Myriam Lefkowitz “Walk, Hands, Eyes (Amsterdam)”

CALL FOR PARTICIPANTS for workshop by Myriam Lefkowitz “Walk, Hands, Eyes (Amsterdam)”

Language: English
Reservations: to apply, please send your CV and a short description of something that has struck your attention in the city lately to cp-intern [​at​] deappel.nl by May 19
Participation is free, max. capacity 10 people

All the curious, interested and brave are invited to participate in the workshop Walk, Hands, Eyes (Amsterdam) led by the artist Myriam Lefkowitz in de Appel arts centre and its surroundings on Sunday 24 May. The workshop is part of the Curatorial Programme Final Project, on view at de Appel arts centre from 23 May until 28 June 2015.

can you recall something you saw this morning ?
at what distance were you from what you were seeing?
were you moving? were you still?
were your eyes moving? were they still?
what was the quality of the space you were in? narrow, wide, indoor, outdoor?
where were you in the image that you were seeing ?
in this image is there something you perceived that was not directly visual?
what was the soundscape of that image?
was there the smell of that image?
where were your hands?
did you have any physical sensation happening in that image?
it was state were you? in what mood were you?
did this image make you think of something? was there a connection between what you were directly seeing and something else?
did this image bring you to another image?

The workshop will evolve around the project Walk, Hands, Eyes (a city) that artist Myriam Lefkowitz has been practicing for several years. Walk, Hands, Eyes (a city) is a perceptive experience for one receiver and one guide, weaving a specific relation between walking, seeing and touching in a city for one hour. This walk triggers our usual encounters with urban topography. In the time frame of this experience we seem to exist in a mixture between the sensorial, architectural, historical and social reality of a city and a form of space that our perception is producing. Close to a dreaming activity, this experience generates a re-composition of a world through fragments of reality, which somehow redefines what we call ‘space’.

What is it that we call perceiving? What is the content of a perceptive act? The workshop will ask those big questions by sharing the techniques based on experience and perception between the artist and the participants. It will consist of transmitting the tools activated in the walks, mainly based on visual and touching scores aiming to increase the elasticity of our sensorial attentions and tuning those attentions to a partner and to the city of Amsterdam.

Myriam Lefkowitz (FR, 1980) is a Paris based performance artist. Since 2010 her research has focused on questions of attention and perception, developing them through various immersive devices that involve one spectator and one performer. Her work has been presented at Le Mouvement (Biel), Family Business (Palais de Tokyo), 54th Venice Biennale (Lithuanian and Cypriot Pavillon), and Kunsteverein (NY). She regularly gives workshops and lectures in places that include the Museum of Modern Art Georges Pompidou (Paris), Open School East (London) and the Royal Institute of Art (Stockholm). In 2011, she took part in the Master of experimentation in Art and Politics (SPEAP, Science Po Paris) founded by Bruno Latour, where she became part of the teaching committee in 2013. Since 2013, she has been collaborating with the artist Simon Ripoll Hurier on the relation between seeing and saying, through a description device of American 1930s musicals. She is currently an artist in residency at Les Laboratoires d'Aubervilliers.

The Curatorial Programme is a 10-month long training programme for young, international curators, which has been organized by de Appel arts centre since 1994. This year, the final project of the Curatorial Programme consists of two exhibitions: Spell to Spelling ** Spelling to Spell and Your Time Is Not My Time, on view at de Appel arts centre from 23 May until 28 June, 2015.