he did not take up the pen himself. In addition to lines which, like his contemporary Marivaux, seem to have been invented instantly, Fuzelier has built a dialectical finesse between peace and war, joy and hatred, pleasure and violence, the state of Nature and the state of society. The Gallant Indies according to Laura Scozzi are not a gigantic burst of joy. On the contrary, they reveal a perpetual and restless balance between shadow and light and are a look, less consensual but true and human, on the Age of Enlightenment. Here is a startling ideological reversal, without any forcing: Laura Scozzi has simply revealed the implicit nature of a libretto, so far read superficially.

Brazil Now
BRAZIL NOW is a composition that addresses increasing militarization and surveillance within urban areas. Its geographical and acoustic reference is São Paulo, the largest megacity in Latin America. The piece is based on field recordings that capture the symptoms of a Latin American variant of turbo-capitalism with its distinctive acoustic features. Eruptive public demonstrations on the streets are often accompanied by loud, carnivalesque elements. These are controlled by a militarized infrastructure, openly demonstrating a readiness to deploy violence. The sonic documents are analyzed by machine learning algorithms searching for acoustic memes, textures, and rhythms that could be symptomatic for predominant social forces. The algorithmic results are then used as a base for a score and its interpretation through a musical ensemble. The piece drafts a phantasmatic auditory landscape built on the algorithmic evaluation of urban conflict zones.

Patriots, citizens, lovers was developed in conversation with Ukrainian journalist Maxim Ivanukha as a commission of the PinchukArtCentre’s Future Generation Art Prize 2014 and is composed of ten urgent interviews with Ukrainian LGBTI and queer activists who discuss the critical and dire situation of lesbian, gay, trans and intersex lives in Ukraine in times of war[…] Social invisibility, physical and psychological abuse, political violence, and a deeply patriarchal culture frame the context for the difficult work of LGBTI activists who denounce discrimination and demand the transformation of the system.

大卫·阿尔特米德

Dans son travail de réflection, il y a de l’érotique et de l’onirique en quantité, et son intérêt pour la transformation des corps nous place d’emblée du côté d’un rapport intime et empathique à ses grands lycanthropes qui nous ressemblent, captés en pleine transformation et comme coincés quelque part entre l’humain et l’animal, le vivant et le minéral.

Ses oeuvres sont complexes et souvent autoréférentielles : des moulages et des objets sont mis en scène dans un décor exubérant, chargé d’ornements, de bijoux, de breloques et de toutes sortes de choses scintillantes. Il y a des fleurs aussi, des écureuils naturalisés, des ossements, des cheveux synthétiques, des cristaux, le morbide toujours inextricablement mêlé à une étrange beauté qui n’est jamais très loin du monde de l’enfance. Il y a aussi l’idée de la décapitation, de la douleur et de la violence.

House with Face
“Reiterated and reworked many times, Wolfson’s cast of characters shed new light on contemporary issues. In House with face, Wolfson revisits the witch whose face is recreated in what appears to be a log cabin tied in chains. While he claims not to be a political artist, Wolfson’s work nevertheless mediates the violence in our world today, often blurring the lines between real and imaginary.” S. Ozer

珍妮•霍尔泽
ג’ני הולצר
ジェニー·ホルツァー
제니 홀저
ДЖЕННИ ХОЛЬЦЕР
For more than thirty years, Jenny Holzer has presented her astringent ideas, arguments, and sorrows in public places and international exhibitions, including 7 World Trade Center, the Reichstag, the Venice Biennale, the Guggenheim Museums in New York and Bilbao, and the Whitney Museum of American Art. Her medium, whether formulated as a T-shirt, as a plaque, or as an LED sign, is writing, and the public dimension is integral to the delivery of her work. Starting in the 1970s with the New York City posters, and up to her recent light projections on landscape and architecture, her practice has rivaled ignorance and violence with humor, kindness, and moral courage

Bataille
Bataille is a confrontation between two physical actors : on one hand Hassan Razak, specialist of body percussion and on the other hand Pierre Cartonnet, specialist of acrobatics. This confrontation is a complex, paradoxical and ambiguous battle. Is it a realistic dance or a choreographic fight ? Is it a contract accepted by both parts or a unilateral violence ? Is it a fool’s game ? Is the violence undergone or granted ? Masochist or sadist ?

A Single Composite

A Single Composite is a series of kinetic installations and projection apparatuses that stretch, twist, and loop film strips containing declassified and other found reconnaissance footage. Using reconstituted digital printer chassis, this cinematic enterprise is projected on walls, ceilings, and floors, to form a series of individual moments of surveillance and implied violence.

Broken Flower
Liquid Nitrogen
Throughout his career, Shireman has maintained a connection with flowers in decay; in other still lifes, he has cataloged the wilting of tulips and mums. This series, unlike those previous, is brutal and instantaneous. Where his other flowers underwent a slow, gradual death, these broken flowers are quickly frozen and violently ruptured. The process captured here is not a natural one but one that necessitates the use of a manmade element.

“O impossivel”

They touch. They bite. They get warm. They penetrate. They are made. They get rid of. They stick their tongues in. They put the body in. They get body. They split up. They exist.
They want to be one. It is impossible (“O impossivel”). Which means that a single body, as you would like, is impossible. It can not. For a moment yes, for a moment they can. But no, they can’t. Impossible. They cannot be one. Despite the bites. Their bodies are different. They were born and will die self-absorbed, in themselves. Between them there is an abyss, a discontinuity. But they want to be continuous, they want their bodies to be one body. Since they cannot, they celebrate the sacrifice of the meat. “Essentially,” says Georges Bataille, “the field of eroticism is the field of violence, the field of rape.” Isn’t it violent, perhaps, to want to break the discontinuity of the other closed in on itself? Isn’t it violent to force the discontinuity of the other to be a continuous whole with him? O impossível by the Brazilian Maria Martins (1894/1973) shows the excesses of sex (take note: excess, sex). Or impossível is the moment in which the organs swell with blood and gush sexuality. The moment when animality makes us gloriously human.

ואליי אקספורט
ヴァリエエクスポート
ВАЛИ ЭКСПОРТ
Time and Countertime

ecce homo

The expressive capacity of the human body is infinite. A naked body, beyond any sexual connotation, is pure art. Conceptual photographs about the idea of the body is what Evelyn Bencicova brings us in her series Ecce Homo (Latin term that means “here is the man” and which is cited in terms of violence or war), in which we see a lot of bodies pile up and form strange sculptural forms. At no time do we see any faces, which helps to depersonify each of the participating actors. The result is somewhat disturbing: we do not know why those bodies are there, or what they are trying to do. It is a mix between choreography, aesthetics and a theatrical performance. Of great artistic sensitivity, there is something in these figures that evokes the feeling of a human collective. Feelings to the surface.

WORKS ON PAPER III: The Shape of Missing Violence
Each of the participants is required to hold a knife and stay still. They stand in front of a wall within a “frame” which is made of black adhesive tape in rectangle shape. When the performance starts, the artist adjusts their postures and, later, uses the same black adhesive tape to “fill” everything within the frame. Afterwards, the wall and the bodies of the participants are covered with black tapes, while their heads and the knives are still visible; then, their heads are covered with black tape and, finally, the knives are covered as well. Once participants realize that their body is completely covered, they can move slightly, expanding the tapes from “inside” (not destroying them) and come out from the tapes. They leave the knife, which is stuck on the wall, behind the tapes. In the end, the shapes of the leaving traces of their bodies are shown while the knives are invisible.

MENSKE

Even the standing room only tickets have sold out, and the raging mass of disappointed kids looks like they may start a riot: the atmosphere before Ultima Vez’s performance is akin to a rock concert. Choreographer superstar Wim Vandekeybus’s company has toured the world with their trademark vocabulary of acrobatic, extreme, often violent movement, soaked in multimedia and energetic music. Menske (meaning approximately ‘little human’), their latest work, has all the typical flaws and qualities of classic Vandekeybus. On the conservative end of political intervention, Menske is an explosive concoction of brash statements about the state of the world today, a sequence of rapidly revolving scenes of conflicting logic: intimist, blockbuster, desperate, hysterical. The broad impression is not so much of a sociological portrait, but of a very personal anguish being exorcised right in front of us, as if Vandekeybus is constantly switching format in search of eloquence. Visually, it is stunning, filmic: a slum society falling apart through guerrilla warfare, in which girls handily assume the role of living, moving weapons. A woman descends into madness in an oneiric hospital, led by a costumed and masked group sharpening knives in rhythmic unison. A traumatised figure wanders the city ruins dictating a lamenting letter to invisible ‘Pablo.’ Men hoist a woman on a pole her whole body flapping like a flag. “It’s too much!” intrudes a stage hand, “Too much smoke, too much noise, too much everything!” And the scene responsively changes to a quiet soliloquy. At which point, however, does pure mimesis become complicit with the physical and psychological violence it strives to condemn? Unable to find its way out of visual shock, Menske never resolves into anything more than a loud admission of powerlessness.

(women who have fallen victim to extreme violence)