performance

Katrina Daschner
Sara Sowell 
Paul Tarragó
Carolyn Tennant 
Jayne Wilson

April 23 to May 14, 2022

An exhibition of moving image works, performance explores the propagation of identities, personae and social roles via unexpected approaches to the titular concept. Deftly employing original and archival materials, these five international artists slyly invert and rework the tropes of role play, illusion, spectacle and social choreography by engaging with unsettled narrative to consider competition and failure, equilibrium and collapse, power and performance.

Glamour and expectations are hijacked to reveal fissures in the performance of emotional veracity on a reality TV competition. Through solarization of B&W film stock and manipulation of source materials intercut with a parallel text, an altogether more primal reading is revealed, “Conjuring Freud's id while watching America’s Next Top Model.” 

At the Grove Finishing School in Kent in the 1960s, privileged daughters of elites and foreign dignitaries barely contain youthful enthusiasm as they are groomed to perform the obsequities of class and gender. What do we now see in this edited archival footage, in unruly filement amidst manicured gardens, in costuming and auditions for roles in society, in bodies of colour in a colonial landscape? How successful can the overarching need for order be against time and nature? Can grace exist somewhere between equilibrium and collapse? 

An unlikely but compelling cast of kitchen utensils demonstrates elementary principles of physics. Elsewhere, feats of strength, agility and poise give way to competition and velocity, revealing the risk of breakdown, chaos and defeat. The Equilibrists are here as a “reminder of the patience, delicacy and balance essential for stability.”

In Berlin’s Tieranatomisches Theatre, a nod to Arthur Schnitzler’s 1926 Traumnovelle sets in motion eight bodies queering the space in enactment of an architectural detail. An aquatic number without water—in a musical without music—a perfectly unstable head of foam collapses ecstatic into golden showers. 

Illusion and animation conspire to complicate narrative. Worlds are created through tricks of the mind. Magician and computing pioneer Alex Elmsley narrates from beyond. Wardrobes respire. Sensitivity advisors hover in some ethereal realm. Presto: energy is exchanged. Will we believe what we can’t see?

Visual and media artist Katrina Daschner was born in Hamburg and has lived in Vienna since 1995. Her work has been presented internationally in art exhibitions and at film festivals including Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen, Mumok Cinema Vienna, Blickle Cinema 21er Haus Vienna, Diagonale Graz, New Horizon Int. Film Festival Wroclaw, Galerie Krobath Vienna/Berlin, Centre d’art passerelle Brest, Kurzfilmtage Hamburg and Thrust Projects New York.

Sara Sowell is a filmmaker and interdisciplinary artist. Her films and videos undermine the legacies of art and media production throughout history, including Dada, Surrealism, reality television and cinema’s prehistory. Her films have been exhibited in venues, galleries and festivals including The Wexner Center, Antimatter [Media Art], ANALOGICA, Athens International Film and Video Festival and The Filmmakers’ Cooperative.

Paul Tarragó is a filmmaker, using both video and celluloid, living in London. His work is a mix of underground experimentation and metafiction, tugging at the leash of film language but with narrative often held close at hand. His films have shown widely on festival and gallery circuits (International Film Festival Rotterdam, NYUFF, EMAF, National Review of Live Art, Triangle France, Kino der Kunst) and include several award-winning experimental narratives, video installation, a collaborative feature, cinematic sketchbooks, moving image and live soundtrack performance work. 

Carolyn Tennant is a media artist, curator and archivist interested in hybrid nonfiction forms. Her projects are informed by a background in experimental nonfiction film and literary journalism. She is currently exploring the use of ersatz archives as a platform for 21st century storytelling. Her projects have been exhibited at the Whitney Museum, Brooklyn Museum of Art and Art Basel Miami and she has presented research on video preservation and the history of early electronic art at the Guggenheim Museum and Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin. Her films have screened internationally and her work with an archival 16mm film collection was presented as a performance and multi-media installation at the Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center (EMPAC) in Troy, NY. She received her PhD in Electronic Art from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in 2021.

Jayne Wilson is a Brighton-based artist and filmmaker. Working with experimental approaches to moving image, her constructed narratives sit at the juncture between art and documentary and revisit the themes of technology, legacy and progress. She has exhibited widely and shown work in events, screenings and exhibitions in the UK and internationally including Wroclaw Media Art Biennale, Anthology Film Archive (New York), London Short Film Festival, Antimatter [Media Art] and Experiments In Cinema (New Mexico).