Display | LOVE LETTERS

LOVE LETTERS – PART 2

EWA DZIARNOWSKA
RAFAL PIERZYNSKI
JORDAN MÜLLER
TOBIAS PREISIG
TALAYA SCHMID

Exhibition
Jan 9 – Feb 7, 2021
Sat-Sun 12-18.00

Performances
Program to come

Curated by
Marie DuPasquier &
Lea Schleiffenbaum

Location
Horse & Pony, Berlin
Altenbraker Str. 18
12053 Berlin

Reservation
rsvp@horseandpony.online

Love Letters: Stories of Distant Proximities

Intimate relationships are never just private but always also political. How and who we love influences the way we approach our own species, as well as the world as a whole.The work of Annie Sprinkle and Beth Stephens serves as a starting point when thinking about sexual relationships as a form of healing. Entering into sensual relationships withmountains, waterfalls and trees, Sprinkle and Stephens challenge basic societal structures such as monogamy and heterosexuality, as well as our relationship to non-human species.

International careers and digitalization have further complicated modern love lives,increasing the number of long distance relationships substantially. The current healthcrisis accelerates this process further. Love letters, phone calls and virtual role-play make up for physical encounters, replacing hairy, sweaty skin with clean, smooth computer screens. While the visual and the aural senses are stimulated, touch, smell, taste andproprioception are being neglected.

Creating a place that smells, moves, touches and talks, Love Letters: Stories of Distant Proximities engages its visitors as sentient beings. Conceived as a series of solopresentations, the exhibition will grow over time. Seeking sensual, sexual and societal healing, the works on view explore the role of intimacy, individual freedom, and artisticpractice.

Proposals – Part 2
January 2021

Talaya Schmid & Jordan Müller
Tobias Preisig
Ewa Dziarnowska
Rafał Pierzyński

Talaya Schmid & Jordan Müller

Guided Group Masturbation: Immersive Sound Sculpture is a meditation: binaural beats and cat purrs invite the audience to an immersive excursion through the narratives of the body. Originally produced as a participatory performance with a live audience, Schmid & Müller have translated the workshop into a livestreamed format, inviting participants to prepare their own environments according to instructions from the artists prior to the performance.

Tobias Preisig

In Praise of Small is a series of experimental online one-to-one concerts by violinist Tobias Preisig, which seeks to open alternative formats and revise the listener-performer-spatiality relationship. Playing on the assumption that musician and listener reciprocally inform one another, In Praise of Small allows an intimate exchange between the two and fosters a shared and non-hierarchical experience for both parts.

Love songs, declaimed poems or spotify playlists: the ways of declaring one’s feelingthrough intermediary supports are multiple. In the framework of the project In Praise of Small, an exclusive sound piece made by the violinist Tobias Preisig is joining the exhibition. Arbeitsweg – A Musical Love Letter is a soundtrack for one’s path, intended to accompany on the duration, on the way, on the long distance. While it transposes verbal intentions into sound, it also compensates for the lack of physical presence. Through this “soundscape” piece, Tobias Preisig continues to explore ways of listening-seeing-feeling in the most intimate one-to-one exchange.

Ewa Dziarnowska

Ewa Dziarnowska has engaged in a strong physical relationship with the space of the exhibition since November 2020, using Horse & Pony as her studio base for several months during the semi-lockdown. The same body appears, negotiating movements, environments, clothing and collected favorite love songs. Variations develop according to patterns and repetitions from her physical repository as well as immediate sensual stimuli to become a dance journal of responses to internal and external situations.

In her performance, Ewa Dziarnowska lets herself be informed by a studio dispositive and solo improvisation practice. Raw, impulsive, sharp, sometimes elusive, her movements reduce to essential dance gestures. The corporeal experience, devoid of any narrative tension, seeking into the deepest bodily memories and non-rational knowledge, is translated into space.

Rafal Pierzyński

Following their expanded idea of touching, in a 34-minute video-choreography Pierzyński explores the alterity within, differentiating own parts from one another in the eyes of multiple cameras. Rafał’s phasing, circular journey reveals the potential of the choreography to speak beyond the dimensions bounded by time and space, proposing a reality in which we all are interconnected entities. In their reflection of the lockdown they are looking at the potential of the unseen, and the space between us, the tension between our backgrounds and foregrounds. Dwelling in the difficult, queer moment they embody the idea of reorienting. After being alone in the vertigo of images, voices and selves, coexisting digitally or skin to screen, we leave the party with the question: ‘how can we live together’ ?

The work was created in collaboration with Kulturfolger Zürich. Inspired by the writings of Karen Barad, Timothy Morton, Sara Ahmed.

Previous proposals – Part 1
October 2020

Julie Favreau
Kasia Fudakowski
Neha Kudchadkar
Marie von Heyl & Fette Sans