ACTS

Discover the latest trends in sound and performance art, when the Museum of Contemporary Art for the third time opens the doors to a wealth of experimental performance and sound art works with the international festival for performative art, ACTS.

With ACTS, art moves out of its usual exhibition space and instead utilizes the city, its various possibilities and public spaces as a stage. This year the festival is curated in collaboration between PhD-student Rasmus Holmboe, PhD-student Judith Schwarzbart and Assistant Professor Sanne Krogh Groth all associated with the Department of Performance Design at Roskilde University and museum director Sanne Kofod Olsen.

Saturday and Sunday, the festival offers spectacular sound installations in and around the Museum of Contemporary Art, and around Roskilde city center. On Saturday evening, the program takes place at the venue Gimle where the cellar, lounge and concert hall forms the stage for performance lectures, experimental concerts and more.

We look forward to welcoming you to this third edition of ACTS!

ACTS 2014 presents the latest tendencies in sound art and performance art in Scandinavia, Europe and the United States. This year the museum has entered a collaboration with three external curators associated with the Department of Performance Design at Roskilde University – with continued focus on sound and performance art, and social art in public spaces. 

Under the title Acts & Motion, PhD student Judith Schwarzbart presents a program of text based performances and simple actions that revolve around political and socially oriented performance art. Assistant Professor Sanne Krogh Groth focuses on contemporary music with the theme Experimental Opera. The program extends from mini- operas over a media archaeological musical theater to a digitally manipulated performance lecture.

With the theme Sound & Process, PhD student Rasmus Holmboe puts a focus on sound art works that has a movement and materiality associated with the performance. Museum director Sanne Kofod Olsen presents with title Conceptual Acts some idea based performances, characterized by a destruction of any kind of reason.

We look forward to seeing you at ACTS 2014!

Andrea Geyer

Comrades of Time
In Comrades of Time seven women recite monologues composed from speeches, letters, and essays by architects, writers, philosophers and political organizers from the era of the Weimar Republic. With looming extremist forces slowly forming, intellectuals of the young republic tried to mobilize people by appealing to the capacities of their minds, and their responsibility to the community. By transferring the textual element to the present time, the artist brings to the present not only an experience of historical times but also a political imaginary.

Andrea Geyer is a German artist living in New York City. In her image and text based works, she uses both fiction and documentary strategies. She investigates historically evolved concepts such as national identity, gender and class in the context of the ongoing re-adjustment of cultural meanings and social memories in current politics. Her work is widely shown e.g. in Documenta 12.

NB: The location has changed!
Performance at  Domkirkestræde, by the Cathedral.

Performance
Place: ​Domkirkestræde, by the Cathedral.
Time: Saturday June 14th, 4.00 PM – 5.00 PM

Read about Andrea Geyer http://andreageyer.info/

Andreas Führer

The map is not the territory or?
Take a psycho-geographical walk through the city equipped with a musical score, that points out certain locations and times where you can listen to the sounds the city makes. During the walk new connections between sounds normally separated will arise, the different sounds put together become music and their usual meaning is transformed. The work shows us that the noises around us potentially can be heard as elements in a symphony.

Andreas Führer (1980) is a composer, musician and artist. He is co-founder and member of the musical collective yoyooyoy. His recent work reflects upon music as a performative strategy that can communicate different questions and topics – most recently a participatory production of Carl Orff’s opera Der Mond at Artistspace in New York.

Audio/city walk
Place: Museum of Contemporary Art / Roskilde City
Time: Saturday June 14th, 1.15 PM - 5.00 PM
           Sunday June 15th, 2.00 PM - 5.00 PM

Watch Andreas Führer´s video presentation of the artwork The map is not the territory or? (app. 1.30 min)

Read about Andreas Führer and yoyooyoy here: http://www.yoyooyoy.dk/

Anna Lundh

Anna Lundh’s research based work investigates cultural phenomena and social agreements, language and technology, and frequently involves exchange with other people and professionals also beyond the art field. This transdisciplinary work takes the form of video, site specific installation, web-based work, interactive experiments and performance. For ACTS, Lundh has developed a new lecture performance, based on her ongoing research on time and temporality, focusing on the phenomenon of Frøken Klokken, “Miss Clock”, a (wo)man–machine time telling technology, introduced in Denmark in 1939.

Anna Lundh is a Swedish artist based in Stockholm and New York. She graduated in 2008 with a MFA from Konstfack University College of Arts, Crafts and Design, and has also studied at the Cooper Union in New York. Most recently, her work was shown and performed at Disjecta Contemporary Art Center, Portland, USA, as well as at Performa 13, New York.

Performance
Place: Formidlingen, The Museum of Contemporary Art
Tid: Saturday June 14th, 2.00 PM
        Sunday June 15th, 2.30 PM

Read more about Anna Lundh http://www.annalundh.com/

Arendse Krabbe

Regarding The Haustorial Complex, Part II
The focal point of Arendse Krabbes performance is the organism lichen. Lichen lives in a symbiotic relationship between fungus and algae. This interaction is transferred into two characters in Krabbes performance. A haustorium can draw itself in and change and transform the entire structure of a lichen. A haustorium is a separation process from the parasitic fungus that lichen consists of. It is in this transformation process that something new arises.
Costume Design: Cecilia Parfelt Vengberg

Arendse Krabbe works both individually and collaboratively. Engaging in various interdisciplinary constellations, she uses video and performance art as well as dialogue and participation as methods to renegotiate spaces. She holds an MA in Contemporary Art Theory from Goldsmiths College, London and graduates in 2014 as an artist from the Royal Academy of Academy of Fine Art, Copenhagen.
Arendse Krabbe lives and works in Copenhagen.

Performance
Place: The concert venue Gimle, Helligkorsvej 2, 4000 Roskilde
Time: Saturday June 14th, 6.30 PM

Watch Arendse  Krabbe´s video presentation of the artwork Regarding The Haustorial Complex, Part II (app. 3.30 min.)

Brett Bloom and Bonnie Fortune

The Powerless PowerPoint: "A is for Antrhopocene"
The Powerless PowerPoint: "A is for Antrhopocene" is a mobile slide presentation for the streets of Roskilde. Inspired in part by the phrase “We seek a lower standard of living for a higher quality of life” from the book The Environmental Design Primer, by Tom Bender (1976), the artists have replaced the ubiquitous powerpoint presentation with an electricity free presentation system, which they use to engage with the ways in which human society effects the surrounding environment. They are interested in what it means to start powering down, using and consuming less, while continuing to make compelling visual culture. This performance introduces passersby in Roskilde to the terminology needed to understand the devastating, massive changes global warming presents us with.

Brett Bloom is an artist, activist, writer and publisher. His main work is collaborative with the group Temporary Services (Copenhagen/Chicago/ Philadelphia). The group makes work together, writes about art, and publishes obsessively. They run Half Letter Press, a publishing imprint.

Bonnie Fortune is an artist and writer whose work looks at ecology-social and environmental– and the communication of affect. Fortune often works collaboratively with artists and professionals from other disciplines to realize her interdisciplinary projects.

Together they work on the Mythological Quarter using art as a tool to investigate place, ecology, city planning and more.

Performance
Place: Hestetorvet / the station building / pedestrian street (Algade)
Time: Saturday June 14th, 1.15 PM - 5.00 PM

Read more about Brett Boom and Temporary services www.temporaryservices.org
Read more about Bonnie Fortune and Mythological Quarter www.mythologicalquarter.net

Francesco Cavaliere

Rebus 1 - Fluac
The performance is based on a story of two women´s interest and involvement in an investigation of an old game (Cosar Fluac), where you play and trade with special stones. The wrong choice of some of these stones creates a mysterious game, which through an infinite number of possible combinations takes the player away from reality to a communication with oracles.

Francesco Cavaliere is a composer and visual artist, working with abstract concepts and systems, that e.g. appears in the game. Cavaliere makes these systems and concepts to subject of both sound and performance and sculptural installations. Cavaliere revolves around an interest in mysticism as a movement from the concrete (the system) to the abstract (the mysterious). Francesco Cavaliere (born 1980 in Piombino, Italy) lives and works in Berlin.


Peformance
Place: 1. floor (cinema), Museum of Contemporary Art
Time: Saturday June 14th, 3.15 PM
           Sunday June 15th, 3.30 PM

Read more about Francesco Cavaliere: http://www.nathiascatola.com/

Kerstin Cmelka

Surviving a shark attack on land
The performance is a mix between a TV drama and a talkshow where various scenes unfold. The TV drama (soap opera) is known from TV channels in many countries, and has been characterized by an inexpensive form of production with regular performances, while the talkshow is the host bound television show, in which a focus on everything between heaven and earth can appear. These two TV forms are the basis for Surviving a shark attack on land, where short sequences change from one scene to the next. Kerstin Cmelka herself is the talkshow host and a variety of performers is playing different scenes, based on e.g. Henrik Ibsen drama “A Doll´s House”. The main characters slide from the drama into the talk show situation, and thus become "real" characters.

Cmelka´s work is designed as small narratives based on the theater or live TV situation. Cmelka has created the series "micro-dramas", small theatrical scenarios presented live or on camera. The micro-dramas have the characteristics of traditional theater and old-style TV drama. Cmelka uses friends, colleagues and herself as actors in the micro-dramas.
Kerstin Cmelka lives and works in Berlin.

Performers:
Kerstin Cmelka, Gerrit Frohne-Brinkmann, Jenny Grönvall, Carl Lindh and Hanno Millesi

Performance/micro-drama
Place: Husarstalden (the Cinema), Museum of Contemporary Art
Time: Saturday June 14th, 3.00 PM
           Sunday June 15th, 3.15 PM

Listen to Kerstin Cmelka presenting the artwork Surviving a shark attack on land (app. 2 min.):

Kirsten Pieroth

Inflated Dinghy
The installation Inflated Dinghy (2009) consists of a rubber dinghy, a tube and an accordion. The work also includes a performance, where an accordionist playing an accordion gradually inflates the rubber dinghy. The same air that creates music makes the dinghy functional, establishing an ambiguous connection between music – normally a goal in itself – and the labour involved in making the dinghy ready to sail. In the music, practicality meets absurdity and poetry.

During recent years, Kirsten Pieroth has created numerous conceptual works that combine action, documentation and installation. In doing so, she generates a dialogue between the physical work and documented action, as familiar objects are isolated from their original environment and inserted in a new context. Pieroth displaces things from one location to another, like dirty puddles in Berlin (Berliner Pfütze, 2013), and the relocation of the label from the Mona Lisa in The Louvre and a forest lookout post to an exhibition space in Berlin (Untitled, 2008).
Kirsten Pieroth lives and works in Berlin.


Performance and installation
Place: Ground floor, Museum of Contemporary Art
Time: Performance: Saturday June 14th, 2.00 PM
           Installation: Saturday June 14th, 1.15 PM - 5.00 PM
           Installation: Sunday June 15th, 2.00 PM - 5.00 PM

Read more about Kirsten Pieroth: http://www.officebaroque.com/artists/17/kirsten-pieroth#works

Leif Elggren

DON’T EAT TOO MUCH!
Emanuel of Swedenborg (1688-1772) is the focal of Leif Elggrens performance for ACTS 2014. The story about the recognized scientist Swedenborg who in 1745 after a ‘spiritual awakening’, transformed into a convinced christian theosophist. Swedenborg believed that people after death turned into angels, continued their ordinary earthly life, but only in a different dimension. He became an advocate the universal religion that is still known as Swedenborgianism. The performance also includes the characters of Queen Christina of Sweden (1626-1689) and King Karl XII (1682-1718).

Leif Elggren is a sound and performance artist who since the 1970s has been linked to the experimental art scene of Stockholm and helped to establish the sound and art environment around Fylkingen. Elggren works with experimental electronic sound combined with performance, but also with drawing, installation, etc. In his performances he often draws on historical figures such as Queen Christina, Sigmund Freud and many others. Together with artist Carl Michael von Hauswolff he has the community Kings of Elgaland-vargaland.
Elggren lives and works in Stockholm. 

Performance
Place: The concert venue Gimle, Helligkorsvej 2, 4000 Roskilde
Time: Saturday June 14th, 9.00 PM

Watch Leif Elggren presenting the artwork Don´t eat too much! (app. 2.30 min.)

Read more about Leif Elggren here: http://www.leifelggren.org/

Morten Riis

Opaque Sounding
A drama about machinery, acted out with the help of outdated episcopes and early technology in projection. Those devices are turned into music machines with each of them playing their own version of a forgotten technological utopia concerning the all-encompassing audio-visual experience. The unstable and the fragile become the centre of the drama, a drama played out as a dialogue between the performer and the machine.

Morten Riis (1980) is a sound artist and has a PhD in media archaeology from Aarhus University. He is currently post doc at the department of Aesthetics and Communications at Aarhus University and head of DIEM (the Danish Institute for Electronic Music) at the Royal Academy of Music. In addition to a career in academics he is an active sound artist and has received several grants and scholarships.


Performance
Place: The concert venue Gimle, Helligkorsvej 2, 4000 Roskilde
Time: Saturday June 14th, 7.15 PM

Watch Morten Riis presenting the artwork Opaque Sounding (app. 2.30 min.)

Niels Rønsholdt

Word by word
Word by word is an experimental performance opera. The composer plays and sings every part and explores how little it takes to make reality turn in to opera. The genre is intervened: pathos becomes intimacy, song becomes whisper and scenography becomes darkness. The orchestra and the singer become one, the far-away moves nearer and the changeable becomes tangible. It will most likely be embarrassing, hideous and tedious. But it will be real.

Niels Rønsholdt (1978) is a Danish composer from Aarhus. His works are intimate and intense and include installation, performance and art music. He uses a wide-ranging stylistic language that comes across both brutal and radical but also references mainstream culture. Rønsholdt is a recipient of the 3 year work grant by the Danish Arts Foundation.


Performance
Place: The kitchen, Museum of Contemporary Art
Time: Saturday June 14th, 1.15 PM, 2.45 PM, 4.00 PM
           Sunday June 15th, 2.30 PM, 4.00 PM

Listen to Niels Rønsholdt telling about the artwork Word by Word (app. 3 min.)

Sharon Hayes

I March In The Parade of Liberty But As Long As I Love You I’m Not Free
The performance addresses a certain intersection between love and politics. It is a public speech but at the same time a love letter to an anonymous ‘you’. The sources for the letter include Oscar Wilde’s “De Profundis”, the letter he wrote to Lord Alfred Douglas from prison, newspaper reportage from NYC from the early days of the Gay Liberation Movement, as well as slogans from queer rights protests from 1969 to 1993. The piece was originally performed over 8 days between December 2007 and January 2008. Here Hayes walked from the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York to sites of public speech around town.

Sharon Hayes is an artist based in New York City. Her practice is conceptual, investigative, and performative. Many of her works examines modes of public address and that tiny distance separating the private and public. She was represented at the Venice Biennial 2013.


Sound installation
Sted: Ground floor, Museum of Contemporary Art
Time: Saturday June 14th, 1.00 PM - 5.00 PM
           Sunday June 15th, 2.00 PM - 5.00 PM

Read about Sharon Hayes http://shaze.info/index.php

Simon Fujiwara

Future/Perfect
In Future/Perfect, Fujiwara enlists athletic-bodied young foreign nationals to perform his work. As each man lies on the tanning bed he learns english via headphones, audibly sounding out seemingly random words and phrases. The artist describes the piece as a kind of educational entertainment whereby the viewers witness a transformation that is both interior and exterior.

Fujiwara has created a complex and rich body of interconnecting works that encompass performance, film, installations, sculptures and texts. Bringing personal experiences both real and imagined into contact with larger historical events, his expansive practise has been described as an ‘autobiographical journey through the architecture of modern life - constantly rebuilt as it is retold’.
Simon Fujiwara lives and works in Berlin.


Performance
Place: Formidlingen, Museum of Contemporary Art
Time: Saturday June 14th, 1.15 PM - 5.00 PM
            Sunday June 15th, 2.00 PM - 5.00 PM

Siri Landgren

The Voice is False
The voice is false is an investigation of illegitimate voices: from the copied, the false and the synthetic voices to the voice of the castrato from the past. In a performance situated between concert and lecture-performance Siri Landgren tells the story of the false voice through a strong sense of timing, advanced technology and an intimate presence.

Siri Landgren (1983) is a sound artist, musician and writer. He has studied composition at the Academy of Music and Drama at the University of Gothenburg and at the Gotland School of Music Composition. He works with performance lectures that take their starting point in the manipulation of his own voice.


Performance
Place: The concert venue Gimle, Helligkorsvej 2, 4000 Roskilde
Time: Saturday June 14th, 8.00 PM

Listen to Siri Landgren telling about the artwork The Voice is False (app. 5 min.):

Read more about Siri Landgren: http://sirilandgren.se/

T. R. Kirstein og Claus Haxholm

The work is what separates us from the animals
The performance installation by Haxholm and Kirstein takes place both inside and outside the museum and it is carefully planned out to last two days involving both smoke, lime stone, miscellaneous containers, sound, movement and manual labor. The work seeks to find the connections between the lofty and the banal and between a day’s work and the elongation of the material. Energy and feedback are exchanged and expressed and subsequently they transform and dissolve.

The duo’s works exist in a field between performative sound art and manual labor where they explore different ways of organizing energy. Previous works include the duo filling up a gallery with multiple tons of dirt only to empty it afterwards, or burying sound in large holes in a backyard.
 

Performanceinstallation
Place: Husarstalden / Palægården
Time: Saturday June 14th, 1.15 PM - 5.00 PM
           Sunday June 15th, 2.00 PM - 5.00 PM

Watch a video presentation by Claus Haxholm & TR Kirstein of the performance The work is what separates us from the animals (app. 4 min.):

Örn Alexander Ámundason

Speculations on the Impact of Kurt Cobain
Speculations on the Impact of Kurt Cobain is a "lecture performance" in which the artist gives an interpretation of the true meaning behind the music and songs of the late American singer Kurt Cobain(Cobain was the lead singer of the grunge band Nirvana). In addition, Ámundason talks about Kurt Cobain's influence on younger generations of grunge and rock musicians.

Ámundason is an Icelandic visual and performance artist who creates humoristic performances with strong images, using simple means. He finds inspiration in the Icelandic singer/songwriter tradition and creates stories that relate to different well-known phenomenon.
Ámundason lives and works in Reykjavik and Malmö.

Performance
Place: The concert venue Gimle, Helligkorsvej 2, 4000 Roskilde
Time:  Saturday June 14th, 8.30 PM

Watch Örn Ámundason presenting the artwork Speculations on the Impact of Kurt Cobain

PROGRAM OF THE FESTIVAL

Check out the festival program here

_____________________________________________________________

Saturday 1.00 PM – 5.00 PM

• Andrea Geyer (US)
• Andreas Führer (DK)
• Anna Lundh (SE)
• Brett Bloom og Bonnie Fortune (US/DK)
• Francesco Cavaliere (IT)
• Kerstin Cmelka (AT)
• Kirsten Pieroth (DE)
• Niels Rønsholdt (DK)
• Sharon Hayes (US)
• Simon Fujiwara (UK)
• T. R. Kirstein og Claus Haxholm (DK/DK)

Saturday night 6.00 PM – 11.00 PM (at the music venue Gimle)

• Arendse Krabbe (DK)
• Leif Elggren (SE)
• Morten Riis (DK)
• Siri Landgren (SE)
• Örn Alexander Ámundason (IS)

Lounge: DJ Kim Las (DK)

___________________________________________

Sunday 2.00 PM – 5.00 PM

• Andreas Führer (DK)
• Anna Lundh (SE)
• Francesco Cavaliere (IT)
• Kerstin Cmelka (AT)
• Niels Rønsholdt (DK)
• Ragnhild May (DK)
• Sharon Hayes (US)
• Simon Fujiwara (UK)
• T. R. Kirstein og Claus Haxholm (DK/DK)

Background
In 2011, the museum established ACTS – Festival for Performative Art as a yearly event. The year prior to this, the pilot projects Sound Festival and Performance Festival were held over two days as a part of the exhibition Acts with the aim to highlight the presentation and documentation of sound and performance art. 

ACTS 2011 showed a wide range of sound and performance art and took place in and around the museum, but also in the centre of Roskilde and at Roskilde Library. In 2012, the festival moved to the area of the city called Musicon where the enormous industry hall 9 of 1.800 m2 provided the setting for that year’s programme, which focused on the sphere between sound, performance and scenic art. Several guest curators, Kunstparade and Lilith Performance Studio were invited to compile a programme along with the museum’s own curators Mette Truberg Jensen and Sanne Kofod Olsen. Subsequently, ACTS is held bi-annually.

More on ACTS 2011
More on ACTS 2012