Ed Atkins: Performance Capture

Amsterdam, April 16, 2015 - In collaboration with artist Ed Atkins, the Stedelijk Museum presents Performance Capture: a two-day program with music, talks, singing, performances and screenings accompanying the exhibition Recent Ouija. Ed Atkins reflects on ideas about representation and identity and how they might be fundamentally changed by the influence of contemporary technologies. During the event Atkins will take on the role of compère to guests and interlocutors, friends and performers, including Beatrix Ruf, David Raymond Conroy, Ghislaine Leung and Frances Morgan.
 
The title of the symposium refers to the technique of mapping the movements of a performing body for the purpose of creating a computer-generated figure. Performance Capture shows how digital representation, in this case representation through an avatar, can change our perception of ourselves. Ed Atkins: “The interplay between the figurative and the literal will thread throughout the Performance Capture program, presenting opportunities to make manifest subjects and sensations that are commonly rendered invisible, magical, or hysterical. The disappearing of physical bodies and their particular feelings will be resisted in favor of a material, immanent return to the matter of our mortal bodies.”
 
Throughout the weekend an ‘open-mic’ equipped with face-capture camera will be available for participants and the audience to converse, pose questions, sing songs, perform. A bar will be installed in the auditorium for the duration of the program: drinking – intoxication – will be encouraged. For two days, the auditorium will be a site for desire and fantasy; a hospitable talk show for caricature, karaoke, mercy and surrogacy – of performance.

About the artist and the confirmed guests

Ed Atkins is known as one of the pioneers of a contemporary art founded in digitized life: a life always-already inflected by the internet, computers, abstract relations. In his practice, Atkins makes extensive use of cutting edge digital technologies of production and display: computer generated imagery, surround soundtracking and extensive digital compositing all function as emphatic, hysterical caricatures of emotional affects and frustrated desires. Atkins has exhibited at a host of international venues, including Tate Britain (2011), MoMA PS1 (2013), Kunsthalle Zürich (2013) and the Serpentine Galleries in London (2014). The exhibition Ed Atkins: Recent Ouija will be on view at the Stedelijk Museum until May 31, 2015.

David Raymond Conroy lives and works in London. His practice spans visual arts and performance, with a particular emphasis on how self-identified forms of representation might be properly conveyed and understood – as sincere, as true, as in any way sufficient. Most recently, during a residency at Camden Arts Centre (2014-2015), Conroy produced a series of essays, stories and presentations that explored issues of consumption, production, privilege and responsibility. Other recent projects include Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, a stage play with Andy Holden, presented at Arnolfini, Bristol and the ICA, London (2012-13); a solo exhibition L’homme qui voulait savoir at GP & N Vallois, Paris (2012) and the Waterfalls Pavilion curated by Charles Aubin at the Biennial de Belleville, Vivarium Studio, Paris (2012). Conroy holds an MA in Printmaking from the Royal College of Art, London.

Gil Leung is a writer and artist living and working in Brussels and London. Leung and Atkins’ worked together previously on their performance A Methodology for a Phosphorescent Screen at the Special Starry Event in conjunction with the exhibition The Starry Rubric Set at Wysing Art Centre, Cambridgeshire (2012). Also, Leung contributed her piece Pin Pricks to the publication of Ed Atkins & Patrick Ward: Defining Holes (CC Tobačna 001, Ljubljana, 2012). She is distribution manager at LUX, London (an international arts agency for the support of artists’ moving image practice) and editor of Versuch journal. Recent projects include A Bright Night, with Serpentine Galleries and LUX. Leung holds an MA in Aesthetics and Art Theory from the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy, London

Frances Morgan is deputy editor of The Wire and an experienced freelance journalist. She writes about music, film and gender, and their particular intertwinement; for Performance Capture, particular emphasis will be made on the role technologies (of language and display; the audio visual) have in mediating, for better or ill, experiences of performance. Morgan writes the Soundings column for Sight & Sound and is a regular contributor to Electric Sheep. Her writings have also been published in Frieze, New Statesman, Time Out Books, The Quietus, Careless Talk Costs Lives, The Fortean Times, Circuit, PlayLouder, Babylon (Istanbul), NME and Terrorizer. Morgan is former editor of plan b magazine and formerly hosted the radio show The Wire’s Adventures In Sound And Music on Resonance FM.

Beatrix Ruf is director of the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam.

This event has been made possible with the generous support of Warsteiner.

More information

Ed Atkins: Performance Capture
Date: April 25 – 26, 2015, 15.00 – 17.30 hours
Location: Teijin auditorium, Stedelijk Museum
Language: English
Tickets: Limited tickets at the door; please buy tickets online.