David Levine

SEPULCHRAL CITY
2016

Performance | Gjörningur:

Gerðarsafn, Bókasafn Kópavogs & Náttúrustofa Kópavogs | Gerðarsafn Kópavogur Art Museum, Library & Natural History Museum of Kópavogur
05., 12.,19., 26. nóvember & 3., 10., 17. desember | 05, 12, 19, 26 November & 03, 10, 17 December 2016
13 - 17:00 | 1 - 5 PM

Gerðarsafn Kópavogur Art Museum & Náttúrustofa Kópavogs | Natural History Museum of Kópavogur
29 October 2016 | 29. október 2016
1 - 5 PM | 13 - 17:00

Gerðarsafn Kópavogur Art Museum & Kópavogskirkja Church
27 October 2016 | 27. október 2016
6 - 10 PM | kl 18:00 - 22:00

Additional performance times and locations to be announced | Aðrar tímasetningar verða tilkynntar síðar.

Assistant Director | Aðstoðarleikstjóri:
Þorvaldur Sigurbjörn Helgason
Actors | Leikarar:
Ingunn Lára Kristjánsdóttir
Gísli Gunnar Didriksen Guðmundsson

New York-based artist David Levine’s new work for Cycle Music and Art Festival is a performance in multiple venues of fragments from Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. Published in 1898, Heart of Darkness has entered the Western canon as a scathing critique of colonialism, its enabling myths, and its enabling institutions. But like all canonized works, it has generated its own myths and institutions; and like all such works, it depends on the ideology of the system it had hoped to undo. Performing Heart of Darkness in Iceland, a nation free of a history as coloniser but bound to global mercantilism at its heart, is an attempt to bend the novella’s reductive treatment of race towards its expansive critique of power by focusing on its less well-known "European" interludes.  As in much of Levine’s recent work, the new project treats the written text as a monologue, and sets individual actors free to perform it to everyone or no-one, as they will, on a loop, for the duration of the exhibition. Each actor will rotate through Kópavogur’s architectures assigned to education (Natural History Museum and Library), contemplation (Gerðarsafn Kópavogur Art Museum), commerce (Supermarket), and restoration (Kópavogur public baths). Each section of the text takes on different meanings, different valences, as it’s performed in a different institution. What’s being staged is thus an encounter between a place, an auditor, a narrator, and an account of civilization as partial as it is seductive.

David Levine er búsettur í New York. Nýtt verk hans fyrir Cycle er performans-textaverk með leikurum, staðsettum á mismunandi stöðum og er byggt á texta Joseph´s Conrad úr Heart of Darkness. Bókin var gefin út 1898 og er hluti af bókmenntakanónu vestræns heims sem sár gagnrýni á nýlendustefnu, goðsagnir hennar og stofnanir eru gerðu henni kleift að blómstra. En eins og öll verk kanóna, þá hefur hún myndað sínar eigin goðsagnir og stofnanir og eins og öll slík verk, hvílir hún á sömu stoðum hugmyndafræðinnar eins og kerfið sem hún hafði vonast til að afhjúpa. Með því að flytja Heart of Darkness á Íslandi, frjálsu landi og fyrrverandi nýlendu, sem ber þó hnattrænt markaðsfrelsi í hjarta, verður úr tilraun til þess að snúa meðhöndlun hennar um kynþætti frekar í gagnrýni á vald og óendanlegan ramma þess. Eins og í nýlegum verkum Levine þá setur þetta nýja verk skrifaðan texta í einleikshlutverk og gefur leikurunum frjálsar hendur til að flytja það endurtekið fyrir einhvern eða engan í gegnum allan sýningartímann. Hver leikari mun færa sig á milli stofnana í Kópavogi er lúta trúarbrögðum á einhvern hátt t.a.m. Kópavogskirkju, sem afþreying (kaffihús), menntun (Náttúrufræðistofa Kópavogs), íhugun (Gerðarsafn) og endurnæring (Kópavogslaug). Hver kafli textans tekur á sig nýja merkingu þar sem hann er fluttur í mismunandi stofnunum. Það sem er sviðsett er þar sem saman koma staðsetning, áheyrandi, sögumaður og frásögn af siðmenningu sem er í senn hlutdræg og þvingandi.

David Levine's artwork explores the relationship of privacy, performance, and language across multiple disciplines. His performance pieces have been commissioned by Creative Time, Mass MoCA, REDCAT and New York's Crossing the Line festival, and his video and photographic work has been exhibited internationally at the Townhouse Gallery (Cairo), Gallery TPW (Toronto), the Museu Colecao Berardo (Lisbon), as well as Untitled (NY), Blum and Poe (LA), and Tanya Leighton Gallery (Berlin). His work has been featured in Frieze, Artforum, the New York Times, and The Believer, and his writings have appeared in Triple Canopy, Parkett, Mousse, and Cabinet. International Art English, his collaboration with sociologist Alix Rule for Triple Canopy, was reprinted in Mass Effect: Art and the Internet in the 21st Century (MIT Press/New Museum of Contemporary Art, NY). He is the recipient of numerous grants and awards, including the Foundation for Contemporary Arts (2016), the Village Voice OBIE award (2013), the Radcliffe Fellowship (2012), and the German Federal Cultural Foundation (2007), and 2015 was invited to lecture on the work of Bruce Nauman for the Dia Foundation's Artists on Artists lecture series. From 2004 to 2015 he was Director of Practicing Arts at Bard College Berlin, and he is currently Professor of the Practice of Performance, Theater, and Media at Harvard University.

Í listsköpun sinni kannar David Levine tengsl einkalífs, performans og tungumáls í gegnum ólíka miðla. Performansverk hans hafa verið pöntuð af Creative Time, Mass MoCA, REDCAT og New York's Crossing the Line festival og vídeó innsetningar og ljósmyndir hans hafa verið sýnd á alþjóðavísu, við Townhouse Gallery (Kairó), Gallery TPW (Toronto), the Museu Colecao Berardo (Lissabon) en einnig hjá Untitled (NY), Blum and Poe (LA) og Tanya Leighton Gallery (Berlín). Verk hans hafa fengið umfjöllun í Frieze, Artforum, the New York Times og The Believer og ritverk hans hafa birst í Triple Canopy, Parkett, Mousse og Cabinet. Verkefnið International Art English sem hann vann í samstarfi við félagsfræðinginn Alix Rule fyrir Triple Canopy, var endurprentað í ritinu Mass Effect: Art and the Internet in the 21st Century (MIT Press/New Museum of Contemporary Art, NY). Hann hefur hlotið fjölda styrkja og verðlauna, má þar nefna The Foundation for Contemporary Arts (2016), The Village Voice OBIE award (2013), The Radcliffe Fellowship (2012) og The German Federal Cultural Foundation (2007) og árið 2015 var honum boðið að halda fyrirlestur um verk Bruce Nauman í fyrirlestraröð Dia Foundation's Artists on Artists. Frá árunum 2004 til 2015 hefur hann verið deildarstjóri yfir Practicing Arts við Bard College í Berlín og hann er núverandi prófessor í Practice of Performance, Theater, and Media við Harvard háskólann í Bandaríkjunum.