IN THE ACT
gives
PERFORMING BODIES – MATTERS OF PRESENCE AND PRESENT MATTER

Saturday October 22^nd, 7pm – 12am (performances start at 7.30 sharp)
Silvershed, 119 West 25^th Street, New York, USA
No cover

Performing artists:
Malin Arnell (Sweden) MPA (USA),
Jenny Grönvall (Sweden), Jibz Cameron/Dynasty handbag (USA),
Imri Sandström (Sweden) and Jeanine Oleson (USA).

With support of The Swedish Arts Grants Committee, Iaspis – The Swedish Arts Grants Committeé’s International Program for Visual Artists and The Culture Committee of Stockholm

IN THE ACT is an international space for emerging performance, a curatorial collaboration by Swedish artist Imri Sandström and curator Hanna Wilde, presented by Swedish collective Högkvarteret.

IN THE ACT is an interdisciplinary room, a space dedicated to the live event, the present that tends to slide out of our hands, that is hard to document, hard to sell – hard to experience unless you are there.

IN THE ACT brings together Swedish and international performance artists, working within overlapping artistic domains but in different geographical spheres. From themes that they share an interest in, and relate to in their work, they are brought together for mutual explorations.

IN THE ACT presents five evenings during 2011, at Högkvarteret, Stockholm, Malmö Konsthall, Malmö, and Silvershed, New York. IN THE ACT will also be transformed into a publication that will be published in 2012.

PERFORMING BODIES is an evening by and about the historical body, the political body and the acute body, the body that only exists right now.

The body has played crucial roles in both performance art history and queer theory and politics. The body continues to be in the spotlight, it continues to be a subject of debate, criticism and artistic research. It continues to be present and it continues to talk about presence. Is the body a material, an object, a theme, a tool, a subject for political and artistic analysis and discussion, or an “I”?

PERFORMING BODIES is the fifth and final evening of IN THE ACT, the grand finale, bringing together three Swedish and three New York-based performance artists, paired together in three acts. We invite you to be part of their collaborations and explorations, the 22^nd of October at Silvershed, New York.

——————————————————————————————————————————–

7.30 MALIN ARNELL (SE) meets MPA (US)
»Walking to the mic, the other falling off her seat«

MALIN ARNELL is an interdisciplinary artist whose work, through performative means such as repetition, duration, enactment and text, reflects upon the political and social construction of realities. She emphasizes through her practice the experiences around body (her body, their body, our body), presence, participation, membership, and other affective manifestations. She is political through being personal, convinced of the importance to be part of a community and of the results that collective creative processes entail. Influenced by her interest in feminist and queer activism she was part of the feminist performance group “High Heel Sisters” and she is a co-founders as well as an active member of the “YES! Association”. Malin’s experience as an art worker has also explored fields as curating, collaborative public commissions or the organization of “Nobody Puts Baby In A Corner”, a series of feminist gatherings that “squatted” the Whitney ISP’s space in Manhattan. www.malinarnell.org

MPA is a feminist and exhibitionist following a living art practice. Her solo and collaborative works focus on performance often in combination with photography, film, text, and sculpture. Enriched with ritual, these acts service a political exercise of the body stimulating questions for participation, resistance, and the intimacy between both. Her work has been presented in New York by the Whitney Museum of American Art, Art in General, The Kitchen, Larissa Goldston Gallery, Higher Pictures, and Movement Research; in Chicago at the Museum of Contemporary Art and Pilot TV; in London at Yinka Shonibare’s Guest Projects, Zendai MoMA in Shanghai, and the Museo de Arte Contemporaneo de Oaxaca in Mexico. Her solo show “Directing Light onto Fist of Father” opens at Leo Koenig Projekte September 15th – Nov 12th, 2011 in NYC.  MPA lives in Brooklyn, NY.

»Walking to the mic, the other falling off her seat« is the first collaboration by the two artists. It involves five microphones, two mic stands, LONG CABLES, and 1 chair. Their action will be simultaneous and separate.

8.45 JENNY GRÖNVALL (SE) meets JIBZ CAMERON/DYNASTY HANDBAG (US)
»Mr Meese und die Lieder aus dem Herzen #3«
»Chaperone, Conquest, Escort, Eternal Triangle«

JENNY GRÖNVALL is an interdisciplinary artist working within fields of performance, video art and traditional formats of painting and sculpture. Targeting the middle grounds and dysfunctionalities within social contracts she poses a keen inquiry into the unspoken laws of aesthetic hierarchies. Her practice aims to address and facilitate a discussion on artistic discretion, and extends to projects of collaborative curating, publishing and international lecturing. On behalf of Moderna Museet, Grönvall was the artistic director of Zon Moderna Malmö 2010. She is a regional representative for W.I.S.P, Women in Swedish Performance. Grönvall recieved a two year grant from the Swedish Arts Grants Committee in 2010. She graduated with a MFA from Malmö Art Academy in 2002. www.jennygronvall.se

»Mr Meese und die Lieder aus dem Herzen #3« is a one-way dialogue where Grönvall is trying to comprehend and communicate with the german artist Jonathan Meese. As l’enfant terrible on the art scene, Jonathan Meese seems to have appropriated classic artistic gestures which also connotate the “great artist” – whereupon Grönvall in the performance Mr Meese und die Lieder aus dem Herzen #3 re-appropriates those gestures, trying them on for size.

JIBZ CAMERON / DYNASTY HANDBAG is a performance and video artist who lives and works in New York. Her work has been seen institutions large and important and small and also important. Dynasty Handbag performances have been heralded by the New York Times as “the funniest and most pitch perfect performance seen in years” and a “crackpot genius” by the Village Voice. She is the recipient of the 2007 Fresh Tracks Artist in Residency Award at Dance Theater Workshop, 2008 recipient of the Franklin Furnace Fund grant for the performing arts, the 2010 Dixon Place Mondo Cane! commission, and the 2010 Kindle Artist Grant. She is currently an adjunct professor of Performance Composition at NYU Tisch School of the Arts, Performance. She is currently working on an upcoming production with The Wooster Group, to be presented in 2012. www.dynastyhandbag.com

»Chaperone, Conquest, Escort, Eternal Triangle« is new work from Jibz Cameron, where Dynasty Handbag looks closely into the freshly shaved faces of the cosmic unknown as she ventures into a speed/slowmotion dating marathon with the dark side of the moon/tracks.

10.00 IMRI SANDSTRÖM (SE) meets JEANINE OLESON (US)
»The Spelling and the Spell of Dying Men« // »OMG (Oh, Magog)«

IMRI SANDSTRÖM is an artist working with sound, video, text and performance. She uses multi faceted composition to explore the physicality of language, aspects of voice, body and presence and the act of reading/writing. Invested in historical thinking, music and religious language, her work re-writes/-tells historical narratives and investigates narrative positionings. She has an MFA from Umeå Academy of Fine Arts (2003-2008), attended a Nordplus exchange program at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen between 2005 and 2007, and she has an additional MFA in Sound art from Dramatiska institutet (The University College of Film, Radio, Television and Theatre) in Stockholm and EMS (Electroacoustic Music in Sweden). Her work has been shown in places such as Oberhausen International Short Film Festival, Umeå Bildmuseum, Gothenburg International Film Festival and Fylkingen. www.imrisandstrom.com

»The Spelling and the Spell of Dying Men« explores relations between the Christian martyr Saint Sebastian, and the writer Yukio Mishima. Mishima was born 1925 in Japan and commited ritual suicide “seppuku” in 1970. In the autobiographical novel “Confessions of a Mask” the writer describes an erotic encounter with a reproduction of a painting of the saint. Sebastian is depicted in his most famous pose, arms above his head, one over the other, tied to a tree and pierced by arrows. This textual scene has worked as a point of departure for the project. The performance presents possible readings of links between the writer and the saint, elaborating on aspects of surface, heroic death, the act of writing masculinity and the conjuring of men.

JEANINE OLESON is an artist whose practice incorporates interdisciplinary uses of performance, film/video, installation, and photographic work. She attended the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and Rutgers University and attended Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. Oleson has exhibited at venues including: Beta-Local, San Juan, PR; X-Initiative, NY; Grand Arts, Kansas City, MO; Socrates Sculpture Park, Queens, NY; L.A.C.E., Los Angeles; Monya Rowe Gallery, NY; Samson Projects, Boston; PS 1, Queens, NY;  and Art in General, NY. Oleson received a Franklin Furnace Fellowship and a Jerome Foundation Travel and Study Grant in 2009; and Brooklyn Arts Council Community Arts Regrant, 2008 and 2009. Oleson is an Assistant Professor of Art, Media and Technology at Parsons the New School for Design. www.jeanineoleson.com

»OMG (Oh, Magog)«
‘The end is is going to come very, very quietly, probably within the next month’
-Harold Camping, Family Radio, Late September, 2011

This performance is a way to take up time thinking about The End. The end of time, really. October 21 is the re-scheduled Rapture according to Harold Camping and Family Radio. I am working on a series of projects about apocalyptic anxiety, and this performance is specifically about three unrelated strands of thought: The Rapture of Harold Camping; The Götterdämmerung of Richard Wagner; and formal strategies that indicate the end of theatrical and filmic narratives.

—————————————————————————————————————————–

Assisting producers: ANDREA MERKX and CLARA LÓPEZ
Graphic design: MOA EDLUND
Technical Director: LAUREN BROWN
Videographer: AMY VON HARRINGTON

IN THE ACT gives AS WE SPEAK – Performing language and telling text
28th of September 2011, 7pm – 9pm
Malmö Konsthall, S:t Johannesgatan 7, Malmö, Sweden
Free entrance

Participating artists:
Jane Jin Kaisen (Denmark) Beata Berggren (Sweden) and Mara Lee (Sweden).

With support of The Swedish Arts Grants Committee, Iaspis – The Swedish Arts Grants Committeé’s International Program for Visual Artists and The Culture Committee of Stockholm

—————————————————–

IN THE ACT is an international space for emerging performance, a curatorial collaboration by Swedish artist I.mri S.andström and curator Hanna Wilde.

IN THE ACT is an interdisciplinary room, a space dedicated to the live event, the present that tends to slide out of our hands, that is hard to document, hard to sell – hard to experience unless you are there.

IN THE ACT brings together Swedish and international performance artists, working within overlapping artistic domains but in different geographical spheres. From themes that they share an interest in, and relate to in their work, they are brought together for mutual explorations.

IN THE ACT presents five evenings during 2011, at Högkvarteret, Stockholm, Malmö Konsthall, Malmö, and Silvershed, New York. IN THE ACT will also be transformed into a publication that will be published in 2012.

————————————————————————————————————

AS WE SPEAK is an evening dedicated to the spoken and the written. An evening of text based performances and performed text, of literary readings and multilingualisms.

7.00 pm. JANE JIN KAISEN »4.3«
Jane Jin Kaisen (Denmark) is a visual artist based in Copenhagen. She works in a project-based manner primarily within the mediums of film, performance, and text. From a postcolonial and transnational feminist perspective, she is interested in questions of memory, subjectivity, and translation in order to pose alternative genealogies to official narratives and discourses. She holds an MFA from the UCLA Department of Art in the interdisciplinary studio area, an MA in Art Theory and Communication from The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, and participated in the Whitney Independent Study Program. Jane Jin has performed at venues such as ACTS! – Museum for Contemporary Art Roskilde 2011, Infr´action 2010 in France, Live Action New York 2009, Indonesia International Performance Art Festival and The 2nd Deformes Biennale at Gallery Metropolitana in Chile. www.janejinkaisen.org

»4.3« refers to one of the bloodiest massacres in Korea’s modern history, which took place on the island of Jejudo, and began on April 3rd 1948 (4.3). The incident has also been referred to as ‘Red Hunt’, given that the South Korean government, with backing from the U.S. Army launched a scorched-earth operation to eliminate the island population that was thought to be leftist. For nearly 50 years it was forbidden to even publicly mention the date 4.3 or April Third. The only way people could secretly commemorate and grieve over the incident was through shamanic memorial rituals, through which the living could communicate with the dead. Through the appropriation of the Jeju shamanic ritual, presentation of archival material and excerpts from her Korean grandfather’s book “Light and Shadow”, Jane Jin Kaisen mediates different voices and addresses issues such as the transportation of aesthetic form across cultures, colonial gaze, and the suppression of free speech.

7.30 pm. BEATA BERGGREN »FELÖVERSÄTTNINGAR OCH FALSKA KOPIOR«

Beata Berggren (Sweden) is a writer and an artist. She began writing scripts for readings, lectures and talks, based on the spoken and written word, these manuscripts worked as a basis for performance and video art. Gradually the manuscripts have become autonomous texts, so when the the debut in book form came at the publisher OEI-Editor, it was not far fetched. Part of the material in the book also has its roots in scenic works. Beata Berggren uses language in different ways in attempts to bring art beyond the object of the artifacts, with the consequence that the language’s own object nature is being explored. She studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Umeå, and currently has a project studio at IASPIS.http://beataberggren.blogspot.com/

»FELÖVERSÄTTNINGAR OCH FALSKA KOPIOR« is a kind of image theory written in vertical prose, it is a text that wonders how far from understanding one can can write oneself, and also if it is possible to write oneself back. It is interested in how the value of the artwork, the exhibition and the artist is created. Where are the borders of value? Is it possible to write oneself away from, for example, a value of an exhibition? This text has had to find its own reciter, who will be presented during the reading, for this text also wonders who is prepared to read. This is a text that has its starting point in Walter Benjamin’s essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.

8.00 pm. MARA LEE »HUR SVÅR DEN SKOGEN TYCKS MIG ATT BESKRIVA«

Mara Lee is an author and has written both poetry and prose, most recently the novel Salome (Bonnier, 2011). Currently a researcher at the Faculty of Fine Arts in Gothenburg. Has also translated the Canadian poet Anne Carson.

»HUR SVÅR DEN SKOGEN TYCKS MIG ATT BESKRIVA« is based on Dante’s journey towards God. It is a work that wants to investigate and take care of the workings of the indescribable. The work is part of a project called Listening Aloud, a series of text and sound works that puts listening in the foreground as an aspect of writing that is active and produces meaning. The crack that opens between writing, reading and listening is here manifested as temporal displacements putting the voice, the body and the process of memory in motion. The title of the work alludes to both the expression reading aloud, and to a homophone aspect – listening allowed. It also represents a response to the Norwegian / British / French poet and performance artist Caroline Bergvall and her text “Writing Aloud” as well as the work Via.

PitchWise Festival, 8-11th of September 2011
Sarajevo, Bosnia Herzegovina

Participating artists:
Eli Levén, Ester Martin Bergsmark, Imri Sandström, Silvana Imam

Curator:
Hanna Wilde

——————————————————————————————

——————————————————————————————

“There is no obvious definition of what it means to be a European country”
- The Swedish center for EU-information

More and more smudged borders are characterizing our contemporary European landscape. At the same time; the wall towards the outside world grows higher and more rigid. Consequently, an order based on inclusion and exclusion of humans and our individual and collective bodies is once again being reproduced, legitimized through promises of freedom for some at the cost of others.

Invited by The Cure Foundation in Sarajevo, Bosnia Herzegovina, curator Hanna Wilde from Högkvarteret and the art collective Idyll has brought together Swedish artists from the queer art community in an attempt to address this disrupted landscape. Thus, »Transnational Visions – Crossing Borders, Translocating Positions« presents an interdisciplinary program of four artists, working within various fields and with different expressions, who all redefine and relocate positions of identity, space and bodies. Together with the Bosnian artists and activists within the PitchWise Festival, the program aims to visualize alternative spatialities, imaginary positions and transformative bodies, in a boundary landscape that refuses to be either a “Member State” or a “Candidate Country”.

»Transnational Visions – Crossing Borders, Translocating Positions« is made possible with support of The Swedish Institute.

—————————————

ELI LEVÉN
http://agency.norstedts.se/about-us/news/2011/Eli-Leven-has-been-awarded-the-Katapult-Prize-/

Eli Levén is an author and an artist, born 1984 in Sweden, currently living and working in Brooklyn, New York. Eli Levén studied the art of writing at Biskops Arnö outside of Stockholm between 2007-2009, and published his first novel »You Are the Roots that Sleep Beneath My Feet and Hold the Earth in Place« in 2009. This award-winning novel has been praised by the critics, translated into English and highly noticed in the Swedish media. Yet for Eli Levén the writing is merely a resistance to death, a way of living through the words, a tool for taking place and becoming visible. Through the novel, he created a space wherein he could obtain the memory of growing up as a transgender person, and the experiences of being an in between borders person that came out of that. It is a story about being a boy, a story about handling the violence, beauty and cruelty of the world, and a story about being outside of everything, written in a period of time when Eli Levén reeled in between the positions of being a trans person and a boy, as well as between being someone young and someone grown up, dedicated to his younger gay brothers and trans sisters.

The novel evolves around the main character Sebastian, starting in an almost exhausted incitement of Saint Sebastian. Since the renaissance, Saint Sebastian has been portrayed as a young dying man tied to a tree and riddled by arrows, in pictures reeking of desire towards the dying boy. Eli Levén wanted to transform this picture, positioning Sebastian in a modern time and let him speak for himself, mixed with Eli Levéns own experiences and memories.

For Transnational Visions at Pitchwise Festival Eli Levén will be reading extractions of his novel, as well as screen work in progress from the two films he is working on together with Ester Martin Bergsmark, also participating in the program. Eli Levén and Ester Martin Bergsmark will also give an artist talk about their artistic collaboration, led by the curator of the program, Hanna Wilde.

ESTER MARTIN BERGSMARK
is an award-winning Swedish artist and film director. Ester Martin Bergsmark is currently undertaking her bachelor studies at Konstfack University College of Arts, Crafts and Design, and has earlier studied documentary film at Biskops Arnö between 2002 – 2004. Amongst her work we find documentaries, queer porn films and full-length fictions, such as Fruit Cake (part of the community based film project Dirty Diaries 2009), Maggie in Wonderland (full length documentary film, 2008), My cock is a dildo (short queer porn film, 2007) and Swallow it (experimental short film, 2007). Her work has been awarded with the Guldbagge award and the Dox Alliance Award, and has been shown at festivals like Abulante (Mexico), DMZ docs (South Korea), CPH DOX (Copenhagen), London Gay and Lesbian Film Festival (London), Berlin Porn Film Festival (Berlin), Nordisk Panorama (Aarhus), FilmIdyll (Stockholm).

Since 2008 Ester Martin Bergsmark has been collaborating with Eli Levén, who is also participating in the program. From what started as intimate conversations between the two artists about their personal experiences of their bodies, their genders and how these gendered bodies would be able to take place in a reality outside them selves, a fairytale developed around a character called Pojktanten [Boy Hag]. This is also the name of the first visual collaboration between the two artists that will be shown within »Transnational Visions« at PitchWise Festival. Parallel to this work, another project started to take shape between the two artists, with the starting point in a discussion about esthetics and representation. This project evolved into a full-length film script, being the screen version of Eli Levéns novel »You Are the Roots that Sleep Beneath My Feet and Hold the Earth in Place«. The film, called »Någonting måste gå sönder« [»Something must break«], is being filmed during the summer of 2011 and is planned to be released in January 2013.

For »Transnational Visions« at PitchWise festival, Ester Martin Bergsmark will screen work in progress from both her current projects, and give an artist talk about her artistic collaboration with Eli Levén, led by the curator of the program, Hanna Wilde.

IMRI SANDSTRÖM
www.imrisandstrom.com

Imri Sandström is an artist working with sound, video, text and performance. She uses multi faceted composition to explore the physicality of language, aspects of voice, body and presence and the act of reading/writing. Invested in historical thinking, music and religious language, her work re-writes/-tells historical narratives and investigates narrative positionings. She has an MFA from Umeå Academy of Fine Arts (2003-2008), she attended a Nordplus exchange program at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen between 2005 and 2007, and she has an additional MFA in Sound art from Dramatiska institutet (The University College of Film, Radio, Television and Theatre) in Stockholm and EMS (Electroacoustic Music in Sweden). Her work has been shown in places such as Oberhausen International Short Film Festival, Umeå Bildmuseum, Gothenburg International Film Festival and Fylkingen.

For »Transnational Visions« at PitchWise Festival, Imri Sandström will bring a performance exploring the relations between the Christian martyr Saint Sebastian, and the writer Yokio Mishima, who was born 1925 in Japan and commited ritual suicide “seppuku” in 1970. In the autobiographical novel “Confessions of a Mask” the writer describes an erotic encounter with a reproduction of a painting of the saint. The young boy is standing in his most famous position, arms above his head, tied to a tree, pierced by arrows. This textual scene has worked as a point of departure for the project. At the PitchWise festival Imri Sandström will for the first time show the results of her explorations, in a performance presenting possible readings of the links between the writer and the saint, elaborating on aspects of the frozen image, “male” beauty and the heroic death.

SILVANA IMAM
www.silvanasolo.com, www.myspace.com/silvanasolo,www.soundcloud.com/silvana-solo, www.facebook.com/silvanasolo,www.youtube.com/silvanasolo1

Silvana Imam is an artist working with music and text, performing as a rapper under the name Silvana Solo. During her so far short but soon to become long career as a rapper, she has released the mix tape »EP(ic)« of eight tracks, performed in New York, Norberg and Stockholm, been running the monthly annual event “The Resurrection of Hip Hop” at Högkvarteret in Stockholm, and been DJ:ing all around. Her music always starts in the text, which she composes as means to escape the hidden rules and explicit norms that society carries. As someone bearing three cultures – Arabic, Lithuanian, and Swedish – and as a woman desiring women in a heteronormative world, she finds herself floating in an in-between country, not really belonging, not really escaping. On stage and through her music, these experiences can be found, her thoughts presented to us without any filters.

For »Transnational Visions« at PitchWise festival, Silvana Solo will bring a performance set including both visuals, videos and live ambient hip hop music, every song representing its own aspect of her.

HANNA WILDE
www.hogkvarteret.se, www.klubbidyll.se. www.hannawilde.com

Hanna Wilde is a curator and producer interested in collaborative practices that explores and re-formulates the impossible and the imaginary. Her work engages in the creation of queer and feminist spatialities, alternative realms and parallel realities, which exist in a border country in between history, the present and visions of the future. She bears a particular interest in interdisciplinary practices that interpret and relocate conceptions of identity, power, bodies and narratives. In 2006 Hanna Wilde co-founded the queer feminist art collective Idyll and in 2009 she co-founded Högkvarteret. Amongst the shows and projects she produced and curated are: »Androgynous Portraits« by Sophie Mörner at Galleri Riche (2007), the literature salon »Semafor« (2009-2011), the Queer Arab Art Festival »Fi Taharrok« (2010), »American Fragments« by Julia Gillard at Galleri Lundh Åstrand (2011), »Community Action Center and Beyond/Before« at Konsthall C and Bio Rio (2011), »Transnational Vision – Crossing Borders, Translocation Positions« (2011), »In The Act« (2011-2012). Hanna Wilde has a bachelor degree in gender and queer studies.

For PitchWise festival, Hanna Wilde is curating the program »Transnational Visions – Crossing Borders, Translocating Positions« . She will also hold a workshop on the theme “Real Visions and Visionary Realities – Alternative Queer Spatialities”. The workshop will tell the story of creating the autonomous art space Högkvarteret in Stockholm, and explore the idea of using visions and utopian schemes as queer feminist artistic tools.

Dear Stockhomos and everyone else,

Some of you might not have seen us since »The Divorce«, the 28^th of May. Some of you might have forgotten all about us. Some of you might have been crying and craving for Högkvarteret to return. And some of you might have met us briefly at Konsthall C or Bio Rio this summer. We did say that you never know where or when we will appear again.

Today Högkvarteret is launching our new blog at www.hogkvarteret.se/ccc, presenting our new shape. We no longer give you six evenings of outstandingness at Närkesgatan 8 in Stockholm (thank God). But we do exist. And we do continue to be the Swedish headquarter for contemporary queer and feminist art. Our bags are packed with experiences from the past and visions of the future, and now we are going travelling.

During 2011-2012 we collaborate with and/or are proud to present artists, collectives and spaces like A.K Burns, A.L Steiner, Andrea Merkx, Anna Linder, Anna Åstrand, Barbara Hammer, Bio Rio, Clara Lopéz, Dynasty Handbag, Eli Levén, Elin Magnusson, Ester Martin Bergsmark, Galleri Lundh Åstrand, Imri Sandström, Jeanine Oleson, Jenny Grönwall, Kutterfugel, Konsthall C, Malin Arnell, Malmö Konsthall, Marit Östberg, MPA, Silvana Imam, Sofie Westerberg, The Women-Oriented Womens Collective, The Women’s Initiative Support Group, The Cure Foundation, The Silvershed, and probably many more to come.

Go visit our blog to find out more, at www.hogkvarteret.se/ccc. And if you wanna collaborate with us, hire us, invite us, present us, challenge us, please contact: 
info(at)hogkvarteret.se

Community Action Center and Before  – An evening of sociosexual affinity
Film screening + bar, Bio Rio, Hornstulls Strand 3
August 2nd, 8pm – 11pm, 50 kr

Med stöd av Statens Kulturråd och Stockholms Stads Kulturförvaltning

Biljetter köpes i förväg på www.biorio.se eller i kassan under kvällen.

»Community Action Center and Before« är den tredje kvällen inom ett curatoriskt samarbete mellan Malin Arnell och Hanna Wildow, presenterat av Högkvarteret på Bio Rio. De första två kvällarna presenterades på Konsthall C den 8-9 juni 2011 och innehöll förutom filmen »Communtiy Action Center«, av de båda Brooklyn-baserade konstnärerna A.K. Burns och A.L. Steiner, filmer av konstnärerna Barbara Hammer, Marit Östberg och Malin Arnell, en workshop, samt ett konstnärssamtal mellan Burns, Steiner och Östberg.

För den sista och tredje kvällen, när filmen »Community Action Center« alltså visas för andra gången i Sverige, har Arnell och Wildow valt att presentera den tillsammans med Kajsa Dahlbergs »Female Fist«. Dahlbergs verk från 2006 är baserad på en intervju med en aktivist från Köpenhamn som under en längre tid arbetat med ett queert porrfilmsprojekt. Projektet syftade till att vara icke-hierakiskt och icke-definierande och under tiden som gruppen skapade filmen engagerade de sig i en rad olika diskussioner om hur porr kunde produceras och distribueras på ett sätt som stod i enighet med dessa ideal. Slutresultatet blev att de aldrig lanserade filmen. Samtidigt talar intervjupersonen, som hörs men inte syns i filmen, med glädje och inspiration om lusten efter mer queer och feministisk pornografi.

Fyra år senare, 2010, presenterar A.K. Burns och A.L. Steiner vad de kallar för en socio-sexuell film som det tog dem tre år att producera tillsammans med sitt community. Resultatet är ett 69 minuters långt unikt, besinningslöst, ärligt, upphetsande och fantasifullt utforskande av kroppar, kön, sex, identitet och feministiska positioner. Filmen rör sig i ett gränsland av iscensättande av drömmar och dokumenterande av praktiker, något som också representerar samarbetet mellan Burns och Steiner som konstnärer.

—————————————————
20.00 »Female Fist«, 2006, 20 min.
Kajsa Dahlberg (Berlin)

The video is an interview with an activist from the Copenhagen queer milleu, filmed with the lens-cap left on the camera. The interviewee begins by talking about pornography and about the creation of separatist rooms. About halfway into the film she goes on to speak, in more general terms, about the possibilities for being different in today’s society. The film opens and concludes with a long silent scene from a big public square in Copenhagen.
I became involved with this activist group because I was interested in the way they worked politically, whilst attempting to stay outside of already existing political frameworks. In their struggle to fight repressive structures they are defining themselves in primarily negative terms, by saying: we are not Anarchists; we are not Feminists; we are not Marxists. I was interested in how one could, both formally as well as ideologically, make a film about a group whose main objective is the desire to resist representa- tion. What images could be produced, while struggling to avoid recognition as such? The resistance to being defined by what one sees as a repressive structure is important here, in the way it reflects a larger problem concerning the possibility to produce counter images to the normalizing narratives mediated through mainstream TV and cinema.

—————————————————

20.30 »Community Action Center«, 2010, 69 min.
A.K. Burns & A.L. Steiner (New York)

Community Action Center is a 69-minute sociosexual video by A.K. Burns and A.L. Steiner which incorporates the erotic of a community where the personal is not only political, but sexual. This project was heavily inspired by 1970’s porn-romance-liberation films, which served as distinct portraits of the urban inhabitants, landscapes and the body politic of a particular time and place. Community Action Center is a unique contemporary womyn-centric composition that serves as both an ode and a gap-filler. Sex, sexuality and the complexities of gendered bodies are inherently political. This project is a small archive of an intergenerational community built on collaboration, friendship, sex and art. The work attempts to explore a consideration of feminist fashion, sexual aesthetics and an expansive view of what is defined as ‘sex’. Burns and Steiner worked with artists and performers who created infinitely complex gender and performance roles that are both real and fantastical. This was set to a soundtrack of music culled from the worldwide sisterhood: Chicks on Speed, Effi Briest, Electrelane, K8 Hardy, Lesbians on Ecstasy, Light Asylum, MEN, Motherland, NGUZUNGUZU, I.U.D. (Lizzi Bougatsos & Sadie Laska), Kinski and Thee Majesty (Genesis P-Orridge), and featuring original compositions by Justin Bond, Nick Hallett & Sam Greenleaf Miller, Ashland Mines & Wu Tsang, Sergei Tcherepnin and Tri-State Area. The video seeks to expose and reformulate paradigms that are typical of porn typologies, intentionally exploiting tropes for their comical value, critical consideration and historical homage. The artists have created a reason to reflect on the cultural realness of homo-grown lesbian sexuality. The work aims to be a hedonistic and distinctly political adventure.

Community Action Center and Beyond – Two days of sociosexual affinity
With A.L. Steiner & A.K. Burns (New York), Barbara Hammer (New York), Malin Arnell (Berlin/Stockholm) and Marit Östberg (Berlin/Stockholm)

Pannrummet [The Boiler Room) at Konsthall C, Cigarrvägen 16, Hökarängen, Stockholm

8th of June, 2011 4pm. – 7pm and 7pm. – 9pm.
9th of June, 2011 7pm. – 12pm.

Free entrance and bar both evenings!

————————————————————————————————

Community Action Center and Beyond – Two days of sociosexual affinity brings together a selection of socio-sexual films & videos by the artists A.K. Burns, A.L. Steiner, Barbara Hammer, Malin Arnell and Marit Östberg. The films and works presented celebrate desire and redefine notions of queer sexuality and the lesbian body.

Presenting a multigenerational overview of representation, this two-day event will focus on contemporary artistic practices which incorporate avant-garde visions of sexuality and the erotic; dissecting the trope of pornography itself.

Community Action Center and Beyond is a curatorial collaboration between Malin Arnell, Anna Linder and Hanna Wildow, presented by Högkvarteret at Konsthall C.

————————————————————————————————

PROGRAM

Wednesday, 8th of June

4pm. – 7pm.
Workshop: The Lesbian Body and Queer Sexualities – Artistic and Pornographic Practices with Marit Östberg and Malin Arnell.
Lately, more and more transnational feminists around the world have been producing and re-producing pornographic pictures and sex positive aesthetics. Artists and filmmakers are using their own and others’ bodies to present and fashion nakedness, sexualities and sexual practices. In the workshop The Lesbian Body and Queer Sexualities – Artistic and Pornographic Practices, we will discuss historical and contemporary images of female, lesbian and queer bodies. How is perversion being used as a tool within the feminist struggle? And what kind of effects do these translocations of borders, practices, positions and identities aim for and result in? Marit Östberg and Malin Arnell will guide you through depraved minds and debauching practices within the field of contemporary art, film and pornography. The number of participants in the workshop is limited and pre-registration is required. Sign up by sending an email to mail@malinarnell.org

7.30 pm Film screenings: Barbara Hammer (New York), Malin Arnell (Berlin/Stockholm) and Marit Östberg (Berlin/Stockholm)

Sporing Lips of Transposed Desire, 3:30 minutes, 2011, Malin Arnell

Dyketactics, 1974, 4 minutes, Barbara Hammer
The first lesbian lovemaking film made by a lesbian, Dyketactics reveals Hammer’s aesthetic connecting sight and touch. 110 images in 4 minutes make this film a “lesbian commercial”. Touch precedes sight ontologically in lesbian perception according to Hammer.

Menses, 1974, 4 minutes, Barbara Hammer
A wry comedy on the disagreeable aspects of menstruation where women act out their own dramas on a California hillside, in a supermarket and in a red-filtered ritual of mutual bonding. Menses combines both the imagery and the politics of menstruation into a fine blend of comedy and drama.

Multiple Orgasm, 1976, 6 minutes, Barbara Hammer
A hand plays with a vagina as the same scene drifts over a sea of erotic rock formations.

Women I Love, 1976, 22 minutes, Barbara Hammer
A lyrical portrayal of the personal, intimate moments in Barbara’s life, using rituals to formalize content. At other times, it is a simple delighting in the play of color and emotions that spill over the bodies of women loving women.

Superdyke Meets Madame X, 1977, 20 minutes, Barbara Hammer
An humorous, even satirical over-turning of patriarchal expectations and taboos.

Share, 2010, 16 minutes, Marit Östberg (Swedish premiere)
She’s longing for her lover. Pictures come to her mind. She sees her lover and her lover’s lover; she wants to be where they are. She walks out of her dream, she walks out of her apartment. She knows where they are, she has the key. Share is a beautiful fairy tale and a queer reality.

Thursday, 9^th of June

7 pm. Doors open with DJ-duo Elin Magnusson & Lollo Bjerkert
To compose the night, we invited the artist Elin Magnusson who invited Lollo Bjerkert. Together, they constitute the world premiering DJ-duo Magnusson & Bjerkert, who play music for the people.

7.30 pm. Film screening: Community Action Center, 2010, 69 min, AK Burns & AL Steiner (New York)
Community Action Center is a 69-minute sociosexual video by A.K. Burns and A.L. Steiner which incorporates the erotic of a community where the personal is not only political, but sexual. This project was heavily inspired by 1970’s porn-romance-liberation films, which served as distinct portraits of the urban inhabitants, landscapes and the body politic of a particular time and place. Community Action Center is a unique contemporary womyn-centric composition that serves as both an ode and a gap-filler. Sex, sexuality and the complexities of gendered bodies are inherently political. This project is a small archive of an intergenerational community built on collaboration, friendship, sex and art. The work attempts to explore a consideration of feminist fashion, sexual aesthetics and an expansive view of what is defined as ‘sex’. Burns and Steiner worked with artists and performers who created infinitely complex gender and performance roles that are both real and fantastical. This was set to a soundtrack of music culled from the worldwide sisterhood: Chicks on Speed, Effi Briest, Electrelane, K8 Hardy, Lesbians on Ecstasy, Light Asylum, MEN, Motherland, NGUZUNGUZU, I.U.D. (Lizzi Bougatsos & Sadie Laska), Kinski and Thee Majesty (Genesis P-Orridge), and featuring original compositions by Justin Bond, Nick Hallett & Sam Greenleaf Miller, Ashland Mines & Wu Tsang, Sergei Tcherepnin and Tri-State Area. The video seeks to expose and reformulate paradigms that are typical of porn typologies, intentionally exploiting tropes for their comical value, critical consideration and historical homage. The artists have created a reason to reflect on the cultural realness of homo-grown lesbian sexuality. The work aims to be a hedonistic and distinctly political adventure.

9 pm. Artist conversation with A.K. Burns, A.L. Steiner and Marit Östberg
Meet the makers of Community Action Center, who are visiting Stockholm and Konsthall C for one night only. Together with Marit Östberg, freelance journalist and filmmaker, they will discuss the theme and history of queer and feminist pornographic art in general, and in particular, their work within the three year long project Community Action Center. . Whose footsteps are Burns, Steiner and the other participating artists within Community Action Center walking in when they are raising the sex positive gonfalon? Who are they replying, objecting, interrupting, developing and agreeing with? And how can we relate the project of Community Action Center to queer feminist porn, mainstream porn and gay porn?

10 pm. Live: Kutterfugel
Kutterfugel is the electronic solo project of Anna Giertz. A recollection of marching tunes is being filtrated through memories of top lists, anxiety of small towns, Septrention, croplands of stone, and longing. Through electronic dreams grows a landscape of sounds, where new rhetoric can occupy space.

10.30 pm. DJ-duo Elin Magnusson & Lollo Bjerkert
Elin Magnusson & Lollo Bjerkert will have us dance the night away

——————————————————————————————-

Participating Artists and Curators

A.K. Burns is an interdisciplinary artist who lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. She received a BFA from Rhode Island School of Design 1998 and an MFA from Bard College, Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts, in 2010. A.K.’s practice explores interpretation and implications of sexuality, power and language, often taking the form of sculpture, video, drawing or social actions. A.K. has been a frequent contributor and active member of both LTTR and Ridykeulous. A.K. is a founding member of the artists’ activist group W.A.G.E. (Working Artists and the Greater Economy). Her work can be found in the Judith Rothschild Contemporary Drawings Collection at the MoMA. This fall, A.K. will launch the inaugural issue of RANDY in collaboration with Sophie Mörner/Capricious Publishing. http://akburns.net/

A.L. Steiner uses constructions of photography, video, installation, collage, collaboration, performance and curatorial work as seductive tropes channelled through the sensibility of a cynical queer eco-feminist androgyne. Based in Brooklyn, NY, Steiner is a collective member of Chicks on Speed, the co-curator of Ridykeulous, a founding member of W.A.G.E. (Working Artists and the Greater Economy) and collaborates with numerous visual and performing artists. Her work has been recently featured in Greater New York 2010, P.S. 1, New York and has been subject to solo exhibitions at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Sofia, Bulgaria, the Portland Institute of Contemporary Art and the New Museum, New York. She is a visiting instructor at the School of Visual Arts and University of California Los Angeles, and is represented by Taxter & Spengemann, NY. http://www.taxterandspengemann.com/category/artist/a-l-steiner/

Barbara Hammer was born on May 15, 1939 in Hollywood, California. She is a visual artist working primarily in film and video and has made over 80 works in a career that spans 30 years. She is considered a pioneer of queer cinema. Her experimental films of the 1970’s often dealt with taboo subjects such as menstruation, female orgasm and lesbian sexuality. Her documentaries tell the stories of marginalized peoples who have been hidden from history and are often essay films that are multi-leveled and engage audiences viscerally and intellectually with the goal of activating them to make social change. Her memoir, HAMMER! Making Movies Out Of Sex and Life, published by Feminist Press at CUNY in spring 2010 and coincided with a retrospective at The Museum of Modern Art in New York City, the Reina Sophia in Madrid, and the Tate Modern in London. http://barbarahammer.com/

Marit Östberg is a freelance journalist and a filmmaker, who works with sexual politics. Between the years of 2006 – 2008 she was the chief editor of the hbtq magazine Kom Ut, and in 2009 she made the film Authority, a contribution to Mia Engbergs feminist porn film project Dirty Diaries. With Dirty Diaries she participated in several festivals in Europe to discuss feminist porn. 2010 her second short porn film Share had premiere in the Berlin porn film festival. Her third film, a documentary about feminist porn, is in production and will be premiered at a feminist festival at Warehouse9 in Copenhagen in November. http://www.dirtydiaries.se/

Malin Arnell is an interdisciplinary artist/researcher, whose work is sited within the public and social realm. Informed by feminist art and queer-feminist activism, she predominantly works in collaborative and collective fields; a working method which informs much of her ethos around the making of art. Arnell works in a variety of media; mapping and making guides out of explorations into territory and social, political structures. She makes and distributes alternative/wild/feral products and creates experimental social events. Arnell is a founding member of the feminist performance group High Heel Sisters (2002-2007) and in 2005 she co-founded föreningen JA!/the YES! Association. With Johanna Gustavsson, she organized NOBODY PUTS BABY IN A CORNER, a series of feminist gatherings in New York (2009-2010). Between 2001-2006 she co-organized the artist-run space KONSTAKUTEN (Art Emergency Room) in Stockholm. In 2005, Arnell and the author Sara Stridsberg formed the project Solanas’ Sisters, which takes as a starting point the life of the American Feminist Valerie Solanas. She received an MFA from University College of Art, Crafts and Design, Stockholm and was a studio fellow at the Whitney Independent Study Program, New York. Since 2010 she’s a choreography research student at the University of Dance and Circus in Stockholm. www.malinarnell.org

Kutterfugel was born in 2008 and since then, Kutterfugel has amongst other things, worked with pause music for the Swedish pod radio program Fulradio, played at the HBTQ-festival in Gothenburg, played for Riksteatern in Stockholm Pride Park as well as at the Arts Birthday of 2011. Further, Kutterfugel has played at the Modern Dance Theater and at a bunch of parties and clubs.   http://kutterfugel.tumblr.com/

Elin Magnusson, born 1982 in Norrköping, Sweden, lives and works in Stockholm. She got her BFA in Fine Arts at the University College of Art, Crafts and Design in Stockholm 2010. Magnusson is a conceptual video and performance artist as well as film director. Her work poses questions about adaptation, feminism and nature. She is one of the directors behind the feminist porn film project Dirty Diaries. www.elinmagnusson.com

Hanna Wildow is as a collaborating curator and producer with an interest in the exploration and re-formulating of the impossible and the imaginary. Her work engages in the creation of queer and feminist spacialities, alternative realms and parallel realities which exist in a border country in between history, the present and the visions of the future. In 2006 she co-founded the queer feminist art collective Idyll, within which she has curated events and shows like Androgynous Portraits by Sophie Mörner at Galleri Riche, FilmIdyll at Årsta Folkets Hus, the queer Arab art festival Fi Taharrok and American Fragments by Julia Gillard at Galleri Lundh Åstrand. In 2009, she co-founded the Swedish headquarters for queer and feminist art, Högkvarteret, that between August 2009 – May 2011 presented a program of five events a week. From May 2011 Högkvarteret is a curatorial collaborative collective, which will take place in different sites, projects and forms. Hanna Wildow is, besides being part of the Community Action Center and Beyond, currently curating the program Transnational Vision – Crossing Borders, Translocation Positions for PitchWise Festival in Sarajevo, and In The Act – a space for emerging performance art taking place in Stockholm, Malmö and New York. www.hogkvarteret.se, www.klubbidyll.se.

Anna Linder is active in the field of film, music and art. Born 1967 in Storuman, Lapland, she lives and works in Stockholm, Sweden. Since 1990 she has taken part in various cultural projects, working as a producer and manager for art shows, events and concerts. Her works have been selected for festivals and art exhibitions, both in Sweden as well as abroad. She is a member of the feminist performance group High Heel Sisters (2002-2007) and in 2005 she co-founded föreningen JA!/the YES! Association. Her first film cum pane – the one you share your bread with has been screened at the ICA in London, The Modern Museum and The Museum of National Antiquities in Stockholm, Arsenal Experimental in Berlin and at several film festivals around the world. The short film 13 Related Sewing Machines had premiere of Folkets bio (The People’s Bio) on 4 March 2011. She has a Master degree in Sound Art at the Dramatic Institute and EMS, Stockholm and at the moment she is attending the MFA programme in film – with a specialisation in Curatorial Studies for Film and Video, The School of Film Directing, Gothenburg. www.annalinder.se