EURÊKA, C’EST PRESQUE LE TITRE
Marie-Caroline Hominal
Performance — Aug 8, 2021
On the occasion of the traveling exhibition Et tout ceci est vrai! In Tinguely’s footsteps between Paris, Amsterdam, and Basel by Museum Tinguely, the Stedelijk Museum presents the performance Eurêka, c'est presque le titre by Marie-Caroline Hominal.
- Price
- Museum entrance
- Location
- Teijin Auditorium
- Time
- Aug 8, 2021, 2 pm until 2.30 pm
- Main language
- n.a.
- Admission
- We advise you to be present at least 10 minutes before the starting time of the program. No visitors will be allowed to enter once the performance has started. Visitors are expected to attend the entire performance.
In celebration of the 25th anniversary of the Tinguely Museum in Basel, a barge carrying a number of objects from this Swiss museum will travel from Paris to Amsterdam, and back to Basel. From 17 July to 26 September, the barge will dock at places that have played an important role in the artistic career of Swiss artist Jean Tinguely (1925-1991). Two films about works by Tinguely in the Stedelijk Museum’s collection will be shown in the entrance hall. At the NDSM wharf in Amsterdam, a sculpture by Tinguely and documentation about his practice will be exhibited on the barge. Three contemporary artists developed performances specifically for this project, in which they relate to Tinguely’s influential corpus of works. One of these performances was created by Franco-Swiss artist Marie-Caroline Hominal.
About the performance
In Eurêka, c’est presque le titre Marie-Caroline Hominal will take you along into the tumultuous narrative of a dream. Through a series of choreographies, Hominal recounts a dream, in which she is playing a game of chess with John Cage. It is followed by a series of numbers: the dance-like game with abstract forms is accompanied by depictions of characters, which include a female figure (somewhere between a witch and a Mexican La Catrina), a tiger and an indefinable, shimmeringly hairy creature that oscillates between object and living being. Together these scenes form a fragmented yet colorful assemblage: the performance portrays the artist’s imaginative and tragicomic nocturnal fantasies.
The first gesture, whether a movement, a trait or a construction, is always the beginning of a story.
ABOUT MARIE-CAROLINE HOMINAL
Marie-Caroline Hominal lives and works in Geneva. She received her dance education at the Schweizerische Ballettberufschule (ZHDK TanzAkademie) in Zürich and at the Rambert School of Ballet and Contemporary Dance in London, where she joined the National Youth Dance Company. Her artistic practice includes text, drawing, sculpture, video, performance and choreography. In her works, Marie-Caroline Hominal often embodies animals or fictional figures that she borrows from cultural traditions as well as from pop culture and the world of cartoons. Her work has been presented at venues such as theaters, museums and galleries since 2008, but Hominal also seeks out locations that are less obviously part of the art world. She has executed performances in hotel rooms, theater dressing rooms, construction sites and even in the trailer of a transport truck, for example, across China, the United States, and several South-American and European countries.
Marie-Claire Hominal is currently one of Switzerland’s key contemporary choreographers. In 2019 she was awarded the title “Outstanding female dancer” by the Swiss federal dance jury.
PERFORMANCE CREDITS
Commissioned by Museum Tinguely, Basel as part of Museum Tinguely AHOY!
Conception and choreography: Marie-Caroline Hominal
Performer: Marie-Caroline Hominal
Curator, Museum Tinguely: Dr Sandra Beate Reimann
Production Manager: Attila Gaspar
JEAN TINGUELY AND THE STEDELIJK MUSEUM AMSTERDAM
Jean Tinguely played a crucial role in the development of kinetic art in the 1950s. To Tinguely, his work was an act of resistance against a conventional, static art (world): he wanted to put play and experimentation on center stage. He was not satisfied with the notion of visitors watching static paintings from a distance in a sterile white space. Through his do-it-yourself drawing machines, Tinguely critiqued the role of the artist and the elitist position of the arts in society. He rejected the idea of “the unique hand of the artist” by having visitors assemble works themselves.
Amsterdam and Tinguely share a dynamic history. The exhibitions Bewogen Beweging (Moving Movement) (1961) and Dylaby (1962) at the Stedelijk Museum, both co-curated by Tinguely, testify to their close contact. He did not only bring his kinetic Méta-machines to the Netherlands, but also his international avant-garde network, leaving a lasting impression with the public, which visited these experimental exhibitions in great numbers. Close ties with Willem Sandberg (then director of the Stedelijk Museum) and curator Ad Petersen led to several acquisitions for the collection, including his famous drawing machine Méta-Matic No. 10 from 1959, Gismo from 1960 and the enormous Méta II from 1971.
In 2016-2017 the Stedelijk Museum organized an extensive Jean Tinguely retrospective entitled Machine Spectacle. In conjunction with the large Tinguely exhibitions in Düsseldorf and Amsterdam, the thirteen three-dimensional Tinguely works in the Stedelijk Museum’s collection were examined and restored in an extensive interdisciplinary project over the course of 2015 and 2016. The videos that were created in this process will be shown at the Stedelijk Museum, where several works by Tinguely are on show.