click on pictures to enlarge. Photos - left to Right: L. Keela, A. Kers, A.Kers, L. Keela & A. Trofimoff
Five minutes is the unit I have chosen for a larger series of performances: One action, sequence or process that starts, is conducted and concludes within 300 seconds. Five minutes of time one should be able to spare, and 5 minutes should suffice for literally everything. Five minutes cannot be too much to ask. It is a unit that immediately makes sense to almost everyone - at the same time, it is enough to enable differences in how it is experienced. For some, over when it has just begun, for others endless.
300 is positioning and artistic research of a performance artist. It confronts the all encompassing commodification of time, relationships, things and activities - results of the performative turn - with the means of art. As research in artistic practice that draws its insights and perceptions from this same artistic practice - i.e. to insist on the ability to devise and transform with the aim to translate this into possible transformation of realities.
300 is devised as longterm research. The individual actions focus a variety of aspects: at times every day life, at times sculptural or visual aspects, then social or ethnological - always or better always also artistic. Art is Life. Life is Art. Scatchbook of a performance artist, home work, cleaning up, attack. Each single performance is part of the larger body of 300 actions which together will result in the experimental 24 hour video 300.
The works happen mostly in the studio. Under the working title 'Prologue to 300' at times specifically devised sequences or bodies of work of a number of five-minute/300 second long actions are presented publicly.
since 2009
Collaborations 2021 Atlas‘ Wirbel|container, GREEN LINE, Thousand Times Yes
Despite all hardships on the one hand, repeated re-scheduling and only with heaviest re-organisational efforts of all involved parties on the other some collaborative work was made possible and could finally be shown during 2021.
LOSE COMBO by Jörg Laue - Atlas‘ Wirbel|container, GREEN LINE I had the great pleasure to be invited to perform along with the great Claudia Splitt and reknowned musicians of Sonar Quartett (Atlas‘ Wirbel) and Duo Tocar (GREEN LINE) in two new productions by Jörg Laue‘s LOSE COMBO. Atlas‘ Wirbel could unfortunately not be presented live with an audience. Large parts of the auditive, visual, performative and environmental material, texts and compositions are published online as Atlas‘ Wirbel | container. GREEN LINE luckily could be produced, rehearsed in situ and shown to a live audience in November 2021 at Heizhaus/Uferstudios.
Both – Atlas‘ Wirbel and GREEN LINE – are part of the cycle of performative cartographies which will be continued in the years 2022 and 2023 starting with the new production makropolis.
Find further information and documentation about LOSE COMBO by Jörg Laue here: LOSE COMBO Visit Atlas‘ Wirbel|container here: Atlas‘ Wirbel|container
2016. 100th anniversary. New life for DADA: Neo Neo DADA is neither historical classification nor aesthetic homage. Neo Neo DADA is performance art as political weapon, anti-performance that stands up against the latest catastrophic developments in art, politics and economy without allowing cabaret like arrangements to influence the emerging art. DADA says: Enlightment results in its consequences always in capitalism, the authority of men ruling everything in this world results in war. Therefore the utmost nonsense employed by DADA is not simply nonsense. The laughter this kind of nonsense produces is never relaxing. It is the only possible reaction towards the morbid absurdities we are made believe to be practical constraints and realities. Neo Neo DADA will not contribute to any debate. Neo Neo DADA opposes the powers that are with the formal momentum of its contributions.
Premier: September 2016
Venue: Sophiensaele Berlin
TEOTWAWKI
TEOTWAWKI - The End Of The World As We Know It. An acronym coined by the prepper community. Survival specialists who prepare themselves with rigorous storage plans, prayers, bunkers, first aid training and target practice to survie the final catastrophe. Popular scenarios are among others the eruption of a mega volcano, the global crash of stockmarkets, climate change, terror attacks or the zombie apocalypse. Preppers take them all very, very serious. And they do prepare. Burmester & Feigl appropriate these paranoid views on the world to gain an understanding of the all encompassing fears and obsessions with security so characteristic for our contemporary western societies.
Premier: October 2014
Venue: Sophiensaele Berlin
Dissolved - The Uncanny Valley
Telematic performance
The Uncanny Valley is a space that does not exist outside virtuality. Brought into existence through construction of two identical spaces in different parts of the the world and superimposing the live images from the two locations through video streaming in a way far removed from Skype calls and video conferencing a third space is created - the telematic space. This space allows performers and audiences in different parts of the world to merge and occupy each other, in a doubled space that is half there, half not there.
Entering telematic space, merging with remote beings, creating spatial situations and third performing entities - unstable in all aspects - pushes the limits of the common understanding of here and now, cause and effect - of what one usually likes to understand as reality. Starting with some few reduced conceptual questions apparently simple and mundane situations become a well of desaster and chaotic effects. The complex sequential dependencies make it literally impossible to execute and fulfill the carefully scripted and rehearsed theatrical reality. These performances provoke the well tuned theatrical machinery to collapse. Each performance becomes a manifestation of the contingency of being. A celebration of the beauty of the theatrical situation as something that happens against all odds, provoking chance and fate - something utterly unique.
The Berlin production was funded by HKF - Haupstadtkulturfonds. The London production was developed through an AHRC Fellowship at Royal Central School of Speech and Drama and supported using public funding by the National Lottery through Arts Council England and British Council.
Premier: March 2014
Venues: Beaconsfield London & Sophiensaele Berlin
Burmester & Feigl's Hermetic Garden
click on pictures to enlarge
In autumn 2013 Joern J. Burmester and Florian Feigl invited five performance artists from Germany, England and Denmark to join them in their Wunderkammer at Sophiensaele Berlin.
Burmester & Feigl's Hermetic Garden was installation, research extravaganza, conference of conjuroring artists and series of shows half-way between dark cabaret and punk academia. With performances, lectures and talks they illuminated and tested transitions between performance art and magic for five days.
Premier: October 2013
Venue: Sophiensaele Berlin
Rambo Revisionist a performance series by Florian Feigl and Joern J. Burmester
Ten years ago: a bunch of students from Hamburg with small cutters in their hands are not afraid to die. A bearded prophet with warm eyes becomes the terror of the western world. President W. declares War against Evil.
Enter Joern J. Burmester and Florian Feigl. They interpret the new world order in a series of performance lectures. To understand they use the Hollywood movie "Rambo III" with Sylvester Stallone as backdrop. The "Ueber"-soldier - man-made by Colonel Trautman, not a creation of God - whose body is home to war became a reliable guide for the trip through the mountains of Afghanistan and many representations of Evil.
Ten years later. Everybody is ten years older. John Rambo went home - back to his fathers ranch. Years earlier George W. did the same. And Osama? A video shows an old man slightly twisted from the back watching TV - as proof of his death! The other proof that he's dead is a photo showing the US president also watching TV.
Burmester and Feigl ask: Is that how victory against Evil looks like? Everybody watching TV?? Did actually end anything at all???
Follow us in new chapters! Feigl and Burmester are back - with Rambo Revisionist, with new thoughts, new manifestos, new performances!
opening: March/2011, Samtalekoekken/Copenhagen
-VOID-
a gallery tour by Jochen Roller and Florian Feigl
In October 1960 Yves Klein jumped out of the window of an apartment in Paris. Klein's "Jump into the Void" documented on a photography by Harry Shunk soon becomes a key moment of art history and a myth of performance art. Klein set the jump up as a proof for the possibility to overcome the materiality of art. At the same time he never denied that the photography was the result of various and complicated processes of manipulation. Thus by its paradoxical double function as proof and fake the photography becomes the spectacular manifestation of a strategy that Klein employes to encounter the fetishised relation towards materiality as it is growing ever more in art market. The Berlin based performance artists Jochen Roller and Florian Feigl take the photography as starting point for the performance -VOID-. They take the audience on a guided tour through an exhibition of thoughts about the materiality of art. Longing to overcome that same materiality they try out various possibilities, invent stories, construct causalities and sketch out utopian scenarios. They argue to value aesthetic experience more than the material exploitation of art.