by Contemporary Cruising |

Kate Brown on Nora Turato
‘Hysteria Is Still Taboo’: Performance Art Dynamo Nora Turato on Why the Art World Still Isn’t Ready to Hear a Woman Scream
The Croatia-born, Amsterdam-based artist is on a hot streak.

She performs in the typically quiet, hallowed halls of museums, galleries, and even churches. She storms around; she gets hysterical.

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by Contemporary Cruising |

MATTHEW MCLEAN on Trajal Harrell
Made to Measure
Trajal Harrell talks ‘realness’, daydreaming, and his performance Twenty Looks or Paris is Burning at the Judson Church (S)

Trajal Harrell is in London to perform Twenty Looks or Paris is Burning at the Judson Church (S) (2010) at Sadler’s Wells – the UK debut of this piece, which forms part of Block Universe, the performance festival whose impressive second edition also featured UK premieres of works by Martin Spangenberg and niv Acosta, and new commissions from Jesse Darling and Raju Rage, Grace Schwindt and Erica Scourti, among others.

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by Contemporary Cruising |

Open letter: #metoo and Troubleyn/Jan Fabre
By (former) employees and apprentices at Troubleyn
september 2018

In the interest of the audience and the wish to inform future generations of performing artists, we, former employees and interns who have worked with Jan Fabre in the context of Troubleyn vzw, have come together to share our experiences and to raise our voices in the context of #metoo and its associated social shifts.

This collective response is prompted by statements made by Jan Fabre during an interview with the public broadcast station VRT on Wednesday the 27th of June 2018. In the interview, Fabre shares his thoughts concerning the results of a survey on sexual harassment commissioned by the Flemish Minister of Culture, Sven Gatz.

The starting point for the interview is the headline “1 out of 4 women in the cultural sector experienced sexual harassment in the past year”. On camera for the interview, Fabre responds with surprise and disbelief when these numbers are presented. He says that he is supportive of the actions and measures taken by the Ministry of Culture, but adds that “there is also something dangerous about this. Because, the relationship, the secret bond between director/choreographer and actor/dancer…. you will in fact also destroy and harm it incredibly”.

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by Contemporary Cruising |

By Henri Neuendorf for Contemporarycruising.com

Christian Jankowski Guest-Starred on a German Crime Drama and Declared It Art.
The Producers Say, No, It’s Just a TV Show
The artist appropriated the episode for his latest exhibition at Petzel Gallery in New York.

An exhibition at a Chelsea gallery has become a new battleground for an age-old question: Is an artist ever allowed to take another person’s work and re-present it as their own?

The question takes on new meaning in a dispute between the German artist Christian Jankowski and the producers of a German television show, who are displeased that Jankowski has presented an episode he appeared in as his own work in his latest solo show at New York’s Petzel Gallery (on view through August 3).

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by Contemporary Cruising |

Sacred Naked Nature Girls
By Coco Fusco

By the time the Sacred Naked Nature Girls brought their all nude show to Highways in Santa Monica, they were wrapped in wild stories about how, in other locales, irate feminists and horny fellows had joined forces to recast their work as pornography. The gals wanted to censure them—the guys wanted to jack off in front of them as applause. I went to see what all the ruckus was about and witnessed a rare instance of decidedly female energies melded together in a serenely powerful force. New Age neo-primitivists scoot over—here’s another spin on the body and the sacred. Their nudity wasn’t there to shock or offend, it was symbolic of their collective will to break down the barriers of the social and turn emotional vulnerability and personal memory into poetry.

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by Contemporary Cruising |

By Ellen Söderhult on Linda Blomqvist

To listen with all senses

In a piece of writing on listening, the philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy asks what it means for a being to “be immersed entirely in listening, formed by listening or in listening, listening with all his being?” Later he continues: ”What secret is at stake when one truly listens, that is, when one tries to capture or surprise the sonority rather than the message?” […] “What does to be listening, to be all ears, as one would say “to be in the world”, mean? What does it mean to exist according to listening, for it and through it, what part of experience and truth is put into play?” Maybe The Sound by Linda Blomqvist together with Madeleine Lindh and Sandra Lolax could be considered a form of answer to Nancy’s questions. An answer in the sense of a response, an echo or a proposition. Or, it could be considered a different, embodied and materialized way of asking these questions.

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by Contemporary Cruising |

Castor Troy on Michael Koptev

The celebrity, which had already been recognized before the war as one of the main freaks of Luhansk, scandalous fashion and organizator of the sensational “shows of the extreme fashion” of the theatre “Orchid”, Michael Koptev visited Ukrainian capital on October 28.

Having lived for 25 years in Luhansk, I’ve heard a lot about his “fashion shows”, taken place in HC of railroad, seen some photos, but personally I prefered not to visit them. It was not because I didn’t want it, it was curious enough, but consciousness of Luhansk dweller had the associations with “total facepalm” in spite of a little number of prejudices.

A lot of people from Donbass, Crimea and other Ukraine had to build once again the paradigm of life values, once again to divide anger from kindness, reconstruct destiny. So, when I knew that legendary Mike Koptev, stayed to live in occupied by “LPR” Luhansk, is going to visit the capital, I decided that I must go on this event.

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