Past

Performance Proletarians / Hit the North
Benjamin Valenza
14 March 2015, 6–9 pm

Photo of “Performance Proletarians”, a project by Lili Reynaud-Dewar and Benjamin Valenza, 9-10 October 2014. Broadcasted from Magasin-CNAC, Grenoble

Photos by Sara Linderoth

The combination of sculptural objects, performers and an audience in the same environment defines a particular mode for an object to be present in. The object itself builds up the performative space by affecting its surroundings. Philosopher Gernot Böhme describes this mode as “ecstasy of the object”. In his understanding, “space” originates from the primary qualities of said object, such as its form, but also from its secondary traits, such as sound and smell. In this space, the ecstatic object acts on the performers and seizes the audience.

With “Performance Proletarians / Hit the North”, Benjamin Valenza addresses the language and circulation of ephemeral formats. The audience can choose to attend a 3-hour programme “live” at Andquestionmark, streamed “live” online, or both, simultaneously.

If the media that allow the circulation of performance also make the performative space expand, or ecstatic, what is the new condition of the object and how is it critically assimilated?

Benjamin Valenza involves sculptures, videos, poetry and literature in his performances. In 2014, he conceived “Performance Proletarians” with artist Lili Reynaud-Dewar: a live broadcast of a 36-hour programme of events. Valenza is also the co-founder of Galerie 1m3, an artist-run space in Lausanne.

Saturday, 14 March 2015, 6–9 pm

The event is part of “Performance as Sculpture”, an ongoing investigation into performance and the objects it activates by curator Valentina Sansone.

In collaboration with CuratorLab and Konstfack University College of Arts, Crafts and Design / The Royal Institute of Art / Stockholm University of the Arts (DOCH, University of Dance and Circus)

4×4
Christine Sun Kim
16 January 2015, 7–9 pm

Photo by Catherine McElhone

Photos by Sara Linderoth

Your voice is disappearing, into the walls, making the light fittings shiver. The doors move and the windows shake. Your chest fills up with sound, your cranium bubbles. Yet, your ears cannot hear anything.

A song is played, you can feel it, but it’s not really there. It could be the artist’s voice, or someone else’s in disguise. Any attempt of speaking is sucked up and absorbed by the surroundings. The inaudible sound is leaking through the building, too big to be detained in the space. The silence is physical, permeating the rooms, the objects, the bodies. It becomes the sound.

Christine Sun Kim is an artist based in Berlin and New York, preliminarily working with sound. She was born deaf, and often creates works to make noise perceivable visually, physically or conceptually, as well as asking others to lend her their voices. For Andquestionmark, Kim specifically conceived the piece “4×4”, consisting of four speakers and four voices, which can only be experienced in the space for one night.

Contributors:
Bob Cohn, entrepreneur
Tony Conrad, artist
Jeffrey Mansfield, designer
Matana Roberts, musician

Friday, 16 January 2015, 7–9 pm

Before the event, on Friday, 16 January 2015 at 14.00, Christine Sun Kim will communicate about “4×4” at Iaspis. The presentation will include other samples of her practice and will be moderated by Robin McGinley, supported by a unique set-up of computers and projectors. Location: The Project Room / Projektrummet, Iaspis, The Swedish Arts Grants Committee’s International Programme for Visual Artists, Maria skolgata 83, 118 53 Stockholm

In collaboration with Iaspis, The Swedish Arts Grants Committee’s International Programme for Visual Artists, and Interactive Agents (Phil Arnold and Robin McGinley)

The First Swedish Normcore Convention
29 August 2014, from 6 pm

Photos Andquestionmark

Andquestionmark invites you to The First Swedish Normcore Convention. Please join us for an evening of normalcy, non-particularity and celebrating that each of us is nothing more than one in 9.7 million.

Think unbranded jeans, plain turtleneck, white socks, Fleetwood Mac. Think post-difference, post-determination, post-authenticity, post-aspiration. Come as you are, I want to be with you everywhere. Maybe, may be. We adapt, we belong. Let’s talk about the weather, let’s revel the return of the real. The insanely OK over the psychotically different.

Come listen to regular music, share mundane food, drink unimposing wine, have normal conversations.

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The YouTube Variations
Pierre Bismuth
20 March 2014, 6–8 pm

Photos by Mia Frykholm

For his new project “The YouTube Variations”, Pierre Bismuth worked with different computer algorithms to transform sound material into musical scores. The scores are neither the product of thought, nor of chance, but the result of a series of computer translations, transliterations, and transcriptions of audio material.

Bismuth fed the software YouTube clips including musical parts, but also sound and speech. The music scores that are achieved after a first series of operations are then processed by using more conventional methods of composition, involving issues of choice, reference, structure, and aesthetics. The result is a piece in 5 movements for four instruments: cello, clarinet, flute, and percussions.

The piece is at the same time succinct and immensely difficult to play. “The YouTube Variations” is the first composition for several instruments based on this protocol and will be performed for the very first time at Andquestionmark.

This project is being developed in collaboration with artistic producer and acoustical engineer Kerwin Rolland.

With: Daniel Borgegård Älgå (clarinet), Pelle Halvarsson (cello), Magnus Nordén (kit percussion), Anna Petraskevica (flute), coordinated by Robin McGinley

Thursday, 20 March, 6-8 pm

On Friday, 21 March at 2 pm, Pierre Bismuth will talk about “The YouTube Variations” at Iaspis in conversation with Robin McGinley, one of the musicians interpreting the piece. The conversation is moderated by Stefanie Hessler. Location: The Project Room / Projektrummet, Iaspis, The Swedish Arts Grants Committee’s International Programme for Visual Artists, Maria skolgata 83, 118 53 Stockholm

In collaboration with Iaspis. The Swedish Arts Grants Committee’s International Programme for Visual Artists

Salong Flyttkartong
Linnéa Sjöberg
11 February 2014, from 5 pm

Photos Andquestionmark

Linnéa Sjöberg’s recent projects can be described as performative research. After working and acting as a career woman in a “real-life” performance for almost two years, Sjöberg turned into a tattoo artist. More than strategic decisions, both projects developed in slow and naturally growing processes, and only became discernible as art works over time. Sjöberg's engagement with tattooing started in a method of acting first, thinking later, when she bought a tattoo machine and began scribbling words on volunteering friends’ bodies during gabber parties.

Andquestionmark organises an evening with Salong Flyttkartong, Sjöberg’s mobile tattoo studio. The event connects to the exhibition Tattoo Collection curated by Air de Paris and Urbi et Orbi in 1991. Hundreds of artists submitted drawings for tattoos that were exhibited in the galleries, and the number of which continued to grow for years. Between 1991–93, the exhibition was shown at Galerie Jennifer Flay, Paris, Galerie Daniel Buchholz, Cologne, and Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York, as well as the CRDC, Nantes, where it was part of the tattoo convention L'Art dans la Peau.

At Andquestionmark, Sjöberg interprets and applies a selection of these original works in her specific style, which has little to do with skills or following aesthetic rules established within the tattoo world.

With Dj Vero Veramente.

Thanks to all the artists, who have given us permission to use their works, as well as Air de Paris, who have made their archive accessible to us.

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Objects of Desire
A soirée with Raimundas Malašauskas and Carl Palm
11 October 2013

Photos Andquestionmark

The proposal for Objects of Desire is to move away from the readings of style and formal categorization that are common to design and material culture and to look at alternative ways of dealing with objects by means of imagination, fiction and performance. This on-going project is composed of several one-evening events that will be held at different spaces where we normally experience material culture. This is the first event of a series and it is made in collaboration with Jour Fixe: a program in a domestic space that occasionally hosts artistic events organized by Stefanie Hessler. The evening is hosted by Andquestionmark, a working space with its own specific relation to objects. In those private spaces, the peculiar combination of particular things left in apparent disarray offers a different view from the process of organising and displaying objects in a gallery. It has its own rhythms of time and life. For that reason, its objects should follow different rules and be addressed with a different tone. In this way the diverse, sensitive and diffuse character of words, and above all imagination is introduced.

For dOCUMENTA (13), Raimundas Malašauskas carried out the project ‘Black Box’, a series of conversations about objects whose meaning and use had been lost with the passing of time, converting them into abstract and unclassifiable objects. Once a week, different artists, philosophers and scientists met up to speculate, in homage to the hypothetical relativity of knowledge. What they were looking for were stories, to create, through imagination and fantasy, alternative forms of understanding. For this year’s Venice Biennial, he was the curator of the Cyprus and Lithuanian Pavilion, in which again, objects and art pieces followed a special relation with each other. For the first event of Objects of Desire he will introduce us to his particular engagement with material culture and artistic objects.

In a similar way, Carl Palm (b. 1980, Tåstarp, Sweden) experiments with different ways of perceiving objects through daydreaming and meditation, in what he calls ‘The Nocturnal Studio’. The domestic object, charged with familiarity, becomes a place where we decide to reunite some disparate things, where we endeavour to establish multiple, imaginative relations, an area that possesses its own rules, linking things that are not evidently linked. Intricate and unique in their own right, Palm´s works often point somewhere else, generating content without possessing it, acknowledging the context and presence of the other pieces in the show. For Objects of Desire he will work on a new series of sculptural presentations coming from dreams. These objects are acting as the main characters on a radio drama and they will, for one night, be caught behind the stage of a shadow play.

11 October 2013, from 6 pm
Talk by Raimundas Malašauskas at 7 pm
Continuous performance by Carl Palm
Curated by Rosa Lleó

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