"A Little Less Conversation", A conference about exhibiting contemporary performance

De Appel arts centre and the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam proudly present the conference "A Little Less Conversation".

“A Little Less Conversation” will question, in an unusual and dynamic fashion, how contemporary performance art is exhibited. The conference follows the previous inquiries into contemporary performance organized by de Appel arts centre, including the symposia “The manifold (after) lives of performance” (that took place in 2009 and 2010), which scrutinized the different ways performance is documented and collected.

Ephemeral and immaterial in its nature, performance becomes tangible the moment it is exhibited, whether experienced live or through documents. Although it is first and foremost an art of the here and now, the widest access we have to a performance, paradoxically enough, is still based on objects and residual elements such as text, photography, audio, or video. But how can contemporary performance be exhibited without these kinds of relics? What role can performativity play in the presentation of performances? What kind of relationship is there between the audience and the performers?

“A Little Less Conversation”, the same title as one of Elvis Presley’s most famous songs, offers ‘a little more action’. Guest curator Marie Frampier tries to change the relationship between theory and practice in making a conference. Often, this relationship is successive, with a concept preceding the exhibition or an analysis emerging from it. In “A Little Less Conversation”, performance – as exhibition – and theory will be more intertwined, occurring in the same place and at the same time. The conference's topics and issues will be questioned, performed, and made performative rather than just discursive and theoretical. The speakers will share their professional experiences as curator (Mathieu Copeland and Bojana Mladenovic) or theoretician/artist (Lilo Nein). Contemporaneously, the invited artists and performers will explore theoretical and narrative frameworks (Dominique Gilliot), question conference codes (Marie Reinert), and respond to some expectations of the audience (Richard Dedomenici). You could say that the performances are part of the conference and the conference is part of the performances.

Improvisation, infiltration and collaboration with the audience, as well as questioning curatorial conventions, constitute the body of “A Little Less Conversation”. It is based on an instantaneous dialogue between art practice and theory. There are no stages, tables, or scores, but rather a large amount of trouble and curiosity.

Speakers:
Mathieu Copeland (FR), curator
Bojana Mladenovic (SRB), curator and performer
Lilo Nein (AT), theoretician and performer

Moderator:
Dominique Gilliot (FR), performer

Performers:
Richard Dedomenici (UK), performer
Marie Reinert (FR), performer

Curator:
Marie Frampier (FR)

Language: English
Entrance fee: free with a valid Museum ticket
Reservations: required through reservations [​at​] stedelijk.nl

"A Little Less Conversation" was set up with the support of Maison Descartes, Amsterdam.

Mathieu Copeland has been developing a practice that seeks to subvert the traditional role of exhibitions and renew perceptions of them. His work includes having co-curated the exhibition VOIDS, A Retrospective at the Centre Pompidou in Paris and at the Kunsthalle in Bern, curating A Choreographed Polyphony at LiveInYourHead Geneva, A Choreographed Exhibition at the Kunsthalle St. Gallen and the Ferme du Buisson, and Soundtrack for an Exhibition at the Musee d'Art Contemporain Lyon. He presented the series A Spoken Word Exhibitions and An Exhibition to Hear Read, and, more recently, the Reprise series (www.reprise.me). He teaches in the master’s of fine art program at HEAD–Geneva University of Art and Design, and lectures in numerous universities and art schools. He also has released a collection of artist's films on DVD.

Richard Dedomenici is a one-man subversive think tank primarily dedicated to the development and implementation of innovative strategies designed to undermine accepted belief systems and topple existing power structures. By approaching the limits of conventionally acceptable behavior, Dedomenici’s poetic acts of low-grade civil disobedience forcibly ask pertinent questions of society, while his subtle anarcho-surrealist interventions create the kind of uncertainty that leads to possibility. Dedomenici is an Artsadmin associate artist.

Dominique Gilliot is an artist, performer andspeaker. She graduated from the Paris-Cergy Fine Arts School in 2005 and the Lyon Fine Arts School in 2007. She has exhibited in Triangle, Friche de la Belle de Mai, Marseille, France (2008); Lyon Biennial Off (2009); Brussels, Galerie Elaine Lévy (2010); and Bourges, France (laBox), 2011. Her work is about storytelling. About telling stories, any way the wind blows. Using video, writing, singing songs, moving a little slower than is usually admitted. Speaking a little faster than is usually admitted. The result can be funny, clever, all over the place, a bit confused, and at the same time, sometimes, very very precise. It is about pointing out extremely basic things, finger in a most peculiar way. This is about performing, about sharing a moment. After having benefitted from an artistic residency in the east of France (Synagogue de Delme), Gilliot will have her own studio in Main d'Oeuvres, a Parisian art center, beginning in January 2012. She will then run her first solo show, in the same art center (Main d'Oeuvres), starting on February 14.

Bojana Mladenović is performance maker and performer from Belgrade, living and working in Amsterdam. By becoming the artistic director of Het Veem Theater in Amsterdam in June 2010, she extended her artistic practice into the field of producing and curating. Her current focus is on scrutinizing and investigating the conditions under which the work happens and art emerges.

Lilo Nein was born in Vienna and studied fine arts at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna and the University of Fine Arts of Hamburg. She works artistically with art and theory, performs, writes, and speaks. Since 2005, she has realized performances for Tanzquartier Wien and Neuer Kunstverein Wien and performed at MUMOK Wien, Kampnagel Hamburg, and PACT-Zollverein Essen, among others. Her video works have been shown at Diagonale – Festival of Austrian Film, in Schikaneder Cinema, and in Breitenseer Lichtspiele Cinema, and she has taken part in exhibitions at Kunsthalle Exnergasse, Fluc Wien, Art Speech Gallery Vancouver, and Motorenhalle Dresden. In 2009, she published TRANSLATE YOURSELF! A Performance Reader for Staging, and in 2011, THE PRESENT AUTHOR. Who Speaks in Performance? with Revolver Publishing, Berlin. She presented her thesis about performance inter alia at the performance symposium This Sentence Is Now Being Performed in Vienna, and she will be a speaker at the symposium Recollecting the Act. Zur Tradierung von Performancekunst in Bern, Switzerland this fall. She teaches at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna’s Institute for Art Theory and Cultural Studies. Besides her self-realized projects, she has worked in both political and artistic collaborations and collectives, cooperated with dancers, choreographers, and theoreticians, and explored various ways of speaking together.

Marie Reinert has been developing an art practice situated at the borders of installation, drawing, video, and performance. She uses her practice to explore and deconstruct normative behaviors in society and in everyday life (Sur tes traces [On your tracks], 2003), as well as at work (Infiltrations, 2005), in consumer spaces (Premier prix [Bottom price], 2003), and entertainment areas. She infiltrates, observes, searches, digs, and inventories. She questions body movements in its architectural environment and in that way reveals our relation to functions and systems, codes and protocols, until we rethink our common use of those tools. She has worked both in collaboration with workers from public archives (video Faire, Valeurs croisées – Biennale d'art contemporain de Rennes, 2008) and in a long-term infiltration, on a roll-on roll-off cargo ship, from Marseille to Algiers (Roll-on Roll-Off, Marseille, 2011). She recently participated in Le Printemps de Septembre (Toulouse, 2010) and will present her first solo show in the Kiev Arsenal during Art-Kyiv Contemporary 2011.

Marie Frampier is a freelance curator and art critic. She studied the history of art in Bordeaux and Rennes, graduated from the Sorbonne’s professional master’s program in exhibiting contemporary art, and participated in de Appel’s curatorial program from 2010 to 2011. Her research focuses on curating contemporary performance and the performative nature of curating and art criticism. She was assistant curator at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris/ARC and editorial assistant at the contemporary art magazine Trouble. In 2012, she will curate a cycle of events at la Maison Descartes – Institut Français des Pays-Bas (Amsterdam), which will question the relationship between performance and translation within the framework of the Dutch political context. She regularly contributes to the magazines Critique d’Art, Superstition, and Zérodeux.