Seminar/Conference

Putting Rehearsals to the Test

Putting Rehearsals to the Test investigates the role and function of the rehearsal as a methodology, modus operandi, medium, site of representation, and reflection on processes of artistic and curatorial production inserting moments of contingency, interruption, recommencement, irregular repetition, uncertainty, and failure within existing systems. Practices of rehearsal, in attempting to transform asymmetric labor divisions, appear as links between aesthetic judgment and social or institutional critique. As such they imply a structural ambivalence since the popularity of the topic of ‚rehearsal’ can’t be separated from the neoliberal task to improve working methods as well as work performances for the sake of efficiency and value production.

Putting Rehearsals to the Test is a long-term research and exhibition project by Sabeth Buchmann (Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna), Ilse Lafer (Academy of Visual Art, Leipzig) and Constanze Ruhm (Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna) invited by Rike Frank (Kunstakademiet, Oslo) and organized as KUNO seminar. Additional guest speakers and participants include Pietro Consolandi (curator), Ina Hagen (Louise Danny) and Malene Nielsen (student, Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna).
The KUNO seminar Putting Rehearsals to the Test is made possible with additional support from Oslo National Academy of the Arts.

Program Public Seminar
Friday, March 2, 2018, 11am-5.30pm

• 11 am – 12.30pm, Akademirommet and Pakkerommet, Kunstnernes Hus, Oslo.
  Guided tour through the exhibition project 59° 54' 41'' N 10° 45' 28' E with participating artists, Ina Hagen (Louise Danny) and Pietro Consolandi (curator) followed by discussion.

• 2pm – 5.00 pm, Main Auditorium, Oslo National Academy of the Arts.
  Introduction by Rike Frank, lectures and presentations by Sabeth Buchmann, Malene Nielsen, Constanze Ruhm, closing panel discussion

Participants

59°54'41''N 10°45'28''E (the geographical coordinates of Oslo) is a group show and artistic/curatorial experiment that – drawing inspiration from Lucy Lippard’s Numbers Shows – brings together in a five-months long process 10 artists and students based in the city, an artist run space and a curator – an MA exchange student visiting from Venice. The participants come from Norway, Iceland, Denmark, Ukraine, Egypt and Italy and met in Oslo in August 2017. Curated by Pietro Consolandi with Asmaa Barakat, David Tobias Bonde Jensen, Hedda Grevle Ottesen, Maja Pauline Haugsgjerd, Espen Iden, Espen Kvålsvoll, Valgerdur Yr Magnusdottir, Magnus Myrtveit, Øyvind Sørfjordmo, Lesia Vasylchenko.

Sabeth Buchmann – Rehearsal by Numbers
Remarkably many contemporary curators show an interest in the exposure of collective working procedures which oscillate between improvisational and/or rehearsal-based formats. Considering the exhibition as an exposure under the auspices of information media, process art, site-specifity, and cinematographic experiments those practices share a common interest in the interactions between artistic procedures and spectators. As we’ll discuss with regard to the Number Shows (1969¬ –1973) by the curator and critic Lucy R. Lippard, those attempts went along with the popularity of cybernetic feedback systems: Intended to generate aesthetic and social change by spontaneous enactments of self-learning and micro-publics, they replaced the modernist ideal of individual author- and mastership by the concept of collective experience and agency. Since then we observe cyclical booms of artistic and curatorial endeavors to conceive the exhibition as a procedural medium formed for the sake of inclusive communities.

Malene Nielsen Leben – BRD: Modern Games and Spiritual Dystopia
In Leben - BRD the director Harun Farocki invites the viewer into spaces like the therapist office and a dance rehearsal in a strip club. In these spaces we observe people taking instructions and learning how to move, act, speak and behave. By observing these everyday situations we might get an insight into a prewritten grammar of movement within contemporary society. Both Farocki and Bresson had an interest in movement in itself. I will compare Farockis documentary film with Bressons fiction film Pickpocket. One film presents us with a spiritual dystopia where actions shape people into ready-made products by means of authority and control; the other is a humble glimpse of action as a dance between people, as utopian grace.

Constanze Ruhm – Re: Rehearsals
“Rehearsal situations are crucial elements in each of the films in Ruhm’s long-term series X CHARACTERS (…) The “X” is used in theater and film production to mark the position of an actor, and is applied with chalk or tape to a usually black painted wooden floor. (…) Ruhm turns the “X” into a protagonist, into a transmitter between character and space [and] uses the “X” as an aesthetic trigger to literally mark the set as a rehearsal stage (…) creating links to aesthetic theories surrounding minimal art with its theater-historical references, like those to Bertolt Brecht or Peter Brook and his study of empty space. (…) [Rehearsal] is a term associated with work and life, where theater praxis and cinematic thinking are taken up as a basis for the political claim of an emancipated subject, of autonomy and social responsibility. The postulate of unpredictability, a necessary condition for theater work, manifests in rehearsal: (…) it is important that the performance continues to be work at the internal level: it stays rehearsal and does not become a final output.”
(Eva Maria Stadler on X Characters (2001 – 2013) in Is that still? in: Constanze Ruhm, Re: Rehearsals (No Such Things as Repetition), edited by Alexandra Schantl, 2015)

For additional information please contact: rike.frank@khio.no