SAQMI at Gothenburg Fringe Winter Showcase – Short Queer Performance Acts

Short Queer Performance Acts
This selection of short films highlights various forms of performance acts with the queer body in focus. The hairy body, the singing one and the burning one. Bodies that transform and change. Swathed, shrouded and winding in pink shimmer or just as a sensation, a movement or as the total scream above everything else.

PROGRAM:
Klara Lidén – Under mattan, 2006, 2:48 min
High Heel Sisters – Scream, 2007, 2:14 min
Imri Sandström – Never Has Reach, 2010, 4 min 
Malin Arnell 
– Possession Principle, Flames of Protection, 2012, 2:54 min
Marit Östberg – Ladybeard, 2019, 2 min 
Sandy Karste – Metamorphosis, 2020, 3:44 min
Kolbrún Inga Söring – Intervention 1 & 2, 2021, 10:52 min

Presentation by Adrian Turrado from SAQMI.
Curated by Anna Linder.

Mer om akterna:

Klara Lidén – Under mattan (2006, 2:48 min)

Under mattan, filmades i galleriet innan mattan togs bort som en del av utställningen “Economy Class”, på Reena Spauling, New York 2006

Klara Lidén (1979) har fått ett fantastiskt genombrott och är flitigt utställd internationellt. Hennes gallerier ligger i Berlin, London och New York och hon har redan tunga museala utställningar i ryggen, bl.a. en separatutställning på New Museum i New York, kurerad av Venedigbiennalens Massimiliano Gioni. Hon har även ställt ut på Serpentine Gallery i London, MoMa i NYC, Jeu de Paume, Centre Georges Pompidou i Paris och på Venedig Biennalen.

”Klara Lidén är en konstnär som med precision utforskar rummets poetiska och politiska möjligheter. Hennes skulpturala arbeten involverar kroppen, arkitekturen och staden i undersökningar av det privatas och det offentligas gränser. I en rad utställningar som beaktats världen över har hon lyckats utvinna överraskande konstnärliga energier ur vardagens material och rum.” / Moderna Museet

Både i hennes filmer och i hennes installationer möter vi en konstnär som inte vill befinna sig i ett vardagligt system och som inte vill inlemmas i samhällets sociala och kulturella strukturer. Hon bryter ner och bygger upp, hon tar något ur dess kontext och ger det nytt livsrum på annan plats.

High Heel Sisters – Scream (2007, 2:14 min)

In their video piece Scream High Heel Sisters conquer the mountainous landscape covered in snow and endless forests on the border between Norway and Sweden. Their space claiming action is performed with their barefooted bodies and their raging threesome scream. It is a video work on desire for magnificence – of wanting to be just as big as the mountains. At the same time it explores their bodies’ capacities beyond the restrictions put on them by urban, social norms and legal laws.

Between 2002 and 2007 Malin Arnell, Line Skywalker Karlström, Anna Linder and Karianne Stensland collaborated as the feminist performance and artists’ group High Heel Sisters.
With a large dose of humour and a burning feminist zeal High Heel Sisters examined and took on many of society’s (and their own) expectations and accepted norms primarily associated with gender, sexuality and class. Their activity focused on negotiation different forms of privilege in the public space while simultaneously disturbing and playing with the notion of aesthetics and frames of contemporary art. The starting point for High Heel Sisters collaboration was Malin Arnell’s, Line Skywalker Karlström’s and Karianne Stensland’s shared yet varying experiences of physical attributes of height (minimum 178 cm), shoe size (minimum 41) and age (minimum 30yrs).

Imri Sandström – Never Has Reach (2010, 4 min)

Voice composition and video. An appropriation of the Swedish hymn ‘Jesus för världen givit sitt liv’ (Lina Sandell 1889).

Sound and camera: Imri Sandström
Bodies: Vilda Kvist and Imri Sandström

SVE: Imri Sandström är konstnär, författare och forskare. Sandström arbetar transdisciplinärt med text, bild och ljud, ofta utifrån områden som historia, språk och performativitet. 2019 doktorerade hon i konstnärlig forskning, inom fältet litterär gestaltning. För närvarande driver hon det konstnärliga forskningsprojektet Writing Visual Relations, vid HDK-Valand, Göteborgs universitet.

ENG: Imri Sandström is an artist, writer, and researcher. Sandström works transdisciplinary with text, image, and sound, often relating to areas such as history, language, and performativity. In 2019 she achieved her PhD in artistic research, within the field of literary composition. In 2019 she achieved her PhD in artistic research, within the field of literary composition. Currently she runs the artistic research project Writing Visual Relations, at HDK-Valand, Gothenburg University.

Malin Arnell – Possession Principle, Flames of Protection (2012, 2:54 min)    

Original: action, 3 hours, Enduring Sometimes Warring, INCA Institute, Detroit, 2012

SVE: Possession Princip, Flames of Protection var en platsspecifik aktion som relaterade till byggnaden både som ett hem (privat) och ett utställningsrum för konst (offentligt), och det faktum att det fanns en vind och en källare i det specifika huset (INCA Institute, Detroit). Det finns många referenser inom både litteraturen och ”verkligheten” där vinden och källaren är platser där den kvinnliga kroppen buras in (den galna kvinnan på vinden i C. Brontës Jane Eyre och fallet Fritzl och nu senast Castro). Så var inte fallet här. Detta var en (själv)vald handling och på något sätt en erfarenhetsbaserad reflektion – en dialog.

Aktionen Possession Principle, Flames of Protection tog plats i källaren. Det var mörkt, bläck svart. Publiken fann sin väg ner för trappan med hjälp av ljuset från köket. I rummet fanns en stol och två speglar, en på golvet framför stolen och den andra var lutad mot den ena väggen. På ena sidan av stolen låg sex askar med stora tändstickor och på den andra sidan ett kokt ägg, en väckarklocka, en tillbringare med vatten och ett glas. Aktionen började med att Malin Arnell skriver en text med en vit krita på den vita väggen genom att använda metoden för automatisk skrift. Arnell var naken förutom två vita linnen. I början var det bara ljudet av texten som skrivs som fyllde rummet. Senare fortsatte texten på golvet och blev läsbar på den grå ytan. Arnell sitter på stolen, tänder tändsticka efter tändsticka och bränner sakta bort sitt kroppshår, håret på tår, ben, armar, armhålor, bröst och kön.

Video dokumentation av Ulrika Gomm och Clara López Menéndez. 

ENG: The action Possession Principle, Flames of Protection took place in the basement. It’s dark, ink black. The audience found their way down the stairs with help of the light from the kitchen. In the room there were one chair and two mirrors, one laying on the floor in front of the chair and the other one leaning towards one of the walls. On one side of the chair there were six boxes of large matches and on the other side, one boiled egg, an alarm clock, a glass pitcher with water and a glass. The performance started by me writing a text, with a white chalk on the white wall, by using the method of Automatic writing. I was naked except for two white tank tops. In the beginning it was just the sound of the text being written that filled the room. Later on in the performance, the text continued on to the floor and became readable on the gray surface. Sitting on the chair, lights match after match, burns off body hair (except from the one on the head) starting from my toes, legs, arms, armpits, chest and pubic hair.

Forms of hair removal are practiced for a number of reasons, including cultural, sexual, medical and religious. Things are burning, in Detroit, in the world. People put things on fire for many reasons – heating, insurance, love, survival, uprisings against established authority and abuse of power, or as a mean of using power. Buildings, cars, forests, bodies are burning everyday, in war times, in all times.

Video documentation by Ulrika Gomm and Clara López Menéndez. 

ENG: Malin Arnell, PhD. (1970, Stockholm/Berlin) is a visual and performance artist, researcher and educator. Over a period of twenty five years Malin has been engaged in collaborative practices, through an embodied and affective now. Through their commitment to a queer feminist, posthumanist and agential-realist approach Malin has developed an in-depth practice of knowing-through-doing, which includes an extended ecological sensibility. It was in dialogue with these disciplines and fields that they developed the 72-hours live PhD thesis in Choreography, Avhandling / Av_handling (Dissertation / Through_action) (2016), at Stockholm University of the Arts. 

Marit Östbergs – Ladybeard (2019, 2 min)

The cunt has the cake and eats it too. A gentle cunty tale where the protagonist – the cunt – circludes, accessorises, dresses up.

Marit Östberg is a part of the queer feminist porn scene that has evolved in Europe in the last decade. Since debuting as a porn-film director in the acclaimed feminist porn compilation Dirty Diaries her films have been featured and discussed at various festivals all over the world. Her work has been shown in London, Paris, Hong Kong, Sidney, Berlin, Mexico City, New York, Sarajevo, Stockholm, Amsterdam, Vienna and many other places.

Östberg has a background as a writer, journalist and activist. She sees porn as a creative way of working with sexual politics, wanting to expand the possibilities of being in the world. She says: “When women, trans* and queers take their sexuality into their own hands, patriarchy is lost.”

Sandy Karste – Metamorphosis (2020, 3:44 min)

My own story om becoming me, hopes and fears.    

Sandy Karste är en ickebinär person som är bosatt i Göteborg som via mitt skapande, bland annat av denna film kunnat hitta ett utlopp i frustrationen och bekräftelsen det är att få vara sitt autentiska jag. 

Kolbrún Inga Söring – Intervention 1 & 2 (2021, 10 min)

Intervention 1 & 2 served as a visual and meditative break to an otherwise dense and heavy e-publication release ‘What about support and what about struggle’ hosted by L’internationale online. The work looked at how we, during the pandemic, became more and more tied to online social networks. In the work Inga erotisised the platform zoom and the use of it as a meeting place. Blurring a boundary between the public and the private, the intervention took on a cam aesthetic and Inga became an object to be desired, both through their own gaze and that of others watching.

ENG: Kolbrún Inga Söring (they/them) is a gender queer artist working in Gothenburg whose work spans several areas of artistic expression from performance, video work and site-specific installation to community cultivation and cultural production. They currently run the organisation Status Queer.

SVE: Kolbrún Inga Söring (they/them) är en icke-binär queer konstnär som arbetar i Göteborg och vars arbete spänner över flera områden av konstnärligt uttryck från performance, video arbete och platsspecifika installationer till samhälls bearbetning och kulturproduktion. De driver för närvarande organisationen Status Queer.