P for Performance is pleased to announce and host the tenth performative event: Balkony Ceremony by Ania Okrasko.

Ania Okrasko is a Polish artist who recently moved to Rotterdam in order to attend a Fine Arts Master Programme at Piet Zwart Institue. Currently, Ania is developing a project from her interests in the subject of community. The artist’s ideas have grown from her investigation of Rotterdam’s history, the city’s public spaces and its population.

As Ania enters the city, she proposes a ceremony of welcome. She sends an invitation for citizens of Rotterdam to participate in an unconventional and extraordinary welcoming celebration. People are invited to attend this public event on their private balconies.

Ania stresses the almost mythical character of her idea while it is at the same time actually openly publicized. Whether the ceremony takes place or not depends entirely on the citizens’ willingness to participate in the ceremony.

The event at ADA, hosted by P for Performance, offers another opportunity to announce the ceremony of welcome, planned for April the 10th 2010, and giving it more publicity.

Everybody is very welcome!

P for Performance is part of an ongoing project by Maja Bekan, entitled Secret Powers for Identity, Security and Self-respect in Troubling Times. The aim of these performance events is to try to critically engage with the investigation of the artist’s role as a producer and advertiser. The project Balkony Ceremony is supported by Piet Zwart Institute, Willem de Kooning Academy, Rotterdam, Dienst Kunst en Cultuur & ADA Rotterdam.

Theme:
Constituting Reality; Does The Medium Make The Memory?
March’s The Open Office For Words will take place at Kunsthuis SYB, Beetsterzwaag, Friesland.

Speakers:
Laura Basu (A Doctoral Candidate working in the project The Dynamics of Cultural Remembrance: An Intermedial Perspective). Basu talks about memory and media in relation to the concept of memory dispositif, referring both to Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze.

Steve Rushton (Writer and Editor). In his talk They Came To See Who Came, Rushton talks about media events in relation to Who What Where When & How, his collaborative work together with Rod Dickinson.

You are cordially invited to search through your resources and to see whether you perhaps might have something to contribute to the above themes. Books, journals, research papers and images related, whether from the field of arts or science are all welcome, as are art-works, documentaries and interviews in a dvd-format.

P for Performance is pleased to announce a ninth performative event: Talkative Window for Collapsed Items (Proposal for a performance to happen in a former shop window, now ADA’s space), a performance by Roxane Borujerdi.

“In my live performance work, I usually make speeches out of a determined source of language and of already made expressions, which I transpose to another context. Often interacting with “do-it-yourself” props, my performances stage absurd challenges in everyday life spaces, and disrupt the course of events made foreseeable by the specific settings of an urban environment or a manufactured object.”

Roxane Borujerdi graduated from Beaux Arts de Paris in 2006. She is currently doing a residency at Stichting Duende in Rotterdam. With a partiality for mediums that allow mobility, as well the utmost immediacy between an idea and its visual realization, she is developing her practice through performances, drawings and videos. She intends to keep on exploring the contradictions of the common stereotype, using imagery that comes either from minimal art or popular visual culture. Since 2005 she exhibited in various galleries and institutions across Europe and made a year residency at The Hospital Club in London (2008-09). Up coming: solo show Galerie Lucile Corty (Paris).

P for Performance is part of an ongoing project by Maja Bekan, entitled Secret Powers for Identity, Security and Self-respect in Troubling Times. The aim of these performance events is to try to critically engage with the investigation of the artist’s role as a producer and advertiser.

A Screening of three Kurdish/Armenian films selected by S. Battal Kurt.

Toprakkale (a trailer)
A film project in development.
Director: S.Battal Kurt
Runtime trailer: 9 min.

Vremana Goda (The Seasons)
Release: 1975
Director: Artavazd Pelechian
Runtime: 28 min.

Kilometre Zero
Release: 2005
Director: Hiner Saleem
Runtime: 96 min.

Runtime total programme: 134 min.

In his work the Kurdish filmmaker S. Battal Kurt deals with questions of cultural difference and identity. For his film Toprakkale, Kurt returned for a whole year to his birthplace Toprakkale in eastern Turkey, to film the habits of the village’s inhabitants. Images of landscapes, rural life and the changing of seasons represent the filmmaker’s research into his own memories and identity. In February’s Cinema Sunset, Kurt will both show the trailer for Toprakkale, as well as show two films by the film directors Artavazd Pelechian and Hiner Saleem.

The film Vremada Goda (The Seasons) by Artavazd Pelechian is one of the most important documentary films made in Armenia. Pelechian is renowned for developing a style of cinematographic perspective known as distance montage and his use of candid camera shots of people engaging in mundane tasks. In Vremada Goda, Pelechian depicts in a light, ironic and intimate way the co-existence of nature and the Armenian people.

Kilometre Zero by Hiner Saleem is a tragicomic road trip set in Iraqi Kurdistan, during the Iran-Iraq war in 1988. It tells the story of a young Kurdish man Ako, who is forced to join the Iraqi army to fight against Iran, whilst dreaming of escaping the country. Out in the frontline, the other Iraqi soldiers abuse him due to his Kurdish background. When Ako is given a mission to escort the coffin of a dead Iraqi soldier back to his family, an unexpected opportunity for escaping arises.

Theme: Multiplicities and Urban Textures
January’s Open Office for Words looks at the city and the urban environment in terms of how they can be read and understood by looking at modes of reading the city and the multiple uses and meanings of urban spaces.

Speakers:
Taina Rajanti (Doc. Pol. Sci, Head of Research at Pori School of Art and Media, Helsinki University of Art and Design) will talk about Walter Benjamin and The Arcades Project now and in the last century. Rajanti will focus on the new arcades i.e the semi-public commercialized urban spaces, and people’s need to occupy those spaces, to use them and abuse them for their own practices, and how it is possible to introduce new meanings, ways of reading and uses to those spaces.

Frans-Willem Korsten (Prof. dr. Erasmus University, Leiden University) will talk about modes of reading the city, specifically the possibilities of broadening sensibility and the multiplication of worlds, instead of the vectorization of the urban world. In relation to this, Korsten will consider the principal difference between reading the urban environment as a narrative or as a poem.

You are cordially invited to search through your resources and to see whether you perhaps might have something to contribute to the above themes. Books, journals, research papers and images related, whether from the field of arts or science are all welcome, as are art-works, documentaries and interviews in a dvd-format.

A screening of two films selected by Maja Bekan dealing with the subject of inner violence: Meditation on Violence (Maya Deren, 1948) and the film La Ceremonie (Claude Chabrol, 1995).

Meditation on Violence
Release: 1948
Director: Maya Deren
Runtime: 12 min.

La Cérémonie
Release: 1995
Director: Claude Chabrol
Runtime: 112 min.

Runtime total programme: 124 min.

Sophie (Sandrine Bonnaire), an isolated and quiet maid, tries to keep her illiteracy a secret from the upper class Lelievre family she works for. In an attempt to conceal her illiteracy from everyone, she becomes increasingly withdrawn from her employers, and the deception and lie’s compound. Sophie becomes friends with the rebellious post office employee, Jeanne (Isabelle Huppert) who encourages her to stand up against her bourgeois employers and soon their relationship grows unnaturally close. Slowly Sophie’s life begins to spiral towards violence. La Cérémonie is a psychological thriller that explores the themes of isolation and loneliness with a dark undertone. Claude Chabrol presents an ambiguous view of culture and class conflict in this film, which he jokingly called “the last Marxist film”.

Before the screening of La Cérémonie, Maja Bekan will show the short film Meditation on Violence by Maya Deren (1948). In Meditation on Violence, Deren’s camera is motivated by the movement of the performer Chao Li Chi. Through the performance of a ritual, Li Chi tries to exorcise violence through a series of meditational dance movements.

Bekan’s interest lays in the performing power of authority and alienation, and the display of rituals; themes that are questioned by both of the films.