Wir sind Henkel
Body builders – these are Austria’s strongest – with lurid body paint will occupy the same space as 1970s Space Age Design vases and lamps. A bizarre tableau vivant that will channel utopian imagery. Jakob Lena Knebl and Markus Pires Mata have created a chamber of fetish that will make it impossible to discern any difference between art and design, object and body, culture and nature. Inspired by Georg Simmel’s essay The Handle (Der Henkel, 1909), this installation and its surface structures will deflect any essentialist identity concepts. In Simmel’s essay, the handle of a cup symbolises the link between art and functionality. But, in the end, the handle is also being regarded as an instruction – the animated object, its materiality and structure permeating reality, because it is “the principle of the handle to mediate between the work of art and the world”.
Wir sind Henkel is based on the previous performance The Style Council, presented at steirischer herbst 2019.
artistic practice questions normative identity structures and a specific sense of desire in various genres, materialities and disciplines. The results are multimedia installations she calls “spaces of desire”, which resist deterministic definitions and create a new dynamic space for humour and sensuality.
born in Linz, lives in Wien. Pires Mata is a designer at “house of the very island’s …”, exhibition stylist (aka das_em), lecturer and organisational manager of performances and events like S_P_I_T_ Queer Performance Festival and Anti Valentines*Ball, as well as DJ and club host for queer feminist micro clubbing events like mode.mode.der.klub, klub.krass., strom+- a. o.
Credits
60 minutes
In case of sold-out performances waiting numbers for remaining tickets are handed out at the evening box office opening one hour before showtime.
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