Isabel Lewis & Dirk Bell – Sophiensæle | Freies Theater in Berlin

Isabel Lewis is a Dominican-American artist active in the fields of theater, music, and dance and is particularly recognized for introducing the format of the “occasion” to the field of Contemporary Art with her presentations at the Biennale de l’Image en Mouvement at Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève (2013) followed by Frieze Art Fair London (2014). Through persistent experimentation and embodied research methodologies Lewis creates formats for alternative modes of sociality between human and more-than-human-agents. For Lewis any given format suggests ways of ordering the sensible and so how to engage with format is a deeply political question. She employs an expanded sense of the choreographic that centers its focus around generating affective bodily experiences that address all the senses in her collaborative practice.

Lewis has created works around such topics as open-source technology and dance improvisation (Communal EPIC Fiction, 2010), dances as cultural storage systems (Mountain Grass, Mointain Hare: bodily imprinting and social dances, 2012), rapping as an embodied speech act (FLOW PLAY: Sensualized Speech and HipHop, 2013), and the sociological concept of erotic sociability (Unambitious Stripper, 2017-ongoing). Her work has been presented by Dia Art Foundation, Performance Space New York, The Kitchen, Tate Modern, Kunsthalle Basel, Liverpool Biennial of Contemporary Art, Tanz im August, Kampnagel, Gropius Bau, Göteborg International Biennial for Contemporary Art, Palais de Tokyo, Ming Contemporary Art Museum, Sharjah Biennial, Karachi Biennial Trust, and Kunsthalle Zürich among others. In 2021 she became Professor of Performative Arts at the HGB Leipzig.

Dirk Bell is an artist who lives and works in Berlin and in the countryside north of Berlin. He has exhibited drawing, painting, and sculpture internationally over the last 20 years; solo shows include Retour (Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich, Germany, 2011); Made In Germany (travelling between Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead, 2010; Staatliche Kunsthalle, Baden-Baden, 2010; and Kunsthalle Bremerhaven, 2006; among others). Bell works in a diverse array of media and is particularly interested in continuous experimentation with the politics of display within the exhibition setting. Combining found objects, photographs, household furniture, and publications, his exhibitions are installation works in their own right creating staged situations. He is the initiator of several project spaces and collaborative projects that have been active in Berlin such as Montparnasse, Very, and 13 Boxes. His interest in public space has led to the realization of two public scultpures 2FREESPACE (2016) on Otto-Suhr-Allee, Berlin and LOVE (2021) leaning on Berghain. Developing the scenography for Total Romance: Partial Repair is a return to theater for Bell who learned scenographic painting at Staatsoper München between the ages of 18–20 years old. Other collaborations with Isabel Lewis include Scalable Skeletal Escalator (2020) at Kunsthalle Zürich and INTIM/E (2021, 2022) at Galerie Wedding and Schinkel Pavillon as well as their long-term hosting project School of Swans (SoS).

LABOUR is the Berlin-based duo of Farahnaz Hatam and Colin Hacklander who create works based on sound. Collaborating as a duo since 2013, they founded LABOUR in 2018 with their work next time, die consciously (بیگانگی). Coming from music yet thriving in a mixture of scenes, they have recently presented their own work all over the world, including at Martin Gropius Bau, Kraftwerk Berlin, EMST Athens, Sharjah Biennial, Art Basel, Julia Stoschek Collection Berlin, Grand National Theatre Dakar and Berghain. For the Kantine, LABOUR has made a special playlist entitled Music for Togetherness to be played periodically throughout the 10 days.

Yann Slattery (they/them/he/him) (*1997 in Vienna) living and working in Basel is an artist and performer working in the intersections of performance, fashion & clothing and performative multimedia installation. Their praxis often moves in in-between spaces and circles around failure – success, tragedy/comedy, (ir)relevancies, intimacies and un-forgetting. They finished their Bachelor at the Institute Doing Fashion in Basel February 2022 and is currently doing their Master in Fine Arts at the Institute Art, Gender, Nature in Basel. In past projects they used and misused their knowledge in dressmaking to break free from fashional conventions, moving between theatrical fashion performances and clothing installation. As a performance maker they are interested in queering emotions for the experience of the performers and the audience, rewriting notions of failure, shame, joy. They have a recent interest in transforming spaces of intimacies of a strip club into their work, where boundaries of watchers and watched ones get blurry. As a performer they’ve worked with and for Isabel Lewis at Kunsthalle Zürich for the Scalable Skeletal Escalator exhibition from September 2020 to November 2020, Nils Amadeus Lange for different performances and spaces, Monster Chetdwyd for Art Basel 2021 and Raffaela Boss at Les Urbaines 2021 and is part of the Zurich based queer-performance-activist collective DIVAS where they have been involved in different showings both as a performer and a co-creator.

Juli Frodermann (aka Jiji Hopelezz) is a drag performer, musician, and theatre technician. Their work focuses on site-specific sound installations, compositions and task-based performances that guide through the material layers of built places and their histories, exhibiting the process of construction. Nothing is solid; everything is made. They graduated from University of Arts Berlin (Architecture) and Academy for Theatre and Dance, SNDO (Choreography). Jiji Hopelezz is part of the Dragtivist House of Hopelezz and along with their family, hosts drag shows every Thursday at Club Church in Amsterdam. Backstage, Jiji Hopelezz learns with their drag mother TakaTaka about creative processes that value collaboration, co-creation, knowledge sharing, friendship, and joy.

hgb radiob (hello good bye radio) is a student-organized radio of HGB Leipzig – Academy of Fine Arts. As a platform it tries to enable visibility – as in audibility – of sound, music, text and spoken word. The radio explores the medium as a communal and communicative practice  for experimental encounters between transmitters and receptors. hgb radio consists of Aaron Pfersdorf, Leni Pohl, Juri Groß and Helene von Schirach. As the radio and in other constellations they are active in organising and taking part in music and sound art related events, readings, performances as well as DJing and hosting parties. In addition to their live durational sound session happening on December 12, hgb radio has created an hour long soundscape that will play periodically over the ten days in the Kantine.

Tim Novikov (aka Tymm Novyy) is Uzbekistan born and trained as an architect. TN is a multimedia artist, art director and creative coder based in Berlin since 2015. Throughout the past years TN expanded practices into virtual architecture with expansive experience in VR/XR development, modeling, interactive logics & mechanism design of irl / url experiences based on custom procedural engines. TN’s field of work and interests spans from conceptual development, artistic research and experimentation to audio/visual-tech directing and sourcing for innovations, RND in the open-source ecosystem. TN has developed and presented A/V projects in Berghain in collaboration with AMEO, a VR installation at Julia Stoschek Collection within the Worldbuilding exhibition, visual light and stage projections with Marianna Simnett and LAS Art Foundation, art direction and visuals for Black Mirror tokenized web3 experience, visual art direction at Pacha Ibiza with Rockstar Games, VR installations at Art Basel in Miami and Basel, Printworks London, Monom 4DSOUND Studios, as well as part of collaborative live art ecology LARP The Sphere 2033 in Kaunas ConTempo festival.