Welcome to the opening of the exhibition Insomnia, a spectacular 12-hour night exploring the boundaries between sleep and wakefulness. From sunset to sunrise, Bonniers Konsthall will be filled with performances, workshops, rituals, live music and DJs. Free admission.
Program for the Opening Night
6.39 pm Let Your Fingers Do The Walking: Sunset – Julia Feyrer & Tamara Henderson with Annahita Yazdi
6.39 pm DJ – Maya Lourenço
7.00 pm Opening remarks by curator Sara Arrhenius, director of Bonniers Konsthall
7.30-10.30 pm Dream Workshop with Nahum Mantra – Drifting Away from Earth, a Dream Laboratory (Fully booked. Send an email to [email protected] for waiting list)*
9.40 pm GORILLAS GRRLZ, Reading by Karl Holmqvist
10.10 pm DJ – Your Planet is Next
11.00 pm Performance by Wu Tsang and boychild featuring Patrick Belaga – You Sad Legend
11.30 DJ – Marlena Lampinen
00.00 Let Your Fingers Do The Walking: Midnight – Julia Feyrer & Tamara Henderson with Annahita Yazdi
00.30 am Live music and performance by Ensemble Makadam – Goldberg Hallucinations
01.00 am Performance by Leif Elggren/Marja-leena Sillanpää – Who Are Very Nobody 2
02.00 am DJ – Marlena Lampinen
02.00-05.00 am Dream Workshop with Nahum Mantra – Drifting Away from Earth, a Dream Laboratory (Fully booked. Send an email to [email protected] for waiting list).
03.00 am Performance by Gideonsson/Londré – Hour of the Wolf/Vargtimmen. Drop-in registration on site from midnight.
05.20 am Sleepwalktalk, Sound piece by Anna Linder
Before 06.40 am Let Your Fingers Do The Walking: Sunset – Julia Feyrer & Tamara Henderson with Annahita Yazdi
06.40 am Doors close
*The workshop include hypnotic elements. To participate you must be over 18 and not under influence of alcohol. All participants have the right to cancel their participation at any time.
Gideonsson/Londré’s performance is done in collaboration with Andquestionmark. Thanks also to Atracta, the Mexican Embassy in Stockholm and Miss Clara Hotel.
”You Sad Legend” Performance by Wu Tsang & boychild (featuring Patrick Belaga), Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center (EMPAC), Troy NY, April 15, 2016. Photo by Jon Wang.
You Sad Legend – Performance by Wu Tsang and boychild, featuring Patrick Belaga
You Sad Legend is part of an ongoing performance collaboration between Wu Tsang and boychild, featuring experimental cellist Patrick Belaga, which explores different modes of storytelling through an improvisational structure of voice, movement, and musical score. The performance takes inspiration from Tsang’s recent film project Duilian, which explores the intimate relationship between the historical Chinese revolutionary poet Qiu Jin and calligrapher Wu Zhiying (c. 1907).
WU TSANG is a visual artist, performer, and filmmaker. Her projects have been presented at museuems and festivals internationally, including the Museum of Modern Art (NY), the Whitney Museum (NY), the Tate Modern (London), Stedelijk Museum (Amsterdam), MCA (Chicago). Her documentary feature WILDNESS (2012) won the Grand Jury Prize at OUTFEST, and her recent fiction short YOU’RE DEAD TO ME (2014) premiered on PBS and won a 2014 Imagen Award.
boychild is a Los Angeles-based performance artist. Her performances have been presented at MoMA PS1 (NY), the SFMOMA (San Francisco), the MCA (Chicago), Kulturhuset (Stockholm), MOCA (Los Angeles), MOMA (Warsaw), and Stedelijk Museum (Amsterdam). Recent collaborations include Korakrit Arunanondchai, Wu Tsang, and the streetwear label Hood By Air.
Patrick Belaga is a classically trained experimental cellist. Recent performances include Donaufestival 2015 (Krems, Austria), the Museum of Contemporary Art (Los Angeles), Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst (Zurich), and Julia Stoschek Collection / Kunsthalle Düsseldorf. Recent recordings include the soundtrack for Gus Van Sant’s recent feature film I AM MICHAEL.
Hour of the Wolf – Performance by Gideonsson/Londré
3:30 You look down at your hands, they feel as if they have grown larger. Someone has pulled the fingers from the center. There is the middle of the hand; there begin the slurry meat hands. Chubby swollen feet. Toes start growing together. A cylindrical block is pressed against the soles of your feet. The wounds make them itch. They heal. On your head, you wear an undersized itchy woolen hat. On a Lego head. You can lift the skull off and remove the head.
The performance starts at 3 am on the night of the 25th of September and continues through 5 am. During this time, you may participate in experiments derived from sensations often felt during the early morning hours, when our pulse and body functions are reduced. These feelings have inspired the mythological creature “nightmare”, a goblin visiting sleepers at night and sitting on their chest, causing them bad dreams and trouble to breathe. Legend has it that the Hour of the Wolf is also the time of the day when most people die, and when most children are born.
For several years, Gideonsson/Londré have examined how our prehistoric internal clock works during the early morning hours. In experiments they conduct on each other, they test out the physical sensorium and how it translates into communication: Can the experiences be shared and transferred into language that goes beyond the individual?
Waking up at 3 am in the morning, one of the artists enters a room and stays in complete darkness, while narrating the sensations felt in the body to the person outside: itching arms and enlarged woolen feet, eyebrows growing out of the head and the stomach gathered in an elephant’s trunk falling towards the ground. Gideonsson/Londré record their nightly ventures in writings and drawings that the experimenter produces after the narration of the test subject. Many of them show huge heavy feet and disproportional hands, due to the brain misjudging the proportionally concentrated amount of nerves in the extremities in comparison to other body parts.
The performance is structured into four different time zones that are dedicated to varying phases of sleep. Participants can experience different sensations in a dormant state of sustained activity, while the performers are working and take care of them. The rhythmic beat of each of the zones is defined by the participants’ pulse, which is taken regularly and translated into foot stomping, thus amplifying, translating and reverberating the individual’s experience. Participants are welcome to drop by at any time between 3 – 5 am, availability of slots depends on number of participants and you may be required to wait.
Gideonsson/Londré first devised The Hour of the Wolf for Andquestionmark, Stockholm, curated by Stefanie Hessler and Carsten Höller. Text by Stefanie Hessler.
Drifting Away from Earth, a Dream Laboratory – Nahum Mantra
Dream workshop with hypnosis
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