Untitled (Holding Horizon) is a choreography that continues Alex Baczyński-Jenkins’ engagement with negotiations of desire, the materiality of gestures and affections of a queer commons. Through sensual, alienated gestures and the box step –a movement used in several social dances– synchronization, pleasure and alliance coexist with disorientation, limitation and loss. On the thresholds of visibility and invisibility, the performers navigate the fluctuating dynamics of collectivity, intimacy and interdependence. They affect and become affected by the live mixed sound and light, while repetition and duration elicit shifting perceptions and associations. A memory of a rave, a ghostly gathering, a celebration and mourning, a militant congregation, a pastoral imaginary. This 3-hour piece relies on a durational experience. The audience will be able to enter and leave the space at their leisure.
Alex Baczyński-Jenkins is an artist and choreographer engaging with queer affect, embodiment and relationality. Through gesture, collectivity, touch and sensuality, his practice unfolds structures and politics of desire. Relationality is present in the dialogical ways in which the work is developed and performed, as well as in the materials and poetics it invokes. This includes tracing relations between sensation and sociality, embodied expression and alienation, the textures of everyday experience, the utopian and latent queer histories. He approaches choreography as a way of reflecting on the matter of feeling, perception and collective emergence, while indulging in other ways of experiencing memory, time and change. He is co-founder of Kem, a Warsaw based queer feminist collective focused on choreography, performance and sound at the interface with social practice.
CHOREOGRAPHY Alex Baczyński-Jenkins PERFORMED BY AND DEVELOPED WITH Aaa Biczysko, Ewa Dziarnowska, Rafał Pierzyński, Ronald Berger und Sigrid Stigsdatter DEVELOPED WITH Aaa Biczysko, Ewa Dziarnowska, Rafał Pierzyński, Sigrid Stigsdatter, Tiran Willemse PRODUCTION MANAGEMENT Ola Knychalska SOUND, LIGHT Krzysztof Bagiński SOUND RESEARCH Jana Androsova, Krzysztof Bagiński, Tobias Koch und Filip Lech STYLING ADVICE Rafał Domagła STUDIO DIRECTOR Andrea Rodrigo STUDIO MANAGER Sarie Nijboer
A production by Alex Baczyński-Jenkins. Developed as part of Kem's residency at the Ujazdowski Castle Center for Contemporary Art, Warsaw. Originally commissioned for the 2018 Frieze Artist Award, in partnership with the Delfina Foundation, and presented as part of Frieze Projects, curated by Diana Campbell Betancourt. The guest performance in the framework of Queer Darlings #4 is made possible by the Berlin Senate Department for Culture and Europe. Media partners: Berlin Art Link, Missy Magazine, Siegessäule, tipBerlin, taz.die tageszeitung.