Special Event
VERDENSTEATRET
And All the Questionmarks Started to Sing
AT
HERZLIYA CONTEMPORARY ART BIENNIAL
Date: 13 > 18 Oct. 2011
Opening hours:
Thu 13 Oct. 8 – 11 pm: Installation. 9 pm: Performance
Fri 14 Oct. (closed)
Sat 15 Oct: 6 – 11 pm: Installation. 7 and 9 pm: Performance
Sun 16 Oct. 6 – 11 pm: Installation. 7 and 9 pm: Performance
Mon 17 Oct. 6 – 11 pm: Installation. 7 and 9 pm: Performance
Tue 18 Oct. 6 – 8 pm: Installation. 7 pm: Performance
Place: Center of Herzliya. Corner of Sokolow and HaNadiv street
And All the Questionmarks Started to Sing is a composition in the form of a hybrid between installation, performance and concert.
It might be described as an art-machine played by musicians, performers and robots.
For more information, photos, video etc. about this work: www.verdensteatret.com
The artists: Asle Nilsen, Lisbeth J. Bodd, Håkon Lindbäck, Piotr Pajchel, Christian Blom, Kristine Roald Sandøy, Hai Nguyen Dinh, Alireza Djabbary, Øyvind B. Lyse, Gjertrud Jynge, Espen Sommer Eide, Thorolf Thuestad, Eirik Blekesaune, Hans Skogen.
This work is presented in different ways depending on the context.
There are at the present 3 versions:
1: Live version: performance/concert where performers/musicians play on and operate all the machines/sculptures and mechanical instruments.
2: Installation version: A fully automatic computerprogrammed version for exhibitions.
3: Hybrid version: A combination where live sequences alternate with automation. For instance 1 hour automation – 45 min live sequence – ½ hour automation and so on….
This is the version we present at Herzliya Biennial.
Many artists of different backgrounds have left their prints on this work. Ensuring a multitude of ideas threatening to tear the work apart, artistic magnitude and in consequence an articulation of the composition
The elements are tied together by kinship, proximity, simultaneity and the belief that differing materials appear as a well moulded whole under the composition.
By treating the whole room and everything in it as the material, the group has created a vast intermedial composition where visual art, sound art and music are combined with the theatrical potential in our material.
The work also demonstrates the deep fascination Verdensteatret has for all kinds of animation – this strange and somewhat miraculous activity of breading life into dead objects, stiff figures and frozen images.
As a spectator you witness the actual creation of moving images at several levels.
A dive into the core of the physical building of images, down to where the image arises, takes on solid form, twists and winds into constellations and compounded images.
Physically the workappears as a landscape of highly original kinetic sculptures, that activate a diversity of animation techniques, micro puppetry, music, lights and shadowplay. All objects produce art and are also a part in it. The idea of simultaneous perspectives and multiple functions tied to each object creates a work of works.
A conglomerate of connections across media and layers. Some obvious, planned and controlled. Others seen by the single spectator only, weaving her story, from available threads.
This landscape of kinetic sculptures creates a room in constant transformation.
A room with violent shifts between micro and macro perspectives. From the grand to the miniscule. Each component available as a separate cosmos, an opening for a miniature suspended inside the grand piece.
The sonic expression stretches and contracts dephts and distances by moving physically in the room through a network of loudspeakers. The work makes full use of the capacity sound has to create new rooms in the room, make shifts in direction, twist and bend the dimensions.
The sound creates a spatial dynamic that pushes beyond the physical and visual scale of the room.
Sound, image and movement has melted into one unit and cannot be separated from each other again.
“And All the Questionmarks Started to Sing”was first presented at Guangdong Museum of Art in Guangzhou, China in march-april 2010.
The first presentation of a live version took place at Festival Theater der Welt, in Essen, Germany in July 2010.
The premiere of the final live-version took place at Black Box Theatre, Oslo in september 2010.
Further it has been presented in various versions the following places:
The Shanghai Biennale 2010.
-In Quebec, Canada, at Empac, Troy, New York and DTW/ Futureperfect in NYC.
2011. Festival Fabbrica Europa, Florence, Italy. 2011.
The project is supported by The Royal Nowegian Embassy in Tel Aviv, Art Council Norway, Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs / DTS,
Verdensteatret is supported by Art Council Norway
VERDENSTEATRET
VERDENSTEATRET are artists from different art-fields who work together and make live-art and other art-related projects.
They endeavour to use a collaborative process to deeply integrate different artistic disciplines into projects that bridge the gap between artistic boarders.
Characteristic for their work is that they are building exquisite links between seemingly incompatible technologies and materials.
The experimental use of audiovisual technology in a close dialogue with more traditional and historic tools of artistic expression results in complex orchestral works or space-related musical compositions.
Seeing the sound, listening to the images.
Their works are presented widely international in different art contexts and locations, such as art galleries, contemporary music festivals and theatres.
In 2005 they received the Bessie Award in New York in the category ”Performance, Installation and New Media”.
They have developed a unique and complex audiovisual style, where sound spaces mingle with sculptural scenography and stories of the fragile human soul.
They say that their activity now has become a ”telling orchestra” that performs compositions in the “movable room genre”.
Established notions of form or style about “performance” are more or less useless for these peculiarly captivating works of art.
More info at: www.verdensteatret.com
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“Floatsome of the Future”
…” Instead of beginning with an all-encompassing idea, Verdensteatret takes the ashes as their starting-point, collecting fragments of contexts that may once have had meaning; old scrap that they have picked up from the roadside. They call it flotsam of the future.
And through Verdensteatret’s work, the flotsam is transformed into something else; twisted, bent and carefully reassembled to create new contexts. Verdensteatret’s art is born when all these elements begin to work together. When the shadows fall on the back wall, the shrieking machinery, the joke that you can’t understand because it is told in a foreign language, the sound of a man hammering away on a piano. Verdensteatret’s art is everything that comes into being and disappears again in the same instant.
Think of the old cinemas from the early days of film, where people crowded in to be blinded by pictures they had never seen before, and by the wonderful technology that gave them these pictures. If we opened the door to one of these picture palaces, we would find machinery rusting away, and we might perhaps smile sadly at the fascination for things that once were new and spectacular. Verdensteatret takes us into such spaces and fills them with their own futuristic dream – samplers, Powerbooks and projectors, technology that we may find fascinating now, but which will soon end up on the scrap heap too. By combining them to form a rusty shadow theatre, Verdensteatret shows us that our own futuristic fantasies are also about to disappear.
Verdensteatret’s art is always in the act of erasing itself, which is why there are so many historical references in their work. Therefore their work pays defiant homage to artistic production: a production that creates no stable values, but which instead chooses to cultivate moments that should really not be cultivable.
The task of the artist is not to produce meaning, but to produce production, the hungarian Nicolas Schöffer once said. This may sound like splitting hairs, but in fact there is a major difference. Verdensteatret never presents you with a ready-made meaning, but rather shows the production of meaning. By setting a large-scale, unstoppable play of references in motion, Verdensteatret lays the groundwork for meanings to develop.
As a spectator of Verdensteatrets work you are never presented with a finished expression, but you witness the creation of an expression. And because time, space and the viewer are drawn into this creation, there is always an element of coincidence – the final expression is produced by a game of chance. But as in Schöffer’s ballets of light, or in John Cage’s happenings, or Alexander Calder’s mobile sculptures, chance is always dependent on one strict condition: the rusty mechanics of the machine. Jon Refsdal Moe