Expanded Performance

Expanded Performance trailer made Tanja Busking
Watch on Stroom Den Haag YouTube channel

30 September thru 16 December 2012
Kick off: Saturday 29 September 2012, 5 pm
Special kick off program with short films
Finissage: Sunday 16 December 2012, 3 pm
Festive closing event filled with activities

Location: Hogewal 1-9, The Hague
Open: Wednesday thru Sunday, 12 noon-5 pm


VISIT OUR TUMBLR BLOG:
expanded-performance.tumblr.com

For press articles: click here

For a period of three months this fall the program of Stroom Den Haag will be dedicated to performance art, in the broadest sense of the word. We will explore the practice of 'expanded' performance, breaking through the boundaries of the exhibition space and actively engaging the audience. On the day of the opening Expanded Performance will not present an exhibition in its finished form; over time the presentation will change, by means of performances, activities and visitor participation. The audience can follow these changes on our Tumblr blog and take a guided tour of the building along the interventions of the artists. Expanded Performance is characterized by a variety of speeds and layers. This will be explained below.

PROGRAM SCHEDULE

- Reading group led by artist Maria Pask
During the course of Expanded Performance this reading group led by Maria Pask is looking into the concept of 'expanded' performance, institutional working methods and audience engagement. A list of texts discussed can be found online. >> read more

- Architectural intervention
by Thomas Heyer and Jakob Kunst

These two young designers from The Hague will develop a concept linking the separate elements of Expanded Performance. People who visit Stroom will know that they have become part Expanded Performance. >> read more

- New work by five international artists
Ruth Buchanan (New Zealand), Leidy Churchman and MPA (USA), Vlatka Horvat (Croatia/USA), Adrien Tirtiaux (Belgium). These artists take up a special position in the field of expanded performance.

Leidy Churchman and MPA have develop a project entitled Painting Rooms, composed of large paintings, walls and brass rods. The work also consists of a black and white video on a monitor notating the actions by the two artists with these materials. >> read more

Vlatka Horvat comes from the theater world. As a visual artist she is fascinated by the relationship between people and their surroundings. She loves to take the viewer by surprise, to make us laugh, and show the unexpected. During Expanded Performance she presents the new projects Replacements and Drift. For the former, each day for the duration of the exhibition a different member of Stroom staff chooses an object from anywhere in the building and relocates it to the exhibition space, replacing the object that had been placed there the day before. Drift is a two-part spatial intervention in two stairway corridors in Stroom's exhibition space
 >> read more

Adrien Tirtiaux was originally trained as an architect. Thus, his feeling for buildings and the way they are used is still very present in his work. Tirtiaux hardly ever leaves the viewer alone and expects, or simply forces the audience to adapt his or her behaviour in order to be able to see his work. This is also the case for the project The Great Cut which Tirtiaux developed for Expanded Performance. This project does not only deal with the exhibition space of Stroom, but with the whole institution and the people working there. >> read more

The work of Ruth Buchanan mobilises language in manifold ways, incorporating a combination of audio and printed matter. Often using her own voice, Buchanan's text-work operates as a form of choreography to navigate the viewer through a space, a set of objects or group of ideas. She works closely with the spatial parameters of any given situation, subsequently the viewer enters a subtly staged scenario: a large curtain, a wall, a group of chairs. Nothing is left to chance, yet nothing feels forced upon us. >> read more

- Lecture Anthony Huberman
Thursday 11 October 2012, 8 pm

Curator and author Anthony Huberman is the director of The Artist's Institute in New York. His text Take Care (2011) is one of the most important sources of inspiration for Expanded Performance.

- I Proclaim, You Proclaim, We Proclaim
Saturday 3 and Sunday 4 November 2012, 5 pm

This two-day performance event addresses the presentation and performance of speech, text and language. With Nicoline van Harskamp, Louise Hervé & Chloé Maillet, Léa Lagasse, Pierre Leguillon, Sarah Pierce, Alexandre Singh, and Cally Spooner, curated by Capucine Perrot.

- Serendipitous Circuit
5 November - 16 December 2012

Serendipitous Circuit, a project initiated by the artist Léa Lagasse, brings together a series of exhibitions of printed matter presented on a library wheel. A selection of artists, curators and writers has been invited to participate: Arnold Mosselman, Pedro Gadanho, Anthony Huberman, Will Holder, The Grand Domestic Revolution by Casco Office for Art, Design and Theory.

- Lunch talk with Sarah Rifky and Manuela Moscoso
Monday 3 December 2012, 12 noon to 1 pm
Private event. More info: click here
Discussion about institutional working practices and audience reach in concurrence with the International Visitors Program of the Mondriaan Fund.

- Lecture Pedro Gadanho
Thursday 6 December 2012, 8 pm

RSVP required: click here
Pedro Gadanho is an architect, curator and writer currently based in New York. He is the Curator for Contemporary Architecture at the Department of Architecture and Design at MoMA, in New York. He will talk about his research into the idea of 'performance architecture'. Peter Gadanho is one of the main sources of inspiration for Expanded Performance.

- The City School
Saturday 8 December 2012
The Dutch architect Anne Holtrop and his students of the  Sandberg Institute, Studio for Immediate Spaces, will organize a performance event at Stroom Den Haag. They will restage, renew and explore historical urban performances and look into how they relate to our present day and to the current situation in the city of The Hague. For this project Holtrop and the Studio for Immediate Spaces collaborate with The One Minutes Foundation.

- Lecture Vlatka Horvat
'Reorganization of space and spatial relations'

Tuesday 11 December 2012, 5 pm

Location: Auditorium KABK (Royal Academy of Art The Hague), Prinsessegracht 4, The Hague.
Reservations not necessary.

- Expanded Performance: Life on Film
Thursday 13 December 2012, 8 pm
Location: Het Nutshuis, Riviervismarkt 5, The Hague
Admission: € 7,50 (with discount: € 5,-)
An evening on cinema and performance art. Performance for film has been around since the 1950s, but today's results are completely unlike anything produced 60 years ago. RSVP via Het Nutshuis.

- Presentation results workshop Vlatka Horvat
Friday 14 December 2012, 4 pm
Location: KABK (Royal Academy of Art The Hague), space PB 225, Prinsessegracht 4, The Hague
RSVP not necessary
For one full week Vlatka Horvat will give an intensive workshop for third year students (3d and Autonomous) of the KABK around the theme of Expanded Performance. This afternoon the end results will be presented. Everybody is welcome.

- Finissage Expanded Performance
Sunday 16 December 2012, 3 pm

Festive closing event with guided tours by Adrien Tirtiaux. In addition the One Minutes performance films will be screened that were made during The City School. And there will be performances by Dynamics of Performance (The Belgian Job) and students of the KABK (Royal Academy of Art in The Hague).

- Lecture Adrien Tirtiaux
'Things design themselves'
Tuesday 18 December 2012, 7 pm

Location: Auditorium KABK (Royal Academy of Art The Hague), Prinsessegracht 4, The Hague.
Reservations not necessary.

- Bookshop San Serriffe
San Serriffe will present a selection of publications related to Expanded Performance. San Serriffe is an Amsterdam-based bookshop dedicated to independent and small press publishing.

- Graphic design Expanded Performance
Niels Berk has designed the 'corporate identity' of Expanded Performance. His design follows the dynamic, flexible character of the program and brings the separate elements of the project together.

BACKGROUND
Three main sources of inspiration form the basis of this program. The title Expanded Performance is derived from the famous essay Sculpture in the Expanded Field (1979) by Rosalind Krauss. In this essay she describes how, against the modernist primacy, sculptures become more and more diverse, and how artists take on different positions in what she calls the 'expanded' field of sculpture. The idea of one medium with its specific set of conventions disappears. Sculptures can now be land art works, they can be temporary or ready made. In performance art we see a similar development. Performance art was, historically, the quintessence of conceptual art: the idea stood above the product and there was no end product that could be bought or sold. Only the performance itself counted. This historical fetish of the presence of both the body of the artist and the public is becoming less and less dominant. Performance art is gradually changing from an art form dominated by the creeds unrepeatable, undocumentable, unsaleable, to an art form that includes repetition, documentation and objects. This broader or more diverse way of approaching performance art is what this program focuses on and what we mean with expanded performance.

Another important source of inspiration is the text Take Care by Anthony Huberman (2011). Huberman characterizes small art spaces (a category Stroom as a non-museum places itself in) in terms of their behavior, he places the how above the what. Small art places have to distinguish themselves in how they operate and how they behave. An example. Instead of regarding an exhibition as a means to keep objects and processes under control and to use them to prove a point as a curator or to prove a statement, you might use the exhibition to discover, along with the visitors, how the point you wanted to prove behaves itself and how it develops. You would be publicly following, with others, the life of an idea rather than having your explanations ready in advance. The opening of an exhibition is the start of a process of thought, of a curatorial idea and not the end thereof. With Expanded Performance we give this approach a try, in a very literal way. Huberman calls this a more affective approach by institutions and curators, shifting from ‘knowing' and ‘explaining' to ‘caring about' or ‘caring for' and crucially, you have to take your time. Expanded Performance explores the possibilities of an alternative was of programming, in which taking time, exploring a theme with your audience and an affective way of working are central ingredients.

Finally, the third source of inspiration was a lecture by Pedro Gadanho during the TodaysArt festival in September 2011. Think of how to stimulate social space, rather than worry about the form of it. How people use the space, is more important than how it is made. Thus Gadanho explained the term 'performance architecture' in his lecture. Gadanho establishes a link between performance art and various architectural practices and shows how architects use performance strategies in order to set things into motion or to start a relationship with the audience (no matter if they are residents, passers-by or the visitors of a special project). Examples include critical, fast and collective actions or temporary places for encounters. Gadanho distinguishes various forms of 'performance architecture' like Social Space, the stimulating effect of a (spatial) intervention; or City Space, the way one experiences the city space, not from a knowledge of urban planning, but through the senses and one's body. In The City School, and also in the projects of the participating artists and the architectural interventions, this performative aspect of space, the city and architecture will become apparent. On December 6, 2012 Gadanho will give a lecture at Stroom Den Haag -> click here.

Expanded Performance was developed as part of the socalled Curatorial Intensive about performance art organized by the  American organization Independent Curators International. The project was further developed in relation to architecture and the urban environment.

Acknowledgment: Mondriaan Fund, Creative Industries Fund NL, Haagsche Bluf Fonds/Prins Bernhard Cultuurfonds and the city of The Hague.

PRESS
PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art, #105 (2013)
Bomblog, 6 February 2013
Colta.ru, 24 January 2013 (in Russian)
Trendbeheer, 14 December 2012 (in Dutch)
Metropolis M, #6, Dec. 2012-Jan. 2013 (in Dutch)
Jegens & Tevens, 5 December 2012 (in Dutch)
Frieze blog, 14 November 2012
ArtForum.com, November 2012
Endless Lowlands, 13 November 2012 (in Dutch)
(H)Art, 8 November 2012 (#103) (in Dutch)
Tubelight, #83, November-December 2012 (in Dutch)
de Volkskrant, 12 October 2012 (in Dutch)

Partners: REWIRE festival, Het Nutshuis en Cinedans.

Adrien Tirtiaux, 'The Great Cut', 2012
photo: © Stroom Den Haag
Ruth Buchanan, Stroom Den Haag, 2012
photo: Eric de Vries, courtesy Stroom Den Haag
Leidy Churchman and MPA, 'Painting Rooms', Stroom Den Haag, 2012
photo: Eric de Vries, courtesy Stroom Den Haag
Leidy Churchman and MPA, 'Painting Rooms', 2012
photo: video still: courtesy the artists
Thomas Heyer & Jakob Kunst, 2012
photo: Eric de Vries, courtesy Stroom Den Haag
Vlatka Horvat, 'Drift (Wall)', Stroom Den Haag, 2012
photo: Eric de Vries, courtesy Stroom Den Haag
Adrien Tirtiaux, 'The Great Cut', 2012
photo: Stroom Den Haag
Adrien Tirtiaux, 'The Great Cut', Stroom Den Haag, 2012
photo: Eric de Vries, courtesy Stroom Den Haag
Adrien Tirtiaux, 'The Great Cut', sketch, 2012
Lecture Anthony Huberman at Stroom Den Haag
photo: Stroom Den Haag
design: Zak Group
Nicoline van Harskamp, ‘Without Title (an Exercise in European English)’ (2012). Performance at Stroom Den Haag with Dawn Mastin and Amy Potter (2012)
photo: © Stroom Den Haag
Louise Hervé & Chloé Maillet, 'The Wall That Bleeds (Projection and Voice-Over)', Performance at Stroom Den Haag (2012)
photo: © Stroom Den Haag
Léa Lagasse, 'The Awaken Dreamer', 2012. Performance at Stroom Den Haag with Alexander Mayhew (2012)
photo: © Stroom Den Haag
Pierre Leguillon, 'Non-Happening after Ad Reinhardt', 2011. Performance at Stroom Den Haag (2012)
photo: © Stroom Den Haag
Sarah Pierce, 'Campus'. Performance at Stroom Den Haag (2012)
photo: © Stroom Den Haag
Alexandre Singh, 'Assembly Instructions Lecture, An Immodern Romanticism (2009)'. Performance at Stroom Den Haag (2012)
photo: © Stroom Den Haag
Cally Spooner, 'I Have Been ill-advised by my Scriptwriter' (2012). Performance at Stroom Den Haag (2012)
photo: © Stroom Den Haag
'The City School': Reenactment by Roeland Otten of Sigurdur Gudmundsson, 'Study for Horizon'
photo: courtesy the artist
Performance on Film: Mary Reid Kelley with Patrick Kelley, 'The Syphilis of Sisyphus', 2011
photo: courtesy the artists
Dynamics-Of-Performance, 'The Belgian Job'
photo: poster design: Anna Moreno
Display of bookstore San Serriffe
photo: © Stroom Den Haag
flyer design: Niels Berk