Pil & Galia Kollectiv: I-O

The Stedelijk Museum presents I-O, a new performance by artist duo Pil & Galia Kollectiv. This new commission is developed especially for the Teijin Auditorium of the Stedelijk, and is part of the performance and lecture series Stage It! (Part 3): SCRIPTED.

I-O is a new performance piece that ties together notions of ritual, office work, and experimental pedagogy. Moving between team building exercises, fringe art school workshop, and cult initiation rite, the piece examines the performative act through which collectivity is formed as a fantasy at the heart of post-capitalist individualism. The title, I-O, is an allusion to industrial organizational psychology – a management system where techniques from behavioral psychology are used to maximize worker productivity. It is also a diagram that demonstrates the transition from the I to the many – symbolized here by the sign of the circle.

In the structures of collectivity that Pil & Galia Kollectiv examine – team building, pedagogical systems, cults, etc. – the notion of instruction is highly important, often transferred in a manner that implicates a hierarchy. A set of instructions is made visible at the outset of the performance and is subsequently enacted by the performers in the work. In doing so, the artists not only highlight the relationship between the individual and the collective in this particular context (through the power relations between them), but also challenge the extent to which an instruction shapes the event it constitutes.  

Performed by: Suzanne Kipping, Manolis Tsipsos, Dirk Jan Jager, Mireille Ettema, Phi Nguyen, Vanessa Gerotto, Valentina Lacmanovic and Chloé Turpin.

More information about the artists

Pil and Galia Kollectiv are London based artists, writers and curators working in collaboration. Their work addresses the legacy of modernism. They explore avant-garde discourses of the twentieth century and the way they operate in the context of a changing landscape of creative work and instrumentalised leisure. They are interested in the relationship between art and politics and the role irony and belief play in its current articulation. They have had solo shows, The Future Trilogy at Te Tuhi Center for the Arts, New Zealand, 2010, Svetlana at S1 Artspace, Sheffield, 2008, and Asparagus: A Horticultural Ballet at The Showroom Gallery, London, 2007. They have also presented live work at the 4th Athens Biennial, the 5th Berlin Biennial and the 5th Montreal Biennial, as well as at Kunsthall Oslo, Arnolfini, Bristol, Late at Tate Britain, Radar Loughborough and ICA London. Recent solo exhibitions include Terminal Equilibrium at Trade, Nottingham, and Suck the Living Labor at Ort, Birmingham. They are also the directors of artist run project space xero, kline & coma in London. They have a joint PhD in fine art from Goldsmiths College and work as lecturers in Fine Art at the university of Reading.