• 1
• 2

• immersive performance + workshop; Dance
• Performance art
• Performing arts
• Public intervention
• Social encounter
• Social choreography
• Bodies in crisis
• Dissensus
• Radical solidarity

• Fr., 02.09.2022, 15:30

Experimental workshop 'Acid Bodies: Language against Language'

In this workshop Grace Euna Kim presents body and perceptual practices, which question the failure of language during crisis and how this creates conditions for social conflict.

• 1Photo © Valentin Wedde. Grace Euna Kim "The Beautiful Souls". An experiment in radical solidarity.
• 2 Grace Euna Kim, performance and visual artist, choreographer, and researcher

Grace Euna Kim invites participants to explore the body as a sociopolitical archive. The body will thus be activated as a site of radical inquiry and resistance. Prior dance/performance experience isn’t necessary. The workshop 'Acid Bodies: Language against Language' presents body- and perception-oriented practices based on methods that Kim has developed over many years of devising immersive performances. We will explore possibilities to rewrite social/political imaginaries through our senses and bodies. Participants are encouraged to probe their own psycho-somatic patterns, failures, and approaches: What is at stake in moments of crisis and how we choose to react? In what ways does language fail us, and therefore produce conditions for social conflict? What would it mean to embody “solidarity in difference” through actions and not words? As a companion and inside view into Kim’s transdisciplinary performance and social project 'Unspeakable Community', the workshop concludes with participants' co-creation of an experiment in radical solidarity.

About the venue

ZK/U - Zentrum für Kunst und Urbanistik

Located in a former railway depot surrounded by a public park, ZK/U – Center for Art and Urbanistics is an artistic production site, research residency, and platform for creative and urban experimentation. Conceived by the Berlin-based artists‘ collective KUNSTrePUBLIK, ZK/U promotes international exchange on global issues, and sees itself as a laboratory for inter- and trans-disciplinary activities centered on the phenomenon of “the city”. ZK/U looks at how art and culture can be a catalyst for transformation in the urban sphere. It brings together critical minds at the cutting-edge of art and urban research, whose work is informed by theoretical and practice-based critiques developed in the fields of geography, anthropology, urban planning, architecture and the humanities. In addition ZK/U maintains a theoretical superstructure of regular conferences, publicly accessible publications and archives, etc.— emerging from, and feeding into, the expertise of participants and associates.

About the performance

Unspeakable Community

The performance 'Unspeakable Community' is a subversive exploration of anticipation and togetherness that puts expectations to the test. Accompanied by experimental actions in virtual and urban space, what unfolds is an unpredictable experiment in radical solidarity that turns the “theater” of the audience inside out and calls the fictions of reality into question. The performance encounter addresses the failure of language in times of crisis, and how this produces the conditions for social conflict and oppression. At its root the work questions the potential of dissensus as a basis of radical solidarity. How can we create spaces of resistance and solidarity, without unintentionally producing new forms of exclusion? What would it mean to embody „solidarity in difference” through actions and not words? How can we use language against language? With this in mind 'Unspeakable Community' seeks to investigate the transgressive potential of immersive social choreography, to be a catalyst to collectively question, imagine, and test novel ways of being together.

About the artist

Grace Euna Kim

Grace Euna Kim is a Korean-American performance and visual artist, choreographer, and researcher who devises immersive encounters through a lens of psychoanalytic and critical theory. In her performance and social practice, she deploys methods of deconstruction and subversion as a means to question, decode, and reinvent the theatre of the audience themselves, and thereby work through embedded social and political issues. Grace Euna Kim has orchestrated immersive performances in diverse site-specific contexts - from citywide public interventions to cultural and educational institutions incl. Haus der Statistik, Berlin; Frankfurt Lab; ASCA Univ. of Amsterdam; Blueproject Foundation, Barcelona; White Box, NY; and Seoul Museum. She is a lecturer at the Weißensee Academy of Art Berlin - MA Spatial Strategies program.