Avhandling / Av_handling (Dissertation / Through_action)

Friday May 27, 2016

07:30pm–08:45pm

In the lecture-performance After, Rehearsal After (2013), Malin Arnell presents her ongoing dialogue with the work of French-Italian artist Gina Pane (1939–1990). Oriented around textual and visual traces of Pane’s and Arnell’s historical intra-action, the ongoing dialogue explores performance art documentation and historical narratives. Film documentation of Pane’s 1975 action Discours mou et mat at de Appel Art Centre in Amsterdam will be screened alongside video documentation of Arnell’s 2011 reenactment, Reflect Soft Matte Discourse, performed at Kamarad in Stockholm. Included in After, Rehearsal After is a letter written by Clara López Menéndez recounting her experience in the reenactment as “the naked body” listed in Pane’s performance instructions. This text was included in previous iterations of the action, Rehearsal after Reflect Soft Matte Discourse #1 (2011), #2 (2012), developed together with Clara López Menéndez and Imri Sandström. After, Rehearsal After interrogated the operations of archives, asking: “How do queer feminist performance archives make you vulnerable, how do they make you feel, act, react?” “Whose bodies remain present, and which bodies are lost?” The framework of the work—its repetition with variations, its artistic and queer feminist methodologies—enabled an exploration of history, documentation, and bodily epistemology, as an attempt to take responsibility for what is not known by doing, through action, through performance.

Included in the performance is a text written by Malin Arnell and three video pieces:

Gina Pane, Discours mou et mat (1975), video, 22:32 min. (DVD, 4:3, sound, b / w). Unknown cinematographer and editor. All rights reserved, © LIMA. (Discours mou et mat will be screened without sound).

Malin Arnell, Reflect Soft Matte Discourse (2011), video, 22:43 min. (DVD, 16:9, sound, color). Performed by Malin Arnell and Clara López Menéndez at Kamarad in Stockholm on May 24th, 2011. Duration, 58 minutes. Cinematographer: Ulrika Gomm. Editor: Malin Arnell.

Malin Arnell, Letter from Clara López Menéndez (2013), video, 8:03 min. (DVD, 16:9, sound, b / w). Text written and read aloud by Clara López Menéndez. Editor: Malin Arnell.

After, Rehearsal After (2013) was first performed as a praxis session at the conference PSi19: Now Then: Performance and Temporality!, Stanford University, Stanford, CA. In 2014 After, Rehearsal After #2 (2014) was presented within the series, Cheat Out to the Audience: Risk x Reward, curated by Kelly Gilpatrick and Jake Yuzna for The Theater at MAD, Museum of Arts and Design, NYC. Later the same year After, Rehearsal After #3 (2014) was presented during 67,3% performative research seminar (2014) at Weld, Stockholm.