Curatorial Introduction
Pause: Alexis Blake
Crack Nerve Boogie Swerve
27.–29. January 23

Curator: Léon Kruijswijk
Curatorial Assistant: Lara Scherrieble
Curatorial Fellow (CCS Bard Mentorship Work Placement): Katherine Adams

KW Institute for Contemporary Art is pleased to present the performance Crack Nerve Boogie Swerve by the artist Alexis Blake (b. 1981, US, based in NL). Her multidisciplinary practice brings together visual art, dance, and performance. Blake perceives the body as an archive of embodied knowledge and investigates how bodies are represented, which she critically examines, questions, disrupts, and renegotiates. Her work engages specifically with the representation and subjectification of women’s and queer bodies while activating them as sites and agents of socio-political change. In doing so, she creates languages of resistance and spaces to expose and elude systems of power.

Blake conceived the first outlines of Crack Nerve Boogie Swerve in 2019, and further developed and completed the piece for this first presentation of her work in Germany. In it, Blake focuses on notions of transparency, resistance, resonance, and breaking—breaking free from constraints, liberating oneself from the confinement of oppression, and stretching the limits of art institutions. The meaning and act of breaking are explored using sound, the voice, and the body in an installation made of glass and steel. Glass as a material becomes a performer as much as a metaphor for the individual and collective body, as both are inherently fragile, resilient, and strong, depending on the way they are handled or treated. It is constantly in an in-between state, shifting between visibility and invisibility, clarity and opaqueness.

The locally rooted crew consists of percussionist Sofia Borges, low frequency sound researcher Stefanie Egedy, producer and DJ mobilegirl, and six dancers—Viola Luise Barner, Alice De Maio, Luana Madikera, Aya Nakagawa, Willie Stark, Matilde Tommasini—who come from a variety of dance backgrounds, including breakdance, hip hop, house, Afro-fusion, contemporary, heels, and ballet. Through a collaborative rehearsal process, Blake has created a choreography that scrutinizes the resilience and versatility of the glass material as well as its semantics. The movable steel structures that make up the installation imbue the glass with agency, as the wall-mounted sheets of glass become xylophones. The heavyweight subwoofers put to the test not only the material but the entire architecture and the physical bodies in the space—of the performers and the spectators alike.

Dance here is understood as a political and empowering tool. Historically, numerous dance styles have emerged as forms of expression and as acts of resistance against social constraints and oppression. This includes many of the genres practiced by the dancers. Bringing the various styles together highlights the extent to which our bodies are inclined to move in certain ways as a result of various factors that range from structures imposed on us to chosen embodiment.

In Crack Nerve Boogie Swerve, Alexis Blake takes the crew’s varying forms of expression as a starting point for collaboratively probing how to learn from, come close to, and empathize with one another. However, they aim not to appropriate each other’s sonic and body language. Rather they use the glass as a tool to communicate, break patterns, and collectively give rise to a new vocabulary of sound and movement, albeit without losing their subjectivity.

Artist Bio

Alexis Blake is the recipient of the Dutch Prix de Rome Visual Arts 2021 award. She received her MA in Fine Art from Piet Zwart Institute, Rotterdam (2007) and was an artist-in-residence at WIELS, Contemporary Art Centre, Brussels (2020–2021), the Delfina Foundation, London (2016), Jan van Eyck Academie, Maastricht (2014–15), Fondazione Antonio Ratti with Yvonne Rainer (2015). Her work has been presented at numerous locations, such as: 1st Riga Biennial (Riga, Lativa), BOZAR (Brussels), Performatik19 (Brussels), IMMA – Irish Museum of Modern Art (Dublin), Rijksmuseum (Amsterdam), British Museum / Block Universe Performance Festival (London), TENT (Rotterdam), ExtraCity (Antwerp) and La Triennale di Milano XXI (Milan), and Stedelijk Museum (Amsterdam).

Please note that loud low frequency sounds will be played during the performance, which may affect pregnant people as well as people with epilepsy and heart conditions.

The Pause series of KW Institute for Contemporary Art allows for an ephemeral yet deep engagement with a single artwork in order to draw and question relationships between the past, present, and future. A Pause acts as a punctuation of KW’s regular program by presenting an artwork for a short period of time in between exhibition cycles, working with this state of in-between. Pause projects are predominantly commissioned or reworked pieces that shift between or even merge the disciplines of performance, installation, video, and sonic work.

Team

Artist / Choreography / Direction: Alexis Blake
Sound Artists / Composers: Stefanie Egedy, mobilegirl
Percussionist / Composer: Sofia Borges
Garment Designer: Elisa van Joolen
Dancers / Choreographic Input: Viola Luise Barner, Alice De Maio, Luana Madikera, Aya Nakagawa, Willie Stark, Matilde Tommasini

Curator: Léon Kruijswijk
Curatorial Assistant: Lara Scherrieble
Curatorial Fellow (CCS Bard Mentorship Work Placement): Katherine Adams

Public Program and Outreach Coordinator: Nikolas Brummer
Head of Production: Claire Spilker
Technical Management: Wilken Schade
Head of Installation and Media Technology: Markus Krieger
Installation team: KW Installation Team
Press and Communication: Anna Falck-Ytter, Marie Kube
Text: Alexis Blake, Léon Kruijswijk
Proofreading and Translation: Sabine Weier, Simon Wolff,
Interns: Antoine Schalk, Carla Veit