Expanded Performance

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Date: September 30 – 16 December, 2012
Kick-off: Saturday, 29 September, 2012, 17:00 hrs
Special opening program with short films
Finissage: Sunday, 16 December, 2012, 15:00 hrs
A festive afternoon with various activities

Location: Hogewal 1-9, The Hague
Open: Wednesday to Saturday, 12:00–17:00 hrs

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

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

This fall, for three months, the program at Stroom Den Haag is centered around performance in the broadest sense of the word. With Expanded Performance, we aim to investigate practices we refer to as “expanded performance art,” to break open the format of the exhibition and to involve the public actively in the process.

Instead of presenting a ready-made exhibition at the opening, Expanded Performance evolves over time through performances, activities, and audience interaction. Visitors can follow these transformations through the Tumblr blog or join guided tours that take them through the building and the interventions made by the artists. Expanded Performance operates on multiple speeds and layers, briefly outlined below.

PROGRAM

Reading Group led by artist Maria Pask
The group explores ideas around expanded performance, institutional formats, and audience engagement. A list of discussed texts is available online.

Architectural Intervention
by Thomas Heyer and Jakob Kunst
These two young Hague-based designers developed the overarching concept connecting all elements of Expanded Performance. Visitors entering Stroom will immediately realize they are part of the project.

New work by Five International Artists
Ruth Buchanan (New Zealand), Leidy Churchman and MPA (USA), Vlatka Horvat (Croatia/USA), Adrien Tirtiaux (Belgium). These artists hold a special position in what we might call the field of expanded performance.

Leidy Churchman and MPA created Painting Rooms at Stroom — an installation with large paintings, walls, metal rods, and a black-and-white video showing their actions with these materials. >> read more

Vlatka Horvat, with a background in theater, is fascinated by the relationship between people and their environments. In Replacements, each day a Stroom staff member selects an object from the building and moves it to the exhibition space, replacing the object placed there the day before. >> read more

Adrien Tirtiaux, originally trained as an architect, brings a strong spatial awareness into his visual art. His The Great Cut (2012) project impacts not only the exhibition space but the entire organization and its staff. >> read more

Ruth Buchanan works with language in versatile ways, often combining sound and print. Her installations gently shape the spatial experience through subtle setups involving curtains, walls, and chairs, all meticulously arranged yet unobtrusive.

Lecture: Anthony Huberman
Thursday, 11 October, 2012, 20:00 hrs
Director of The Artist's Institute, New York. His essay Take Care (2011) is a key inspiration for Expanded Performance.

I Proclaim, You Proclaim, We Proclaim
Saturday, 3 November & Sunday, 4 November, 2012, 17:00 hrs
Two-day event focused on spoken word, text, and language performances. 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
November 5 – 16 December, 2012
A project by artist Léa Lagasse, presenting exhibitions on paper using a rotating “library wheel.” Contributors include Arnold Mosselman, Pedro Gadanho, Anthony Huberman, Will Holder, and The Grand Domestic Revolution by Casco Office for Art, Design and Theory.

Four Quarters with Arno van Roosmalen
Wednesdays: 21, 28 November + 5 December, 12, 2012
Between 12:30 – 13:30 hrs: open discussions, anything is up for conversation.

Lunch Talk with Sarah Rifky & Manuela Moscoso
Monday, 3 December, 2012, 12:00 – 13:00 hrs
Private meeting. Topics: institutional models and audience engagement. Part of the International Visitors Program by the Mondriaan Fund.

Lecture: Pedro Gadanho
Thursday, 6 December, 2012, 20:00 hrs
Reservation required
Gadanho, architect, curator, and writer, is currently Curator for Contemporary Architecture at MoMA, New York. His lecture will address his research on performance architecture.

City School
Saturday, 8 December, 2012
Architect Anne Holtrop and students from the Sandberg Institute’s Studio for Immediate Spaces will host a performance event. They revisit and reinterpret historical urban performances and explore their relevance to The Hague today. In collaboration with The One Minutes Foundation.

Lecture: Vlatka Horvat
Reorganization of space and spatial relations
Tuesday, 11 December, 2012, 17:00 hrs
Location: KABK Auditorium, Prinsessegracht 4, The Hague
No registration required.

Expanded Performance: Life on Film
Thursday, 13 December, 2012, 20:00 hrs
Location: Het Nutshuis, Riviervismarkt 5, The Hague
Admission: €7.50 / discounted €5.00
A night on film and performance art, exploring how performance for film has evolved since the 1950s. Reservation via Het Nutshuis.

Presentation: Results of Vlatka Horvat’s Workshop
Friday, 14 December, 2012, 16:00 hrs
Location: KABK, Room PB 225, Prinsessegracht 4, The Hague
Workshop with 3rd-year students focused on expanded performance.

Finissage: Expanded Performance
Sunday, 16 December, 2012, from 15:00 hrs
Festive closing with tours by Adrien Tirtiaux, screenings of One Minutes videos made during City School, and performances by Dynamics-Of-Performance (The Belgian Job) and KABK students.

Lecture: Adrien Tirtiaux
Things Design Themselves
Tuesday, 18 December, 2012, 17:00 hrs
Location: KABK Auditorium, Prinsessegracht 4, The Hague
No registration needed.

Bookstore San Serriffe
During Expanded Performance, San Serriffe will present a curated book selection aligned with the project’s themes. San Serriffe is an Amsterdam-based bookstore specializing in independent and small press publications.

Graphic Design of Expanded Performance
Niels Berk designed the visual identity for the project, reflecting its dynamic and evolving nature while tying all components together.

Four Quarters with Arno van Roosmalen
Wednesdays: 21, 28 November + 5, 12 December
Between 12:30–13:30 hrs – everything is open for discussion.

BACKGROUND

There are actually three major sources of inspiration for this program. The title Expanded Performance is derived from the famous 1979 essay Sculpture in the Expanded Field by Rosalind Krauss. In it, she describes how sculpture became increasingly diverse, and how artists - going against modernist conventions -began to occupy various positions within what she calls the expanded field of sculpture. There was no longer a single medium with a fixed set of conventions. Sculptures could now exist outdoors in nature, be temporary, or take the form of ready-mades.

A similar development can be observed in performance art. Historically, performance art embodied a conceptual approach: the idea was more important than the product, and there was no final object to exhibit, buy, or sell. Only the moment of the performance itself mattered. This historical fetishization of presence -both of the artist’s body and the audience- has become less dominant. Performance art has shifted from being defined by the principles of unrepeatability, undocumentedness, and unsellability, to a practice that includes repetition, documentation, and material objects. This broader, more diverse approach to performance art is the focus of this project - and precisely what we mean by expanded performance.

Another key source of inspiration is Take Care (2011), an essay by Anthony Huberman. Huberman characterizes small art institutions (which Stroom, as a non-museum, considers itself to be) in terms of their behavior—placing how above what. Small institutions must distinguish themselves through the way they operate and behave.

For instance, instead of treating an exhibition as a way to control objects and processes—using them to make a point or prove a curatorial argument -you might instead explore, together with the audience, how that point behaves and develops. In this approach, the life of an idea is followed publicly, in the presence of others, rather than being explained in advance. The exhibition opening then marks the beginning of a thought process, a curatorial idea- not its conclusion. That is exactly what we aim to explore quite literally with Expanded Performance.

Huberman refers to this as a more affective approach to institutions and curatorship—less focused on knowing and explaining, and more on caring and taking care. And crucially, it requires taking time. Expanded Performance explores the potential for alternative programming centered on slowing down, taking time, exploring a theme with your audience, and working from an affective standpoint. Huberman will give a lecture at Stroom Den Haag on 11 October, 2012.

Finally, Pedro Gadanho’s lecture at the TodaysArt Festival in September 2011 was also a major inspiration. Think of how to stimulate social space, rather than worrying about the form of it. How people use the space is more important than how it is made. This is how Gadanho characterized the idea of performance architecture.

He connects performance art with architectural practice, demonstrating how architects use the techniques of performance to create impact and establish relationships with the public—whether that be residents, passersby, or project visitors. Examples include critical, rapid, collective actions or temporary meeting places. Gadanho distinguishes several forms of performance architecture, such as Social Space, focused on the stimulating effect of a spatial intervention, and City Space, which addresses how the city is experienced—not through planning knowledge, but through the senses and the body.

This performative aspect of space, the city, and architecture is reflected in City School, as well as in the projects of participating artists and the architectural intervention. Gadanho will give a lecture at Stroom Den Haag on 6 December, 2012.

Expanded Performance was developed as part of the Curatorial Intensive on performance art by Independent Curators International (USA), and further expanded by Stroom in relation to architecture and urban space.

Special thanks to: Mondriaan Fund, Creative Industries Fund NL, Haagsche Bluf Fund / Prins Bernhard Culture Fund, and the Municipality of The Hague.

Partners: REWIRE Festival, Het Nutshuis, and Cinedans.