January 11 and 12, 2023 10-16
What does it mean to perform in public space?
In this seminar we will go through some strategies, limitations and possibilities within performances/ interventions in the public space.
Based on the long durational performance We’re Magic. We’re Real (These Walls), which was performed during my exhibition Archives in The Tongue. A Litany of Freedoms at Kunsthal Charlottenborg in the summer of 2022, we will discuss what it means to intervene in the public space, how do you explore the space, what complications, policies and challenges can you face? How do you cope with them? What are the political dimensions of performance staged in public spaces? What are the social and cultural dimensions?
Additionally we will experience for ourselves what it means to perform in the public space through exercises during the workshop.
Jeannette Ehlers is a Copenhagen-based artist of Danish and Trinidadian descent whose practice takes shape experimentally across photography, video, installation, sculpture and performance. She graduated from The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in 2006.
Ehlers’ work often brings about decolonial hauntings and disruptions and she insists on the possibility for empowerment and healing in her art, honoring legacies of resistance in the African diaspora. She merges the historical, the collective and the rebellious with the familial, the bodily and the poetic.
In the words of author Lesley-Ann Brown, “Ehlers reminds all who participate in or gaze at her work that history is not in the past.”