New Swiss Performance Now: Grand Finale

Johannes Willi, Ayahuasca la vista, 2018

Yves Scherer, Nail Care, 2012, (performance), Times Bar, Berlin, 2012. Courtesy the artist. Photo: Yves Scherer

Ramaya Tegegne, Version #18: Adrian Piper, example image, 2018

Mai-Thu Perret, Figures, 2014, (performance), Biennale de l’Image en Mouvement, Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève, 2014. Photo: Annik Wetter

Steven Schoch, TALKING AROUND A (SUBJECT) WITH ACCENT (DEATH), (performance), 2016. Photo: Christoph Bühler

For the grand finale of the exhibition New Swiss Performance Now Florence Jung, Sophie Jung, Ariane Koch & Sarina Scheidegger, Mai-Thu Perret, Yves Scherer, Steven Schoch, Ramaya Tegegne, and Johannes Willi present their performances and carry us into the night of «Morgestraich», the beginning of the Basler Fasnacht, Basel’s very own collective performance.

Performance times:

7 – 8:30 pm
Johannes Willi, Yypfyffe, 2018

With his performance Yypfyffe, Johannes Willi and the Basel Fasnacht clique “Die Unbaggene” together developed a collective experience that makes reference to Basel’s own performative tradition, the Fasnacht. The artist presents a forest-like setting in which the theme and props he designed for the clique are inaugurated with specially built music instruments.

9:15 – 9:45 pm
Mai-Thu Perret, Figures, 2014

Mai-Thu Perret’s practice focuses on expanding feminist strategies. With a minimalist staging, haunting vocals, specially composed music, and a life-size marionette animated by a dancer, her all-female cast enacts an elaborate narrative about female figures across history: an Indian mystic, a nineteenth-century US-American Shaker, a 1950s computer programmer, an artificial intelligence, and a journalist.

10 – 10:30 pm
Ramaya Tegegne, Version #18: Adrian Piper, 2018

This performance is based on a 2004 lecture given by Adrian Piper where she explores the influence of hip-hop music and culture on global art making and art discourse and suggests that rhythm and dance allow us to evade the constraints of our minds, ground ourselves and experience the complexities.

Version is a series of bootleg performances and the documentation related to it. Performance is here investigated as a learning process and a mean to reconvey discourses, stories, histories, meanings, moments and feelings. The original performance, its documentation, the new version of the performance, and again its documentation, are intertwined, distorted, re-used, republished.

11 pm – 12 am
Sophie Jung, Paramount VS Tantamount, 2018

Sophie Jung’s new work thematizes the play with the idea of staging. The performance Paramount VS Tantamount is a character play compromised of improvised passages, music, and facial expressions through which the artist alternately portrays several characters.

0:30 – 2 am
Steven Schoch, TALKING AROUND (SUBJECT) WITH ACCENT #3, 2018

Steven Schoch’s performance TALKING AROUND (SUBJECT) WITH ACCENT #3 exuberantly explodes the lecture genre, deploying improvisation, philosophical rambling, pseudoscience, and duration to stretch rational thinking.

Ongoing through the night
Florence Jung, Jung59, 2018
Jérôme Leuba, battlefield #132, 2018
Marta Margnetti, Dispositivo di protezione (protective device), 2018
Yves Scherer, Nail Care, 2018

An overview of all performance times of the exhibition can be found here.