Photo: Katarzyna Szugajew.
From 4 to 8 March 2015 (4-7 March at 8.30 pm, 8 March at 4.00 pm) Marta Ziółek will be showcasing her latest piece Black on Black at Amsterdam?s Het Veem Theater (Van Diemenstraat 410).
About the performance:
Black changes shapes. Black makes me slimmer. Black here is an abyss. Black re-lives. Black is no colour. Black is a bandit amongst colours. Blackening exposes. Black is a hole of excess. Blackening is the cover and the change. Black?s cover makes me see. Black is all-embracing. Black is timeless.
Black on Black is the title of a series of black paintings by the Russian artist Alexander Rodchenko. By using black paint as the base for these paintings, he found a way to create depth and to move beyond the canvas? surface The medium expands. ?Nothing but painting exists.? The viewer gets sucked in. Using layers of black creates a tension between visibility and invisibility; it shifts the focus to material and motional aspects, to construction and form. Black creates discontinuity with the work; something is moving off the medium.
Marta Ziółek ?s Black on Black is a détournement on this way of thinking: a hijack into the blackness of motion and textually. She takes its specific kinetics (dynamics, motion) and applies it onto her own medium. The limits of her medium start with the limits of the skin, of physicality, and the presence of the body. How to move these ?off?? Finding the blackness of dance. Thinking dance as a black ?thing?. Creating the ?Black on Black? gesture now.
In her artwork, Marta Ziółek focuses on expanding the scope of choreographic practice. Adopting an interdisciplinary approach, she exposes and challenges those things required of a choreographer and are considered inseparable elements of his or her practice. She approaches performance as a concrete way to reconfigure history and to work with the reproduction of embodiment and disembodiment (alienation). Stick (2012) made in collaboration with Florentina Holzinger, explored the embodiment of historical figures that resisted the dominating discourses of their time; Body Eye or how to say (2013/2104), drew on Ziółek?s explorations of the work of American artist Carolee Schneemann and was developed in collaboration with Lisa Vereertbrugghen in Het Veem Theater. Recently Marta collaborated as a choreographer in Monadology. A treatise on relationality (2014), a live stage installation by Aleksandra Hirszfeld.
Concept: Marta Ziółek
Creation and performance: Marta Ziółek and Anna Nowicka
Dramaturgical advice: Eleonora Zdebiak
Curator, art historian: Szymon Żydek
Fashion designer: Michał Gruca.
Photography: Katarzyna Szugajew.
Black on Black is a Het Veem Theater production.
Supported by The Studio Theatre Warszawa, Komuna//Warszawa, STUK Kunstencentrum Leuven and Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw.
This production is part of the Life Long Burning (LLB) project, supported by the Culture Programme of the European Union.
Het Veem Theater is structurally subsidized by the city of Amsterdam and the Dutch Performing Arts Fund.
On production of your printed entrance ticket from the performance Clubbing by Keren Levi (4 ? 7 March in Frascati), you can enter the performance Black on Black by Marta Ziolek (4 ? 8 March in Het Veem Theater) for a reduced entrance price of ? 10 (or ? 5 on the try out day).
