Performance
A Luxury We Can Not Afford (wisdom of the earth) - Manuel Pelmuş
This new ongoing action will be installed within the largest Constantin Brancusi exhibition to take place in 25 years in Brussels, at BOZAR.
The work takes a starting point from two lesser known sculptures by Brancusi entitled Sculpture for the Blind (1920) and Wisdom of the Earth (1907).
It consists of two live elements, one “invisible” in a dark room, and one visible in the galleries of the museum, presented alongside other sculptures by Constantin Brancusi.
Both elements construct an “immaterial” version of Wisdom of the Earth. The live work aims to enter into dialogue with the history and legacy of the two Brancusi sculptures through speech, movement, strategies of enactment and politics of embodiment, proposing a less canonical narrative of art history, interrogating modernist constructs, as well as imagining a notion of history in motion, open to change and transformation.
With Maria F Scaroni & Cristina Toma
Production: WASP Studios
Cultural project co-financed by: Institutul Cultural Român și Administrația Fondului Cultural Național
Project Comissioned by Europalia Arts Festival, curator Andreea Căpitănescu, for Brancusi: Sublimation of Form exhibition, at BOZAR, Brussels.
Manuel Pelmuş was born in Bucharest, Romania. He is a choreographer and artist who lives and works in Oslo and Bucharest. Pelmuş could be seen as one of the protagonists of the “new performance turn,” artists who have been reimagining the role of performance in the context of visual arts. He often deploys continuous live presence within the context of exhibitions, using enactment as a strategy and the human body as a medium and a means to explore the body’s relationship to memory and the construction of history. In addition to his recent solo exhibition at Para Site, Hong Kong (2018), Pelmus’s projects have been featured at institutions including the Tate Modern, London; the Museum Ludwig, Cologne; Centre National de la Danse, Paris; TanzQuartier, Vienna; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven; Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw, Tanz im August, Berlin; and the Museum der Moderne, Salzburg, among others. In 2013, he represented Romania at the 55th Venice Biennale with a collaborative project with Alexandra Pirici. He has additionally participated in the Off-Biennale, Budapest (2017), and the Kyiv Biennale (2015).
In 2012, Pelmus was awarded the Berlin Art Prize for performance arts and later recognized with the prize for excellence from the National Dance Center of Bucharest in 2015. Beginning with October 2019, Manuel Pelmus are research fellow at the Oslo National Academy of the Arts (KHIO).
