LUCKY

Events:

Friday, 6 July 2018, 19h
Opening of the exhibition with Performances
Ongoing 19- 22h, In the stairwell
Anarel·la Martínez-Madrid: PLAY ME: a one-on-one performance about sex and consent (EN)
Anarel·la Martínez-Madrid invites one participant at a time to practice consent in spontaneous and secured guided scenarios in a space of unfamiliarity. Using her background in sex education, Martínez-Madrid seeks to create a temporary environment where power can be exchanged, sex toys can be touched and played with, and questions around privilege and sex positivity can abound.
21h, nGbK event space, 1st floor
Laura G. Jones & Alexander Linton: Babypunk ft. Babuyoka (EN)
Together Laura G. Jones and Alexander Linton collaborate to explore crip—a reclaimatory term for the chronically ill—as it meets queerness, afro/crip futurism, and a shared love of hip hop. Composed of music, dance, noise, and spiritual ritual, Babypunk ft. Babuyoka is an explosive and experimental synthesis of sterile medical textures with softer textures of care. While addressing the shame inscribed onto medicalized sick bodies and their various fluids, the performers/creatures express their need for visibility as complex crip others.
22h, In the Courtyard
Zinzi Buchanan & Trev Flash: future babies (EN)
A concert-style, semi-conscious delivery of shared fears of—and hopes for—the future: a frantic, euphoric expression of utopian vision. Crash and doom.
This performance explores the notion of ‘being born lucky‘ in tandem with the dream of conception and progeny. Giving birth to hot emotions as both lovers and collaborators, Zinzi and Trev have a strong interest in exploring feelings around parenthood and the future together.

Saturday, 21 July 2018
17.30h
Guided Tour (DE)
19h
Panel Discussion “Hart daran arbeiten, Glück zu haben?”(DE)
With Tanja Abou, Ruby Sircar, and Jasper Anne Potjans
This discussion explores the relationship of luck to labor, class, and the capitalist system through the lens of feminism. Hard work might lead to success, but the expectations and valuation of one’s labor are often dependent on the assumptions that are ascribed to one’s physical and social body. Work is moralized so as to categorize people as ‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving’ of resources through their conformity to social norms. The labor of domestic, ‘unskilled’, activist, artist, migrant, and care work is rarely acknowledged as such, especially when it is unpaid or underpaid. As much as we can dream of getting lucky, it is nearly impossible to do so without disposable income and a seat at the table. We bring together multidisciplinary speakers to explore how we play the game.

Friday-Sunday, 27-29 July 2018
Performance Festival Weekend »LUCKY YOU«

Fri, 20h
Melanie Jame Wolf: An Act of Improbable Genius (EN)
The artist interrogates ‘The Myth of Genius‘, which insists that one is either touched by genius, or not. This good fortune, however, has consistently favored those rich, male, and white.
An Act of Improbable Genius is a performance and video event which seeks to destabilise, and re-inscribe die-hard myths about genius and possibility by underscoring the complex, privileged conditions requisite for genius to emerge. It is a performance that aims to understand how these myths infect people’s estimations of probability, and their own likelihood to pursue things—art, the world—differently.
Ok-Hee Jeong: Fünfmal Frau Kim, auf der Suche nach Heimat (DE)
Centered around South Korean migration to Germany, Jeong’s performance investigates the meaning of being a ‘foreigner’ when examining different generations of immigration, including the so-called “1.5 generation” who split their adolescence between two countries. A performance critical of the ‘luck’ of passing as native to one’s country, Five Times Ms. Kim, Looking for Home dissects the violent ‘blood and soil’ rhetoric of the homeland.

Sat, 20h
Xenia Taniko: Mesh & Wire (EN)
Dramaturgical Assistance: Maya Weinberg
“Mesh & Wire” is occupied with the slippery edges of physical embodiment. It is the process of a body dismembered, a body with many members, spread across the room, evading its own contours. If the body is something larger than its parts, where does it begin and where does it end? Where does a body draw power from? What are its assets?
In this performance, Xenia Taniko orchestrates the singular body as an intricate network of textures and relations, affect and effect, power play and interdependence. Mesh & Wire is the first installment of an ongoing body of work that investigates the prosthetic nature of the body, questioning monolithic concepts of subjectivity and order.
Nasheeka Nedsreal: Working the Root (EN)
Did you step on a crack? Did someone sweep across your foot with a broom? Did you leave your purse on the ground, or your hat on the bed? Are ladders, mirrors, or black cats involved?
In “Working the Root”, Nasheeka Nedsreal explores the traditions that followed Black people across the Atlantic to the USA and that remain embedded in superstitions, beliefs, values, and culture. Is luck the fundamental expression of unpredictability or uncertainty? Is it out of our control? Nedsreal follows the role of the divine, and whether it has left the universe to its own cause and effect—or the chance to manifest one’s own fortune.

Sun, 12-19h
12-19h
Roni Katz, in collaboration with Anna Zett: Between Us (EN)
Investigating intimacy and public space in relation to community building and self care, Roni Katz, Anna Zett, and a group of performers build a stage from a sofa for conversation to transpire, asking how we can both listen and share. This performance begins by entangling what is between luck and privilege, investigating what happens between interlocutors and between spaces public and private.
Between Us is a format that aims to tackle the relations of what is talked about: how, where, and with whom. The audience is invited to step in, listen, speak up, and leave when the time is right.
Performers: Johanna Ackva, Casey Detrow, Giorgio Gago Gagoshidze, Julia Gladstone, Ria Hylton, Roni Katz, Nomaduma Masilela, Jos McKain, Sophia New, Omar Nicolas, Steve Paul Steven Paul, Maayan Strauss, Xenia Taniko, Louise Trueheart, Nikhil Vettukattil, Siegmar Zacharias, Anna Zett
16.30-18h
Zwoisy Mears-Clarke: How to Greet Like a Jamaican: Step 2 (EN/DE)
‘Who do I get to serve today?’
In a performance between host and guest, Zwoisy Mears-Clarke prepares and extends an invitation to a dinner of traditional Jamaican cuisine from his motherland. From how the table is set to the choice of conversation for the evening, the host attempts to gather the respective history of ‘hospitality’ carried within him and his guests, and what it means to them today.
To this end, the work concerns itself with tracing colonial European skills forcefully passed down from the hands of British white masters to the backs, hands, and legs of enslaved people—a genealogy leading to Mears-Clarke’s parents, and finally to the artist himself. Lucky is the guest invited to taste a culinary practice passed down through a colonial history of violence, laying bare on the table the ambivalent nature of hospitality and service.

Saturday, 4 August 2018
17.30h
Guided Tour (EN)
19h, nGbK Courtyard
Panel Discussion “Thank You for Seeing Me” (EN)
With Lorena Juan and Jo Verrent
This discussion will be an opportunity to reflect on the ‘luck’ of being represented and how representation is too often conflated with justice. Departing from the belief that feminism is a collective non-alignment composed of multiple perspectives, but with a shared awareness of oppressive and exclusive feminist canons, this is an invitation to explore how these feminisms are applied to curation and how they guide questions of representation and visibility.

Saturday, 18 August 2018, 20h
»Fortune Unfolded« Short Film Screenings curated by Coral Short
Coral Short deconstructs privilege within the genre of film. Videomakers decipher the notion of luck as privilege within our white cis supremacist society. This is unpacked through landscapes, ideas of heteronormative “beauty”, as well as signs and signifiers for luxury. Anti- authoritative aesthetic strategies are implemented to question the often unquestioned status quo. In this brand new program full of world premieres, playful political performance art unravels ideas, and film artists infuse old medias with intention to speak in new visual languages. From covering colonial statues with piss, to performance princesses, a wide range of different focuses emerge and visually unfold.
With films by: Claire Arctander, Divide and Dissolve, Sabella D’Souza, Daniel Embree, Shon Faye, Gwendolyn Audrey Foster, B.B. Gunn, Winston Hacking, Virginia Joseph, Yasmeen Nematt Alla, Nowmomentnow, Tami T, Erodium Thunk, John Walsh (TBC)

Saturday, 25 August 2018, 12-18h
“My Worst Performance Ever” Queer Performance Workshop with Natalie Igor Dobkin (EN)
“My Worst Performance Ever” is a queer performance workshop that investigates the boundaries between professionalism and amateurism, entertainment and art, and the queer body in heteronormative spaces. In resistance to the call for professionalism, Natalie Igor Dobkin proposes amateurism as a strategy and practice with which to fight capitalism. The workshop incorporates drag, high-school dance parties, songs on demand, talent shows, reality television, and more.
Previous experience in performance art not required. Capacity limited to 20 participants: register via email to nataliedobkin@gmail.com

Saturday, 1 September 2018, 19h
Finissage with Performances
Cathy Walsh: Game Show (EN)
In this immersive performative installation that mimics US television game shows popularized in the 1950s, Cathy Walsh leads a fair game won by strategy—or luck?
There will be prizes, distractions, concessions, buy-outs, go-for-brokes, and phone-a-friends. Game Show creates an arena to play one’s chances and gamble with the body one has created or been given, asking the participant: “Do you feel lucky?”
Vagittarius Rising: Karma vs Kapital (EN)
Against the didactic and the mansplainers, Vagittarius Rising operates from a fake band methodology: a practice that eschews the precious and official in favor of the quick and dirty, the unplanned, and all the freedom and vulnerability that lies in this format for performance and practice.
Meditating on glacially large notions like karma and capital, this fake band does not claim to thoroughly comprehend nor speak on behalf of these frameworks. Rather, Karma vs Kapital explores how different understandings of deed, intention, and unfolding futures are informed by socioeconomic and spiritual world-views.
Travis Alabanza: The Obituary for the Not-So-Lucky (EN)
In their Obituary, Travis Alabanza eulogizes those that didn’t make the cut. In this notice of death, we are invited to remember those that could not quite get up the ladder because ‘luck’ was simply not on their side. As the dead rest among us uneasily, the audience is invited to continue in the festivities and forget that anyone ever had a hand in their demise.