SUPERHOST 2021 – Contact – Public programme
Event
M HKA, Antwerp
12 June 2021 10:00 - 12 June 2021 18:00
CONTACT
Saturday 12 June 2021
Programme of contributions
Workshop, screening and performance
with Army of Love, Laurel Halo, Hanne Lippard and Ania Nowak
as part of
Contact Mood Share by Hanne Lippard
SUPERHOST 2021
Schedule
10:00 - 14:00
If Every Time We Touched (SOLD OUT)
Workshop led by artist and choreographer Ania Nowak
Venue: 6th floor exhibition galleries, M HKA
Duration: 4 hours
Closed workshop
Participants of different backgrounds, ages and access needs are invited to take part
Free access. Limited capacity of 10 participants, prior registration mandatory (SOLD OUT)
11:00 - 18:00
Contact
Display of artworks by Hanne Lippard
Venue: museum hallway, auditorium, top floor exhibition galleries
11:00 - 18:00
Safe Touch
Screening of a film by Army of Love
Venue: auditorium
16:00 - 17:00
Hands
Performance by artist Hanne Lippard and musician Laurel Halo.
Venue: rooftop terrace, M HKA
Accessible with a museum ticket. Limited capacity of 50 participants, prior registration mandatory
Contact Mood Share by Hanne Lippard is a three-part programme focusing on language, especially the vocabulary and semiology that derive from particular social changes and developments.
Hanne Lippard’s programme unfolds over three different seasons, each of which features a display of artworks and a series of events.
The Contact season dedicates its time and space to what might touch a body or connect one to another, both virtually and physically. As part of the Contact season, we propose a one-day programme of events. By reflecting on the notion of ‘contact’, the programme byposes questions about care, vulnerability, movement, touch and desire.
Contributions:
Ania Nowak, If Every Time We Touched, workshop
"As members of human society, perhaps the most difficult task we face daily is that of touching one another–whether the touch is physical, moral, emotional, or imaginary. Contact is a crisis. As the anthropologists say, “Every touch is a modified blow.” (Anne Carson, Men in the Off Hours, 2000)
In this workshop, Ania Nowak and participants will approach absent touch and remote care as consequences of our current contactless reality. Departing from an amalgam of body-mind experiences combining Zoom fatigue, sickness anxiety and hunger for spontaneity and serendipity, participants will attempt to work with intimacy as an ambiguous space of solace, pleasure and risk. As experts in choreographing distance, participants will use speech and touch to figure out what consent and trust mean to us in times of sanitary regimes. What forms of access and proximity do we desire today? How are top-down restrictions affecting our ability to breathe the same air? Is every touch a modified blow? The workshop will be a combination of a massage clinic and discussion club with a performative potential. Participants of different backgrounds, ages and access needs are invited to take part, especially those with an artistic and/or activist practice or those wishing to develop one.
Ania Nowak is a choreographer and artist. Her choreographic practice approaches vulnerability and desire to reimagine what bodies and language can do, using formats such as live and video performance, performative exhibition and text. Nowak inquiries into the political dimension of the body as material and its immaterial aspects - affects, feelings and intuition - to think of new, embodied practices of care and companionship. This latter notion is of specific interest to her when taking into account the unstable, transnational character of life and work in today’s Western world, our experiences of sexuality, sickness and grief, as well as the ethics of pleasure in times of political and environmental urgency.
Nowak’s works have been presented at HAU Hebbel am Ufer and Sophiensaele in Berlin; Nowy Teatr, Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art in Warsaw; BWA Wrocław, CAC Vilnius, ICK Amsterdam a.o. In 2021 she is Artist-in-Residence at Ankara Queer Art in Turkey and Q21 MuseumsQuartier in Vienna. Nowak lives and works in Berlin. https://technologiesoflove.tumblr.com/
Hanne Lippard and Laurel Halo, Hands, performance
The performance builds upon a collaboration initiated in Corsica at the Providenza residency in August 2020. Laurel Halo is an electronic musician, composer and producer who bases her compositions on her own voice and those of others. Similarly to Hanne Lippard’s practice, the vocalised words are considered as a malleable material with its own tonality, rather than a mere piece of informative text. Using recordings of live instruments and vocal loops made on site in Corsica, Halo and Lippard present a newly developed performance and soundscape for this season of Contact at MHKA.
Laurel Halo is an American experimental music composer and producer who is currently based in Berlin. She released her debut album Quarantine (2012) on Hyperdub, which was named the album of the year by The Wire. She followed with albums Chance of Rain (2013), In Situ (2015), Dust (2017), Raw Silk Uncut Wood (2018), DJ-Kicks (2019) and Possessed (2020). She has collaborated on studio recordings and live performances with such composers and artists as Moritz von Oswald, John Cale, Hanne Lippard and Julia Holter, and performed in concert halls and clubs around the world. In 2021 she launched a new record label and radio show called Awe.
Hanne Lippard works with language both as subject and medium of her artistic practice. She is particularly interested in the differentiation and discrepancy between spoken and written words. For over a decade she has developed a practice of performances, installations, sound, image and graphic based artworks, print sand publications. While arising from a highly personal perspective, her productions succeed to capture and encompass collective vocabularies, attitudes and dynamics. Using processes of isolation, extraction, articulation, dilution and repetition, Lippard makes language self-conscious of its intimate and collective implications. By highlighting the role of language in carrying historical, contemporary and sometimes anecdotal claims, Lippard aims to liberate it from certain misuses and abuses and to confront it to its own generic or idiosyncratic expressions.
Army of Love, Safe Touch, film
HD, 5 min., 2020
Written, filmed, and directed by Ingo Niermann
Edited by Martina Jung
Narrated by Staci Bu Shea
Performed by Chris Handberg and Steven Schoch
Supported by Institut Kunst HGK FHNW, Basel
In the film Safe Touch, the Army of Love offers sensual love to all who need it. During the Sars-Cov-2 pandemic, though more people suffer from physical isolation, we can’t offer organized gatherings. But anybody can be in the Army of Love. You can meet with people craving love and touch in a park, a forest, or a deserted parking lot and practice the following exercises without the risk of infection.
The Army of Love is a solidarity group that offers training, recruitments, discussions, manuals, and testimonial videos to promote the redistribution of sensual love to all who need it.
Listening recommendation:
A CONSTANT OF FEELINGS
a programme of audio works selected by Hanne Lippard
as part of season Contact
Available on Spotify
Also available at Radio Public, Pocket Casts, Google Podcasts, Breaker Anchor.
Upcoming season Mood starts on 17th June 2021 with a new display of artworks by Hanne Lippard.
Contact Mood Share is generously supported by the Office for Contemporary Art Norway (OCA), with additional support from the Royal Norwegian Embassy in Brussels.