Untitled (Holding Horizon)
Untitled (Holding Horizon) is a choreography that continues Alex Baczyński-Jenkins’ engagement with negotiations of desire, the materiality of gestures, and the affections of a queer commons. Through sensual, alienated gestures and the box step – a movement used in several social dances – synchronisation, pleasure, and alliance coexist with disorientation, limitation, and loss.
On the thresholds of visibility and invisibility, the performers navigate the fluctuating dynamics of collectivity, intimacy, and interdependence. They affect, and become affected by, the live mixed sound and light, while repetition and duration elicit shifting perceptions and associations. A memory of a rave, a ghostly gathering, a celebration and mourning, a militant congregation, a pastoral imaginary. In this altered state, the box step becomes a vessel for the limit as material.
Untitled (Holding Horizon) relies on a durational experience. The audience can enter and leave the space at their leisure.
is an artist and choreographer engaging with queer affect, embodiment, and relationality. Through gesture, collectivity, touch and sensuality, his practice unfolds the structures and politics of desire. Relationality is present in the dialogical ways the work is developed and performed, as well as in the materials and poetics it invokes. This includes tracing relations between sensation and sociality, embodied expression and alienation, the textures of everyday experience, and the utopian and latent queer histories. He approaches choreography as a way of reflecting on feeling, perception and collective emergence while indulging in other forms of experiencing memory, time, and change. He is the co-founder of Kem, a Warsaw-based queer feminist collective focused on choreography, performance and sound at the interface with social practice. Through various experimental formats and community building, Kem engages in critical intimacy and queer pleasure.
Credits
Choreography Alex Baczyński-Jenkins This iteration is in collaboration with and performed by Aaa Biczysko, Ewa Dziarnowska, Rafał Pierzyński, Ronald Berger, Sigrid Stigsdatter Developed with Aaa Biczysko, Ewa Dziarnowska, Rafał Pierzyński, Sigrid Stigsdatter, Tiran Normanson With special thanks to Billy Morgan Developed as part of Kem’s residency at the Ujazdowski Castle Center for Contemporary Art, Warsaw Production manager Ola Knychalska Live sound, lighting Krzysztof Bagiński Sound research Jana Androsova, Krzysztof Bagiński, Tobias Koch, Filip Lech Styling advice Rafał Domagła Studio director Andrea Rodrigo Studio manager Sarie Nijboer Distribution Something Great. Originally commissioned for the 2018 Frieze Artist Award, in partnership with Delfina Foundation, and presented as part of Frieze Projects, curated by Diana Campbell Betancourt.