gb agency

Exhibition PER/FORM, How to do things with[out] words, CA2M, Madrid

Ryan Gander will display a video from 2013 entitled Imagineering and Roman Ondak will show Stampede, a video from 2011 and the performance This Way, Please from 1999.

Performance and performativity are centre stage at this time. One can think of many reasons why. The fact that we are living more and more in an “immaterial” world, dominated by mediatisation (which some call spectacle), the impact of globalization, the increasing tendency to think of politics as biopolitics, these different factors enhance performance over materiality, or object making. Performativity explores the space in-between, what happens when bodies or objects are left to perform. To perform is to enable oneself or things to work through form. And to let form speak for itself.

Performing and performance are concepts that activate reality. They are at play with the world. The outcome is non-linear, non-unidimensional. It opens up the real into a multifaceted and complex organism. In this sense, performativity (what performing and performance activate) offers resistance against a homogenization of the world. It leads to renewal, change, and expands the potentiality of things and beings. In a world formatted by capital and the weight of history, we need change, we need performativity to unblock minds and situations.

This exhibition, conceived as an event, will enhance performativity and the way it works, the way it performs itself. It will include objects, media as well as bodies. It will be “live” at all times, as installations, photography, films, performances, discussions, inhabit the space of the museum.