An exhibition by Johanna Bruckner and Discoteca Flaming Star

curated by Dimitrina Sevova and Alan Roth.

Opening: Saturday, 20 August 2016, starting at 18:30h

with a performance by Discoteca Flaming Star at 20:00h.

Saturday, 20 August 2016 - Friday, 23 September 2016


Opening Hours / Öffnungszeiten
Wednesday / Mittwoch, 15:00h – 18:00h
Thursday / Donnerstag, 16:00h – 19:00h
Friday / Freitag, 15:00h – 18:00h
Saturday / Samstag, 14:00h – 16:30h
(Closed on Thursday, 15 September 2016)


[English below]

Die Ausstellung #work #dance #labor #movements vereint die Installation und Performance Love Any Out of (90 Seconds) End von Discoteca Flaming Star mit den Research-Prozess-basierten Video Installationen Rebel Bodies (Episodes I & II) und Total Algorithms of Partiality von Johanna Bruckner.

Beim Ausstellungsprojekt geht es um die Freude am Anderen, und darum, aus polyphonischen Melodien und gemeinschaftlichen Rhythmen einen unpersönlichen Refrain zu erzeugen. Die Ausstellung bezieht bewusst die aktuellen post-fordistischen Bedingungen und die prekäre Lage kreativer Arbeiter_innen und immaterielle Aspekte der Produktivität heute ein, um auszumalen, wie wir alle als Agent_innen in einem Netzwerk von Beziehungen dringend unsere materiellen Körper am Limit tanzend erfinden müssen. Das veranlasst jede_n von uns unweigerlich, unsere Beziehungen zum Anderen neu zusammen zu setzen. In dieser Bewegung des Zusammenspiels, in der man sich um den Anderen sorgt, „kann das Limit nicht ausgeschöpft werden.“ Das, was Franco „Bifo“ Berardi als für die Produktion von Affekt und Potentialität notwendiges Limit definiert, für ein positive und aktive Verfremdung, die es erlaubt, der technologischen Entfremdung zu entgehen, die auch eine soziale ist. In der Überschneidung der Praktiken von DFS und Bruckner zeigt die Ausstellung Techniken der Bewegung, die für das tägliche Proben in unserem Alltag verwendet werden können, um ihr Publikum linguistisch, affektiv und politisch einzubeziehen. Dazu sind keine besonderen Tanzfähigkeiten vonnöten. Es kann experimentiert und improvisiert werden, um einen „Mutationspunkt“ der Bewegungen eines Körpers zu finden, der präzis eine Praxis des Tanzes definiert – eines Tanzes, der nichts Exklusives verlangt. Die Arbeiten von DFS und Bruckner gehen alltäglichen Praktiken von Tanz und Bewegung nach, Praktiken, die der Wiederholung und der konsistenten Imperfektion bedürfen. Die Probetechniken der Improvisation sind molekulare Werkzeuge, die dazu dienen, Sand ins Getriebe der Kontrollapparate und der kognitiven Automation, die sie im Sinn einbetten – Werkzeuge zur Herstellung anderer Dynamiken in der Beschleunigung der Alltags im maschinischen Kapitalismus. Die flexiblen tanzenden Körper, die wie ein Fischschwarm Bogen schlagen zwischen persönlicher und sozialer Zeit, entrinnen den üblichen Koordinaten des Bodens.

#work #dance #labor #movements ist ein Ausstellungsprojekt in Bewegung, das Tanzbewegungen als persönlichen/sozialen Prozess betrachtet, der den sozialen Körper neu zusammen setzt, einen Körper als besonderes Ding, als temporär stabile dauerhafte Konstruktion aggregierter Teile, eine Konstruktion, die niemals ausserhalb ihres Wesens als Beziehung erfasst werden kann. Sie ertastet, wie der konkrete Körper kollektiv hergestellt wird in Bezug auf Bewegung und Ruhezustand seiner zusammengefügten Teile und deren affektive Resonanzen. Die Bewegung hat ihre eigene Präsenz, schreibt Simone Forti, eine individuierende Kraft des unpersönlichen, verkörperten sozialen Wissens, das es in biopolitischen Begriffen, also mit dem Körper zu denken gilt. Affekt ist eine andere Art, über Macht und die innerliche Konstruktion des Körpers, die Macht zu affektieren oder affektiert zu werden. Der Affekt ist die Macht des widerständigen Körpers, des tanzenden Körpers, von Körper-Kämpfen. Der Affekt verteilt die Körper über einen grossen Raum, offen gegenüber mannigfaltigen Dauern. Der Affekt ist eine Körperpolitik. Foucault stellt fest, dass in Machtkämpfe immer „Körperaktionen“ wirken, und affektive Macht ist produktiv, da sie „die Wirklichkeit ebenso postuliert und herstellt, als sie ihr Grenzen auferlegt.“ In Deleuzes Worten: “Was ein Körper tun kann, entspricht dem Wesen und den Grenzen seiner Fähigkeit, affektiert zu werden.“ Am Limit zu tanzen, affektiert den Körper mehr, als es die Repräsentation tut. Es gibt uns den Schlüssel zum Verständnis affirmativer Politik. Der tanzende Körper vermag es, Negativität zurück zu drängen, sich von ihr zu entflechten.

Affirmative Praktiken betreffen alles, was zum Sinn gehört, affektive Resonanzen zwischen den Teilen der Körper und ihre Differenz, alle Mannigfaltigkeiten und ihre Variabilität und Intensitäten totaler Freude im körperlosen, immateriellen und unpersönlichen Ereignis. „Die Frage des Sinns wird eins mit der Politik.“ Die Ästhetik und Politik des Sinns, in Bezug auf radikale Metaphysik und Bio-Macht gedacht, erotisiert den Körper sowohl in seiner Alltags-Existenz, als auch in der digitalen Sphäre, unregelmässige Körper miteinander verbindend, um die wettbewerblichen Prinzipien in jedem Fragment des sozialen Lebens zu hintertreiben – sinnliche Körper der Solidarität, der Gerechtigkeit und des Rechts. Die Art und Weise, wie sie in ihren künstlerischen Praktiken die Ästhetik des Sinns und die Biopolitik angehen, überschneidet sich in den Positionen und den Arbeiten für diese Ausstellung der Künstler_innen Discoteca Flaming Star und Johanna Bruckner.

Auszug aus dem kuratorischen Text von Dimitrina Sevova und Alan Roth.


[Deutsch siehe oben]

The exhibition #work #dance #labor #movements brings together the installation and performance Love Any Out of (90 Seconds) End by Discoteca Flaming Star, and the research-process-based video installations Rebel Bodies (Episodes I & II) and Total Algorithms of Partiality by Johanna Bruckner.

The exhibition project is about the pleasure of enjoying the other, and sets out to produce an impersonal refrain made of polyphonic tunes and collaborative rhythms. It consciously considers the current post-Fordist conditions and the precarious situation of creative labor and the immaterial aspects of productivity today, to outline how all of us as agents in a network of relations, urgently need to invent our corporeal bodies dancing at the limit. It inevitably prompts each of us to recompose one’s relation to the other. In this movement of interplay, when one takes care of the other, “the limit cannot be exhausted.” What Franco “Bifo” Berardi defines as the limit necessary to the production of the affect and of potentiality, for positive and active estrangement to overcome technological alienation, which is also social alienation. At the intersection of the practices of DFS and Bruckner, the exhibition dis-plays techniques of movement that can be used for rehearsals every day in our daily life, to linguistically, affectively and politically engage its audience. It does not require particular dance skills. One can experiment and improvise, to find a ‘mutation point’ of a body’s movements that precisely defines a practice of dance – a dance that does not require something exclusive. The works of DFS and Bruckner trace the everydayness of practices of dance and movement, practices that need repetition and a consistency of imperfection. The rehearsal techniques of improvisation are molecular tools for putting a spoke in the wheels of apparatuses of control and the cognitive automation they embed in the sensible, tools for introducing other dynamics in the acceleration of everyday life in machinic capitalism. The flexible dancing bodies that arc as a fish swarm between personal and social time, elude the usual coordinates of the floor.

#work #dance #labor #movements is an exhibition project in motion that considers dance movements as a personal/social process that recomposes the social body, a body as a particular thing, as a temporally stable, durational construction of aggregated parts, a construction that can never be conceived outside its conjunctional nature. It probes how the concrete body is collectively produced with respect to motion and rest of its conjoined parts and their affective resonances. The movement has its own presence, writes Simone Forti, an individuating power of impersonal, embodied social knowledge, to be thought in biopolitical terms, i.e., thought with the body. Affect is another way to talk about power and the body’s internal construction, the power to be affected and to affect. Affect is the power of the resisting body, of body struggles, of the dancing body. Affect distributes bodies across a larger space open to multiple durations. Affect is a body politics. Foucault asserts that power struggles always involve ‘body actions,’ and affective power is productive since it “posits and produces reality as much as it sets limits on it.” As Deleuze put it: “What a body can do corresponds to the nature and limits of its capacity to be affected.” To dance at the limit affects the body more than representation. It gives the key to an understanding of affirmative politics. The dancing body can de-limit negativity, disentangle itself from it.

Affirmative practices concern everything that belongs to the sensible, affective resonances between the bodies’ parts and their differences, all multiplicities and their variabilities or intensities of total joy in the incorporeal, immaterial and impersonal event. “The question of sensibility becomes one with politics.” The aesthetics and politics of the sensible, thought in terms of radical metaphysics and biopower, eroticizes the body both in its everyday existence and in the digital realm, conjoining irregular bodies to undermine competitive principles in every fragment of social life – sensible bodies of solidarity, justice and rights. The way they treat, in their artistic practices, the aesthetics of the sensible and biopolitics, intersects in the positions and the works for this exhibition of the artists Discoteca Flaming Star and Johanna Bruckner.

Excerpt from the curatorial text by Dimitrina Sevova and Alan Roth.



Johanna Bruckner

Rebel Bodies
Episodes I & II

The artist Johanna Bruckner continues her research on the organization of collective bodies with “Rebel Bodies”, part II. This large-scale work picks up the Workers Dance League’s inquiry into the possibilities of forming subversive embodied collective subjects. Bruckner’s research based approach sets off from an approximation to marginalized archives of knowledge, and thus creates space for the enunciation of matters which were excluded from hegemonic historiographies. Yet, this process can in no way be reduced to a purely discursive revision or alternative representation (of historiography). “Rebel Bodies” does not only present past (labor) struggles corporeally, but also calls them into the present performatively. Bruckner’s work transposes aspects of subversive choreographic approaches and of worker struggles from the 1930s, the times of industrial capitalism, into the present post-crisis phase of “cognitive” finance capitalism, temporally and spatially; to be more precise, to the Hafencity, which is a prime example of neoliberalism and proceeding gentrification.

(Marius Henderson)


Total Algorithms of Partiality

Hamburg’s Hafencity is currently characterised by continuous transformation. Interest in the most ʻintelligentʼ possible management of the districtʼs infrastructure is being tested by the introduction of new monitoring systems in Hafencity. The concept of logistics is becoming increasingly centralized, to enable optimal co-ordination of commercial, digital and social interactions. In Total Algorithms of Partiality dance scores examining the potential of an altered social logistics in Hamburgʼs Hafencity are developed, during the course of which I look at the current role of contemporary labour organisation and its possible course of action as it is confronted with the controversial developments in Hamburg’s Hafencity. What stance does the trade union take in relation to the complex, unstable situation in the new ʻghost townʼ and what forms of co-operative resistance are set in motion? The artistic work is to be presented in the form of a video installation, a performance, and research material.

This project is concerned with the possibilities of understanding art as an affirmative practice within society and its interwoven infrastructures, deriving from an intensive artistic and scientific examination of the complex logistical developments in Hamburg’s Hafencity and its significant international position.




Discoteca Flaming Star

Love Any Out of (90 Seconds) End



Love Any Out of (90 Seconds) End is a spatial installation and dance performance construction in two different planes. Love Any Out of (90 Seconds) End is a dance piece in which no one ever appears to dance, like in Dance Construction Clothes by Simone Forti. The fabric and its surface are the interiority of the movement itself, which produces an immersive environment not only to look at, but one which the audience walking in the space can feel or inhabit through their moving bodies. Pieces of fabric cut to different sizes, cut across the existing space other temporalities. They are part of the long-term practices of Discoteca Flaming Star with banners, pieces of fabric, glued together and painted or collaged with text which appears irregularly on their surface in poetic lines that make another movement to that of the freely folding, hung fabric. They serve both as backdrop curtains for performances and as an independent, formless architecture within the existing architecture that unframes the space. The movements of the banners shuffle the space; they are a spatial deterritorialization whose disorder forms into words. The interplay between the words makes a sensitive bricolage of Discoteca Flaming Star’s own reflections and the cryptic thoughts that pass through them on everything they are interested in at the moment, which they sometimes carry around with them for months. Sometimes they are concepts, or poems. In the words of DFS, they are think-text-iles.

For their live performance dance construction Love Any Out of (90 Seconds) End, Discoteca Flaming Star take the case of the little girl Esther who trained ambitiously to become a rhythmic gymnast. She wishes to develop to the extreme in her exercises her athletic excellence, to display perfect physical agility, coordination and grace. As it turns out, under the pressure of her parents, Esther eventually left the field of gymnastics to undertake another education that would give her a better future. Now Esther is a woman who graduated from university, which has indeed given her greater opportunities in her life. Her memory has retained, inscribed in her body, the rigorous training of the movements of rhythmic gymnastics. These inscriptions in her body remind her that she did not manage to realize her childhood dream. In the duration of the performance, the dance movements bring her back to the time of her childhood, as they evoke her memory through her body. They follow the dance score of Esther’s 90 seconds of multiple becoming in its imperceptible time, becoming child, becoming animal – A-ESTHER-BECOMING-DIVINE HORSEWOMAN, becoming an imperceptible-impersonal molecule, becoming one and many at the same time in the vanishing time of a 90 seconds duration. A molecular becoming of one/many, to the event of the groundless and infinitely small milieus of a collective action. Esther does not designate a proper name. Esther does not represent a subject, but a desiring assemblage, a collective persona of three and more, as everything written above in capital letters. She is a collective enunciation. The instruction is to love any out of these 90 seconds. To love. A verb in the infinitive! To mark processes like to walk, to love, to dance. The infinitive marks movements of deterritorialization.

Esther dances together with Cristina, and Wolfgang sings. Their dance supposes proximity and distance at the ground level, but in the proximity of their dancing bodies they do not necessarily follow each other’s movements. Their disjointed movements start to intersect more and more often to modulate an invisible diagram of individuation. “I am you” in this passage, with all its intensive components of variability at once. Their movements are at the limit of their bodies and at the limit of their language. Logomotions and body movements interrelate. They double in the becoming of Esther. She is an assemblage – a material production of desires. Esther starts betraying her own memorized techniques of rhythmic gymnastics, displacing them with more improvisational and free movements, eluding the repressive apparatus and disciplining process to lose control, to push her desires to the real life experience, with the sensible quality of emotions and the fabulating movements coming from language. Cristina’s movement techniques are elaborated on the basis of Maya Deren’s and Simone Forti’s systems of movements and techniques, and philosophy.

Love Any Out of (90 Seconds) End opens a new path of imaginary/experience in order to give her a score to become conscious of her difference, embodied in the singularity of the therapeutic process. It is not remodeling Esther’s subjectivity. It is a new production in the dance movements “to recompose her existential corporeality and to get out of her repetitive impasses.” It is both a politics and an aesthetics of irreversible duration.

Love makes the movements a dance of refusal. Love is not work! “dance! no work!” Dance forms life! Dancing molecules, disconnected and at the same time all together. Every movement becomes a joyful autonomous event in a mass tune that gives the courage to Esther to traverse the abyss of the 90 seconds of death, of non-being and crying. “I die. I die.” Which means, paradoxically “I leave. I leave.” And give her the power to fight for the world. “I am you.”

Excerpt from the text on DFS's work in the exhibition, by Dimitrina Sevova and Alan Roth.