Voice Over #2
A performative gathering
26 Aug 2023, 11 am – 10 pm
Location: KW Institute for Contemporary Art
In English
Free of charge, registration is required for some parts of the program
With Effi & Amir, Brandon LaBelle, Sunny Pfalzer with Lau Lukkarila and Slim Soledad, Public Movement, Netta Weiser with Mădălina Dan and Agata Siniarska
Effi & Amir, Places of Articulation, Five Obstructions, video still, mixed media, 2020.
Voice Over #2 is a one-day performative gathering, staged in the off-spaces of KW during the interim period between exhibitions. Within these intimate spaces, where the public and private intermingle, the artists act as both guests and hosts, stretching the institution’s infrastructure towards its relational, participatory, and performative potentialities.
Voice Over examines how speech and movement are curtailed to categorize identity, while simultaneously discussing how they could become subversive and infiltrate borders. These borders are part of a system of silencing, aiming to control voices that do not adhere to the dichotomic perceptions of ‘us’ versus ‘them.’ The performances, workshops, screenings and talks of Voice Over #2 explore forms of vocal and choreographic identification and resistance. Turning their ears towards the relationship of speech, silence, and body language, they embody the tension and struggle between objectification and subjectivity.
Instead of aspiring to show a finalized exhibition, the artists lay emphasis on the process and treat the rehearsal as the event itself, letting the audience in on a condition that is permanently shifting like identities in flux. Within these non-performances, the artists stretch the boundaries between body and voice as well as between the emotional and the lingual; they speak choreography, cry over politics, laugh in the face of history, and crawl into the future. What one sees and what one voices, – the voices that cannot be heard, the gestures that accompany silence – all this comes into the fore in an intense entanglement of voice and body.
Curator: Maayan Sheleff
Program
10.30 am
Doors open
Location: Studio
11.00 am
Welcome
Introduction by curator Maayan Sheleff
Location: Studio
No registration necessary
Maayan Sheleff is a PhD candidate at the Curatorial platform, the University of Reading (UK) and ZHdk (CH), exploring the use of the voice in participatory, performative and political practices in relation to protest movements of the last decade.
11.15–11.45 am
Conversation between Brandon LaBelle and Maayan Sheleff
Location: Studio
No registration necessary
12–5 pm
Lecture Performance
The Third Voice
By Brandon LaBelle
Location: 3rd floor
No registration necessary
12–2 pm Mapping the Third, 3rd floor
2–3 pm Listening session: audio curation of selected works, 3rd floor
3–5 pm Voicing the Third, 3rd floor
In Jessica Benjamin’s book Beyond Doer and Done To, the author and psychoanalyst argues for greater intersubjective methods within the context of therapy- one in which analysis emerges as a process of co-creation, mutual recognition, and shared transformation. Benjamin poses the concept of the Third, elaborated as a material, psychological, and social figure that helps in processes of rupture and repair. Following Benjamin’s theories, the performative lecture asks in what ways ideas of the Third impact onto conceptualizations and enactments of voice in and as intersubjectivity and relationality. The durational performative lecture will create a space of voicing and listening, opening onto a speculative reading of Benjamin and asking in what sense we may foster a new poetic, intersubjective culture of voice today.
11.45 am
Screening and Q&A
By The Throat (2021, 78 min)
By Effi & Amir
Location: Studio
Registration via reservation@kw-berlin.de
The award-winning film By The Throat explores the invisible border of our oral cavity, which marks and defines the sounds we can emit and the words we can pronounce. Touring between territories – sonic, anatomical and political – the film combines testimonies, found footage and scientific imagery. It examines the power of the voice and the role of the mouth, a sort of personal mobile checkpoint, and how language and pronunciation are used to categorize and control.
1.30 pm
Lunch break
2.30 pm
Performance
I Know What to Do (2022, 45 min)
By Sunny Pfalzer in collaboration with Lau Lukkarila and Slim Soledad
Music by Marshall Vincent
Location: courtyard
No registration necessary
I know what to do resonates the feeling of a teenager who poses in front of a mirror and tries to learn gestures of music videos, experimenting to find a solid material extension of themselves. Interpreting gestures from contemporary Schlager music through repetition and appropriation, the performers support each other to stretch notions of identity, because it is fucking difficult to stretch notions of identity alone.
Continuously at Café Bravo: Video installation of I Know What to do video (2022, 17 min, looped)
Videography and Editing by Laura Nitsch
4 pm
Participatory Lecture
The 8th Letter (2023, 60 min)
By Effi & Amir
Location: Studio
Registration via reservation@kw-berlin.de
The lecture addresses the precarious territory of the vocal apparatus, weaving together the pedagogical, the sensorial and the poetic. The 8th letter, H, started the artists‘ research into the both ancient and contemporary practice of “Shibboleth”, the determination of a person’s group-belonging by a feature of their speech. Technologies of dialect detection participate in reinforcing binary logic, including language tests in asylum procedures. As the participants’ and performers’ voices are put into play, the lecture brings the question of identification and categorisation to the fore, in a tangible and experiential manner.
5.15 pm
Radio-Choreography: Voices from the Verge (2023, 75 min)
By Netta Weiser with Mădălina Dan, Brandon LaBelle, Agata Siniarska.
Location: Pogo Bar
Registration via reservation@kw-berlin.de
Radio-Choreography explores the various ways of broadcasting dance on the radio. By transforming choreographic practice into sound and voice, it brings together a collection of dance acts which were performed by female choreographers in contexts of resistance and migration. The show features a sonic reenactment of a dance action by Lebanese choreographer Dominique Tegho, which took place in Beirut during the 2019 protests; an archival interview with Valeska Gert, a Berlin-born choreographer and performer (1892–1978) whose grotesque choreographies criticized bourgeois culture; and Mothers of Steel, which has the choreographers Dan and Siniarska reclaim crying while they mourn the emotional identification with their home countries, Poland and Romania. Developed for KW, this iteration transforms Pogo Bar into a temporary radio station, broadcasting live on reboot.fm.
The performance is in collaboration with reboot.fm
7–10 pm
Drinks and music in the courtyard
DJ Set with Marshall Vincent
Location: courtyard
No registration necessary
Continuously from 10 am – 7 pm
Debriefing Session: KW
By Public Movement
Location: Will be disclosed upon registration.
Registration via reservation@kw-berlin.de
Each session is one-on-one and 30 minutes long.
Debriefing Session is a one-on-one meeting with a Public Movement Agent staged in a secret room within KW Berlin. During this intimate encounter, the Agent unfolds Public Movement’s research about modern art made in Palestine before 1948, its absence from the Israeli narrative, and its status within the Palestinian diaspora. While exploring notions of normalization, institutional memory, and national identity, the participant activates art as a tool in the production of ideology, evoking questions about knowledge, appropriation, and responsibility. Debriefing Session imagines a civic voice, a whispering of history that turns the listener into an agent of information.
Public Movement Director: Dana Yahalomi
Public Movement Agent: Nir Shauloff
Head of research: Hagar Ophir
Assistants of research: Teresa Millich (Berlin)
Supported by Artis and Goethe Institute Israel
The first iteration of Voice Over was an exhibition at the Bonnefanten Museum, Maastricht, Netherlands (October 2020 – January 2021). With works by Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rhame, Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Yusra Abo Kaf, Effi & Amir, Shilpa Gupta, Domenico Mangano & Marieke van Rooy, Amir Yatziv and Katarina Zdjelar, and curated by Maayan Sheleff.