The Participatory Performances of “River Biographies”
Days: 2023.11.11-11.26
Open Hours of the Performances:
13:00 – 13:30 13:45 – 14:15 14:30 – 15:00
15:15 – 16:45 16:00 – 16:30 16:45 – 17:15
Language: Manderin, English
Venue: Chronus Art Center
2nd Floor, Building 11, No.50 Mo Gan Shan Rd, Shanghai
Free Admission
Chronus Art Center (CAC) will present the performative part of its current exhibition River Biographies on every Saturday and Sunday from November 11 to 26. Based on two individuals’ inter-intra action within and with a larger group, the participants will lead each other by the hand and move together, but their experiences will be separated by Sightless Goggles and different timelines of three-dimensional sound. Each participant will enact a different part in the artwork’s choreography: “You are Water, I am Stone.” They engage in the friction between the materials, between visual and auditory organs and nerves of the skin, relying on each other’s perspective to form a coherent reality that blurs the boundaries between the material body, self and environment. The performance brings awareness of the water and stone elements in human body, encouraging participants to see the river not as an object separated from themselves but as something intimately connected to their own existence.
River Biographies by the Swedish artist duo Lundahl & Seitl is the concluding part of the second iteration of CAC Projects. River Biographies opened on October 28, 2023 and will remain on view through November 26, 2023.
The exhibition at CAC encompasses occasional participatory performances during its exhibition timeframe and an installation in the gallery that audially and visually cartographs fractions of a river named Tabergs Ån in Sweden around where the artists grew up and initiated the first water and study for River Biographies. In the exhibition, the real and the imagined negotiating between the visitors via a notion of virtual reality – not as a form of technology but Embodiment, as a medium, can access levels of reality where conventional strategies of understanding and rationalisation become insufficient. It moves the framing of technology within environmental aesthetics from a “data dump” mode of replication of numbers and statistics related to anthropogenic climate change to the concept of “geo-affect,” coined by Jane Bennett, emphasizing the role of affective relationships with the environment and material world in shaping political and ethical commitments.
Lundahl & Seitl
Lundahl & Seitl live and work in Stockholm. Their immersive solo projects reinterpret the medium of the exhibition as interpersonal processes via choreography, matter and time. Presented around the world, notably at Royal Academy of Art in 2014, Gropius-Bau in 2016, and Kunstmuseum Bonn in 2017. Group Exhibitions include the 8th Momentum Biennale of Nordic Contemporary Art 2015 (NO), An Imagined Museum at Centre Pompidou Metz 2016-2017 (FR), the 3rd Kochi Muziris Biennale 2016-2017 (IN), and a recent commission: Echoes of Alternative Histories at Staatsteater Kassel, which coincided with Documenta Fifteen. In the fall of 2022, the duo was visiting artists at the ACT Programme at MIT.
The duo Lundahl & Seitl have developed a method and an art form comprising staging, choreographed movement, instructions, and immersive technologies, juxtaposed with material objects and the human ability to organize perception into a world. Notions of freedom, autonomy, and what is real, imagined, and perceived are negotiated in an investigation of virtual reality, not as a form of technology but as an ability or sensibility to a relationship with surroundings, with increased insight into how technology makes ‘us’ and lays the ground for the human umwelt – how it connects and disconnects us from each other and other life forms and processes.
Their research is tacit, neuro-diverse, and heuristic. It relies on intuition in an iterative process of allowing concepts, theories and stories to meet the resistance of the physical world via sensory experience, direct observations and listening – often in collaborations with others, such as philosophers, anthropologists, writers, game-engine programmers, neurologists, politicians, curators, as well as the public. Projects are often perennial and develop into series that sometimes fork out into entirely new works. The practice encompasses curation, gallery exhibitions, site-sensitive solo projects, and collective performances in public spaces.
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