Kunsthal Extra City, MORPHO and OUT OF SIGHT are joining forces on Saturday, 28th September. We are warmly inviting you for a full day of events in our neighbourhood. For Kunsthal Extra City and MORPHO this day marks a start of Closing Sessions, a new collaborative ritual that celebrates the ending of an exhibition and an artist residency at their shared locations in the monastery. For OUT OF SIGHT it is the second chapter of the long-term project CLOSE ENCOUNTERS.
A series of audio-visual performances in which we taste and we smell, we see and then we hear. Through senses we meet each other and the world around us.
::: PROGRAMME :::
: Kunsthal Extra City, Provinciestraat 112
13:00-14:00
Curatorial walk with Joachim Naudts for the finissage of the exhibition ANCESTRAL CLOUDS, ANCESTRAL CLAIMS by Denise Ferreira da Silva & Arjuna Neuman
: OUT OF SIGHT, Somersstraat 31
14:00-15:30
Diane Mahin — GUT / durational performance
15:30-16:00
Laila Claessen — BITTER / performance
16:00-16:30
Boris de Klerk — ER IS GEEN RITME, ER IS REGEN / performance
16:30-17:00
Pause & drinks
17:00-17:45
Manuel Groothuysen — IN SOFT OUT LOUD / performance
18:00-18:30
Boris de Klerk and Finn Borath — CHAMBER PIECES / audio-visual performance
: MORPHO Refectory, entry through Kunsthal Extra City
19:00-19:45
Judith Engelen — MELT / performance (by OUT OF SIGHT)
: Kunsthal Extra City, Provinciestraat 112
20:00-20:35
Melisa Yağmur Saydı — A STAIN OF LIGHT ON MY SCREEN, TRAVELING DOWN THROUGH YOUR PIXELS / audiovisual performance (by MORPHO, M HKA and Salt)
21:00-22:00
Drinks in the garden
Entry to all the performances is FREE.
Realised with the support of: Flanders — State of the Art, the City of Antwerp, M HKA, Salt
::: More about CLOSE ENCOUNTERS. Chapter 2 :::
CLOSE ENCOUNTERS curated by OUT OF SIGHT is inspired by Allen Hynek’s categorisation of UFO witnesses.
Hynek proposed three steps:
Step 1 — Visual testimony from a distance of less than 150 metres, on which a degree of detail becomes clear and an angle of movement can be deduced.
Step 2 — Physical traces of the event: impressions on the landscape, power failures or physiological effects on people.
Step 3 — The final step involves direct contact with a living entity.
For the second chapter, Out of Sight presents works by: Diane Mahin, Laila Claessen, Manuel Groothuysen, Judith Engelen, Boris De Klerk and Finn Borath. They confront us with the materiality of the body while questioning the metaphorical meaning we ascribe to our perceptions.
In the durational performance "GUT", Diane Mahin imagines how humans behave when their bodies are turned inside out. The intestinal sounds of a performer are amplified. A visceral and absurd experience that gains in vitality as the gut becomes more active.
Moving up to the mouth, Laila Claessen presents "BITTER". We are invited at her dinner table to eat Brussels sprouts, while she recounts a tale of adverse family relationships. Drawing inspiration from Ayurvedic nutrition, she investigates how bitter tastes disappear from western diets while it actually has a positive effect on our physical and mental wellbeing.
In "ER IS RITME, ER IS REGEN", Boris de Klerk starts from a simple description of the start of a day. This short text is repeated over and over, continuously shifting the timing of each spoken word and manipulating how their meanings are reflected in space.
Manuel Groothuysen investigates the synchronicity between the breath and the moving body in "IN SOFT OUT LOUD". Through his physical motions, the rhythm and intensity of his breath is affected, the sound of which drives an acoustic composition invoking strange and uncanny worlds.
In their "CHAMBER PIECES" Finn Borath and Boris de Klerk create a direct relationship between light and sound, eyes and ears. A grid of fluorescent lights is manipulated, creating intense visual patterns while at the same time producing an electro-acoustic composition from the sound the lights make when switched on and off.
"MELT" by Judith Engelen starts from the visual and tactile properties of wax. As a material that historical played an important role in the development of writing and cast making, it is deeply entwined with how we as humans extend and share our memory. The transient nature of the material is used as an analog to the uncertainty of our recollection.
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