Tag: Performance

As part of Sadik Kwaish Alfraji’s exhibition A Language Under My Skin, W139 will host a performance by The Names. Shaped by the ideas of critical music, listening and sounding practices, and the position of the post-musical, The Names combines playing musical material with reflections on public space, society, and the world of ideas at large.

The Piece DH (Doug Hammond), composed by The Names initiator Koen Nutters, is an extended structure for modal improvisation based on the letters of the name of Doug Hammond: composer, drummer, musician, poet, and educator. The Names is a new Berlin/Amsterdam/Heerlen collective of creative musicians playing open, yet melodic, pieces in a Cage/Oliveros informed spectrum of improvised strategies and open-ended compositions.

The Names:

Harry Golden – tuba

Marielle Groven – violin

Aimée Theriot – cello

Koen Nutters – bass, composition

Gert-Jan Prins – percussion

Originally inspired by the urgencies of the pandemic and the anosmia that millions of people experienced, The Syntax of Smell looks at the entanglements between scent memory, nostalgia and toxicity.

Our daily life has increasingly been scented by large conglomerates, and many of our scent-based memories conceal histories of pollution, waste, and ecological extraction. Scents of fresh laundry and washed linen are likely the product of laboratory produced nitromusks; the taste of ‘fresh’ supermarket orange juice is usually a product of ethyl butyrate; and the burning of sandalwood incense, a dear memory for many, is both neurotoxic and linked to a few forms of cancer.

Engaging with commercial artificial scent production on a micro scale, The Syntax of Smell simultaneously utilises and critiques the olfactory toolbooks of these large industries. During specified moments when the work is activated in the context of an open lab, visitors will be able to share their stories with Majorana, who in turn will create a special scent for them that evokes their lost memories, while simultaneously underlining the links between our memories, our notion of ‘artificiality’, and pollution.

Times of the performances:

Friday 30 September from 18:00 to 21:00 at W139
Thursday 6 October from 19:00 to 23:00 at W139
Sunday 16 October from 13:00 to 16:00 at W139
Sunday 23 October from 14:00 to 17:00 at W139

Photography by Pieter Kers.

“For six years already I have been moving and becoming with HIV.”

Keeping up with the Virus explores interdependency, connection seeking, risk-taking, and solidarity through the embodied metaphor of the virus performing in the artist’s body in the era of undetectability. Situated in relation to the unique constellation of artists gathered at W139, the performance looks to activate genealogies and dramaturgies of living with HIV across time.

Szymon Adamczak (1991, he/his, PL/NL) is a queer dramaturg, writer, theatre, and performance maker working across disciplines. He has a vital interest in HIV-related culture and transnational queer activism. Alum of DAS Theatre and a current fellow of THIRD, a programme for artist-researchers offered by DAS Research. As a dramaturg he specialises in designing artistic processes, (non)verbal, intimate and documentary work. In his own creations, Szymon weaves poetic imagination, visual sensitivity, theory and physical performance. From 2017 to 2021 he developed and presented the performance An Ongoing Song with Billy Mullaney. He now works as an artistic coordinator of IPOP, a practice-based, research and workshop oriented programme fostering queer education at the Academy of Theatre and Dance in Amsterdam. Szymon lives in the Netherlands and volunteers for HIV Vereniging. Currently Szymon is developing a body of research in relation to Bob Mellors, a co-founder of Gay Liberation Front UK, his life and activism, and ultimately tragic death in Warsaw in 1996.

Billy Mullaney (USA) is an Amsterdam-based artist working in theatre, choreography, and performance art. His research focuses on representational practices in and of various sites of performance, the modes of spectatorship they conventionally engender, and how interventions in the former affect the latter. By rigorously embodying such interventions, Billy’s work often foregrounds the physiological impact of movement and thought on the body, indexing the stakes of adhering too closely (or too successfully) to logics such as the attention economy or post-fordist production. This research has led him to experiment with forms ranging from quantum physics lectures and children’s television shows to promotional trailers and tarot readings.

Currently Szymon is developing a body of research, workshops and lectures in relation to Bob Mellors, a co-founder of Gay Liberation Front UK, his life and activism, and ultimately tragic death in Warsaw in 1996. This project is supported by the City of Warsaw scholarship for 2023. First iteration of the project is a short film called “The Soldier’s Tale” presented within Queerstories program for Polish and Ukrainian queer artists.

Photography by Elodie Vreeburg.

Visual identity by Jacob Hoving.

This exhibition is generously supported by Mondriaan Fund, Gieskes-Strijbis Fund, Amsterdam Fund for the Arts, Goethe Institut, Centro Elisarion, Pro Elisarion Association, Monacensia im Hildebrandhaus, Forum Queeres Archiv München, Grafisch Atelier Hilversum and Fonds21.