Antwerp Art Weekend
18-21 May 2023
The Antwerp Art Weekend is the best way to experience the city’s flourishing art scene, with a plethora of galleries, art spaces and museums to discover. The M HKA has programmed several activities, such as the book presentation of Dora García and performances led by Ignace Cami and Céline Gillain.
Performances as part of Dora García’s exhibition She Has Many Names
18, 19, 20 and 21 May, 15:00
The Artist Without Works 19 May, 17.00
Best regards from Charles Filch performed by Peter Aers
Special guided tour by Aaron Schuster in Dora García’s exhibition She Has Many Names
20 May, 14:00
Second floor
During special guided tours organised in the exhibition space of She Has Many Names, invited experts focus on specific aspects of Dora García’s practice. Writer and philosopher Aaron Schuster will focuss on psychoanalysis and Lacanian threads in García’s artistic practice explaining the concepts such as pleasure, desire, Borromean knot, and their complex relationship with language and writing by James Joyce.
The tour is free with a valid museum ticket. No reservation is necessary.
Book launch: Publication: Inserts in Real Time & Magazine launch Girls Like Us #14
20 May, 15:30
Dora García’s exhibition She Has Many Names is accompanied by the publication: Inserts in Real Time: Dora García Performance Work 2000 – 2023, co-published by M HKA and K. Verlag (Berlin).
Inserts in Real Time is the first monograph dedicated to the performance work of the artist Dora García from the past twenty years. At the heart of this book is a Chronology of all García’s performances to date—listed, illustrated, described, and contextualized. This body of work is framed by three newly commissioned texts—by art historian Sven Lütticken, performance theorist Bojana Cvejić, and Dora García herself, as well as a new conversation between the artist and curator Joanna Zielińska. An Appendix of Selected Scripts makes this archive an especially vivid relay of her decades of public experimentation, provocation, and activation.
The launch will be introduced by Joanna Zielińska and Dora García. The artist will be signing books during the launch. The Girls Like US #14 – The Disappointment issue will be launched as well. The book, the magazine issue and T-shirts are for sale in our museum shop. More information here.
Céline Gillain – Performance: Collective song
20 May, 16:00
Sixth floor
This performance presentes the result of a one week workshop led by Céline Gillain. During four days, 12 participants formed a choir-cum-support group. They experimented with building a collective song, inspired by rituals, personal stories, club culture and feminist theories. As the result of the workshop, they will present their collective song. This performance is part of , the project Céline Gillain created for SUPERHOST 2023.
The psychic, almost magical power of words sung, spoken, or yelled might open some gates. We’ll create bizarre beats inspired by techno and dance music with makeshift homemade percussions. Rhythm can lead to a trance and has the potential to shake the walls, create a crack in the system. As contradictory as it may seem, rhythm creates change, rhythm leads to transformation. – Céline Gillain
The performance is free. No reservation is necessary.
Ignace Cami – Performance: RE:ANKER
21 May, at 14:00 and at 16:00
Ground floor, IN SITU-space
Ignace Cami’s new project RE:ANKER (2023) comprises a newly formed choir. Three local songs about Antwerp and its port are sung by a group of twelve singers that are new to the Dutch language. Individually writing their own lyrics through the act of listening, they phonetically transform the original words and sounds into something new and enigmatic. Cami initiated the collaborative singing performance RE:ANKER specifically for his solo exhibition of the same name at M HKA. Entwining the connective nature of singing with the alien experience of facing a foreign language, the transformative power of interpretation is harnessed.
The performance is free with a valid museum ticket. No reservation is necessary.
Conversation about performance artists Taroni-Cividin
21 MAY, 16:00
Reading room, ground floor
Jennifer Malvezzi and Flora Pitrolo will engage in a conversation with Sofie Frederix (M HKA).
The practice of Milan-based duo Taroni-Cividin constitutes one of the most groundbreaking yet rarely traversed areas of the Italian experimental performance archive. Active between 1977 and 1984, Roberto Taroni and Luisa Cividin pushed the edges of the live and the recorded, and of cinematic, bodily and spatial practices, developping an approach to performance-making that continues to generate questions in some of the contemporary moment’s most pressing debates.
Jennifer Malvezzi and Flora Pitrolo’s monograph Taroni-Cividin: Performance, Video, Expanded Cinema (1977-1984) seeks to do justice to the complexity and richness of Taroni-Cividin’s work, critically re-examining it, giving the reader a sense of the theoretical perspectives that guided it, and bringing to light precious archival materials.
The project is supported by the Italian Council (2021), Directorate – General for Contemporary Creativity, Italian Ministry of Culture.
