Pause:
Every Ocean Hughes
Help the Dead
(After Ian White)

24 August 19, 5 pm and 7 pm

25 August 19, 5 pm

Venue: Hall

Admission: 5 € / reduced 3 €

In English

Tickets can be purchased online or at KW’s counter. Please note that capacity for this performance is limited. Booking is advised. No latecomers admitted.

Stockholm-based artist Every Ocean Hughes (EOH) presents Help the Dead—a new live art project that addresses self-determination, accountability, and the fantasy of continuity. Performed by Colin Self and Geo Wyeth, Help the Dead is part concert, part theatre, and draws inspiration from a series of death doula workshops which the artist attended during the past two years. In that time, EOH learned how to care for dead bodies and perform home funerals. Help the Dead considers “queer death,” mutual aid, and the societal aspects of surviving and dying on planet Earth in contemporary times.

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Every Ocean Hughes, formerly known as Emily Roysdon, is an interdisciplinary artist and writer based in Stockholm. EOH’s recent projects have taken the form of live art, photography, printmaking, text, video, and curating. EOH was editor and co-founder of queer feminist journal and artist collective LTTR. Her many collaborations include writing lyrics for The Knife, Colin Self, and JD Samson & MEN, as well as designing costumes for Levi Gonzalez, Vanessa Anspaugh, Faye Driscoll, and Le Tigre. EOH will be a 2019/20 fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, Cambridge (US).

Colin Self is a composer and choreographer based in New York and Berlin. He creates music, performances, and environments to expand consciousness, trouble binaries and the boundaries of perception and communication. His recent work, The Elation Series, is a six-part sequential opera about queer family and global transfiguration. In 2015 he released his debut solo record Elation and toured with Radiohead as one third of the Holly Herndon trio. Self has presented his work at the Dutch National Opera, Amsterdam, HAU Hebbel am Ufer, Berlin, New Museum, MoMA PS1, The Kitchen, Issue Project Room, New York, and other international festivals and venues.

Geo Wyeth is an artist and educator working in the realms of music, performance, narrative sculpture, and video. Their ongoing project Muck Studies Dept melds black/American music and history, extractive industry survey, and techniques of investigative journalism to trouble the swampy waters of race and memory. Wyeth teaches graduate performance practice at the Dutch Art Institute, Arnhem (NL) and composes music for film. Wyeth is a co-founder of the queer community space Tender Center, Rotterdam (NL), and is based between Rotterdam and New York.

Help the Dead is the final installment of a three-part Pause series dedicated to Ian White (1971–2013). An artist, performer, curator, teacher and writer based in London and Berlin, White’s work responded critically to the role institutional infrastructures play in the production of art. The 2019 Pause program comprises Jimmy Robert, Emma Hedditch, and Every Ocean Hughes – three of White’s friends and collaborators. Each explore how their shared work and White’s legacy continues to inflect contemporary performance and collaboration.

Help the Dead is commissioned by Volt, Bergen (NO), and a co-produced by KW, with the support of Konstnärsnämnden, Stockholm, DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Program, and The Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (US).

This year’s Pause series is also part of Reflect-Suspend-Dismantle, a year-long program around the work of Ian White, which takes place at various locations throughout 2019 within the city of Berlin, and is delivered in collaboration with curator Kirsty Bell and the Estate of Ian White, Arsenal Institute for Film and Video Art, and DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Program.

Curator: Mason Leaver-Yap
Curatorial Assistance: Sabrina Herrmann

Exhibition Folder (PDF)

Part of project: Pause series

The Pause series of KW Institute for Contemporary Art allowed 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 acted 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 were predominantly commissioned or reworked pieces that shifted between or even merged the disciplines of performance, installation, video, and sonic work.

Overview

2017–2024

Pause: Billy Bultheel & James Richards

Workers in Song

7–9 June 24

Pause: The Noa Eshkol Chamber Dance Group
25/27 August 23

Pause: Alexis Blake

Crack Nerve Boogie Swerve

27–29 January 23

Pause: Lydia Ourahmane
sync
1–2 October 22

Pause: Tobias Spichtig
Die Matratzen
19–23 January 22

Pause: Michele Rizzo

REACHING

1–3 October 21

Pause: Archivio Conz Collection

Broken Sounds / Remote Music—Prepared Pianos

16–19 January 20

Pause: Emma Hedditch

+49 30 243459-53

18–19 May 19

Pause: Jimmy Robert (After Ian White)

Joie noire

19–20 January 19

Pause: Evelyn Taocheng Wang

What is he afraid of?

27–30 September 18

Pause: AA Bronson

Garten der Lüste

26–29 April 18

Pause: Ericka Beckman

Super-8 Trilogy

18–21 January 18

Pause: Margaret Honda

Spectrum Reverse Spectrum

18–20 August 17

Pause: Anthony McCall

Line Describing a Cone

27–30 April 17