Performance festival at Köttinspektionen and Uppsala art museum
24-25 of May 2024
Free admission. No prebooking required. (Come early to secure a seat)
Welcome!
Programme
Friday 24th of May
Köttinspektionen
18.00 Dorrs open
18.30 Opening speech
19.00-20.00 Nazar Rakhmanov – POKROV
20.00-23.00 Music and mingel- DJ and hangout
Saturday 25th of May
Uppsala Art Museum
11.00-17.00 Wezile Harmans – Umdiyadiya – When we remember
11.30-12.30 Småkonstnärer – The home within us
12.00- 13.30 Stina Ehn & Oda Brekke – MANUAL
14.00-14.45 Salad Hilowle – Untitled black gaze on Francis Bacon
15.00-15.30 Jenny Sunesson – Hymn for a Dehydrated Spruce
16.00-17.00 Region Uppsala folkhögskola Dance project year– Student Open Space
Köttinspektionen
19.00-20.00 Naledi Majola – IN FLUX
Revolve Performance Art Days is an annual festival for performance art. Since the start in 2016 the festival has moved between different locations in and around Uppsala. This year’s festival – Revolve porous bodies celebrates the ongoing exchange between our bodies, our identities and our surroundings.
What happens if we let ideas of solid entities, sharp categories and graspability slip out of our hands, out of our minds? What are the leaky connections that take place here and now in the meeting between materials, ideas, surfaces and spatialities? What spillages, loose threads, and ghosts linger in the space after the meeting?
The performances of this year’s festival have in common a desire to disrupt and defy limitations of definitions in favour of a certain boundlessness. Artistic processes are often nomadic, evolving through inhabiting many different places, bringing an emotional landscape in contact with many others, each time changing. This process of mutual transformation continues in the encounter with the emotional archive of each audience member.
The festival programme, which runs over two days, is located at two venues – Uppsala Art Museum and Köttinspektionen.
Revolve porous bodies is organised and curated by Köttinspektionen dans and Uppsala Art Museum in collaboration with Region Uppsala and the Dance project year at Region Uppsala folkhögskola.
Curators: Rebecka Wigh Abrahamsson, Uppsala art museum, Kajsa Wadhia and Karina Sarkissova, Köttinspektionen Dans
Friday 24th of May
Köttinspektionen
Opening of festival
Join us to celebrate the opening of the eighth edition of the performance festival Revolve. Doors open at 18.00 and at 18.30 there will be an opening speech with presentation of this year’s programme.
time: 18.00-19.00
place: Köttinspektionen
Nazar Rakhmanov – POKROV
A video installation and live performance, where a 2×2 metre cube becomes a mobile hideout moving between cities and nations. A performance work about identity, belonging and nomadism.
time: 19.00-20.00
place: Köttinspektionen
“I have constructed this primitive supreme hermitage
for my primitive unsupreme body
in an attempt to ask myself
what am I beyond the fashion of my body, the gaze of somebody?
to take a piece of this land under my clothes,
arrest it for intimacy on my own terms.”
In May 2020 during lock down, I am constructing Pokrov: a 2×2 metre cube, in which I can walk, wearing it as a garment and mobile shelter. I am wearing it on the streets and surrounding landscape of my native town (Izhevsk, Udmurtia, Russia). Revisiting the places that hold memories of my childhood, I am hidden from the surroundings and gazes to contemplate my current identity and belonging to this land, in intimate touch with its soil. The beginning of the war in Ukraine collapsed my ideas of coming back there to live, work and love. From then on I knew that my future was to become a nomadic European. Pokrov fled the country of origin; this chapter was filmed in Sakartvelo (Georgia) near the Russian border. What does it mean “to belong” now, here, if you are forcefully displaced by war and a carrier of culture and language of bygone colonizers and current occupants of the land? This piece wasn’t supposed to become what it had to become and it will hardly be finished. It is a form of contemplation over ever changing relationships with the body that holds my identity and with the ground on which I stand and to which I belong.
“so, now we are here,
touch the ground
privet, hello, gamarjoba, Ӟечбур and other greetings”
Saturday 25 May
Uppsala Art Museum
Little artists – The home within us
A performance by Uppsala Art Museum’s own art group with children and adults from Ukraine.
Time: 11.30-12.30
Location: Vasaborgens southern wall, near the art museum’s café.
Our performance is the art of moving through time and space, where shelter becomes a work of art and hope becomes our inspiration. We embody the stories of those who left their homes during the war. We start from a void that symbolizes uncertainty and with each movement the contours of a house emerge, drawn with simple lines, as if they grew from broken threads. We embody traditions, carrying them within us across borders and mixing them with the culture of another country and our own identities.
Against a blank background, we create images of memories and hopes. With each movement we reveal a part of ourselves and share our destiny with the audience. In this performance, the audience witnesses the journey that each of us makes in our souls as we try to build our home from the void.
And through creation, we invite everyone to reflect: what does it mean to have a home? What does it mean to create a shelter out of nothing? Our performance is an invitation to understanding, empathy and inspiration to discover together new horizons in a world where culture and human connections are the most precious.
Stina Ehn & Oda Brekke – Manual
Stina Ehn and Oda Brekke, both dancers and choreographers, explore the relationship between place and body together with the students of the Dance Project Year at Region Uppsala Folkhögskola. The audience is welcome to come and go and move around in the room.
Time: 12.00-13.30
Location: Uppsala Art Museum, Floor 1
MANUAL is a choreography by Oda Brekke and Stina Ehn, created for and with the students of Dansprojektåret at Region Uppsala folkhögskola. During two weeks the dancers have been involved in methods where the relationships between place, body, impressions and form are being explored. Through a practice that alternates between writing and dancing, the students have conceived movement phrases that carry the meeting with a specific place. In this project we ask how the spectator’s gaze can be choreographed in a way that renegotiates the hierarchy between body and space. Can formal dances become porous in contact with other materials?
Choreography: Oda Brekke and Stina Ehn, Dance: Milja Vilde, Emelia Muriel Koberg, Natalie Morén James, Ewemande “Smooth” Ehiwe, Alimatou Njie, Sound: Oda Brekke och Stina Ehn, Costume: Elise Nohr
Wezile Harmans – Umdiyadiya – When we remember
What objects and memories do you bring to a place that will become your new home? In the installation you are invited to reflect on your memories, together with others through needle and thread, and to encounter memories and reflections from South Africa’s turbulent recent history.
Time: 12.00-17.00
Location: Uppsala Art Museum, Floor III
Umdiyadiya – When we remember is an open invitation from South African artist Wezile Harmans to collectively reflect on how a home is created. What objects and memories do you bring to a place that will become your new home? In this spatial installation, you are invited to reflect on your memories and, together with others, use a needle and thread to join the pieces together. The work draws inspiration from collective memories and attempts to trace historical events in black households during South Africa’s turbulent recent history of black displacement and segregation.
The performance installation consists of a sparse cotton jersey and bandages that are sewn together into a simple square, replicating the informal settlements that surround major cities as they are close to job opportunities. The artist processes memories of time spent in both welcoming and unwelcoming places with family and friends. Here, kindness and softness meet in an inhospitable and harsh environment. The work testifies that love also exists in unexpected places, in environments that seem ‘broken’. These beautiful and painful memories deserve to be remembered. Due to strict EU visa regulations, the artist was forced to participate without being physically present on the day of the festival.
Salad Hilowle – Untitled black gaze on Francis Bacon
A fabulating performance about the artist’s self, identity and historiography.
Time: 14.00-15.00
Location: Uppsala Art Museum, Floor III
Untitled black gaze on Francis Bacon (2024) is a performance centered on search and struggle, premiering at Revolve with Salad Hilowle. In light of the dramatic life of artist Francis Bacon, Hilowle explores his personal archive. His fascination with Francis Bacon’s expressive paintings, loaded with layers of emotion and personal detail, acts as a projection surface. Salad Hilowle uses speculative imagination and humour to make projections about the past and present. The work oscillates between the artist’s ongoing efforts to inscribe the Afro-Swedish diaspora and the presence of these narratives in opposition to the established, white and masculine historiography.
Jenny Sunesson – Hymn for a Dehydrated Spruce
A sonic live performance that gives voice to a dehydrated spruce tree
Time: 15.30-16.00
Location: Uppsala Art Museum, The auditorium
Jenny Sunesson’s live performance Hymn for a Dehydrated Spruce gives voice to a spruce tree, which, as a result of the severe drought during the summer of 2018, started to produce masses of pinecones as an attempt to pass on its genes. The work is part of a larger series of auto-ethnographical works exploring Western society and its relationship to the forest, often based on the artist’s locality in the small community of Örbyhus in the municipality of Tierp. The tree itself, with its distinctive voice, grows on the artist’s property. Jenny Sunessons is interested in the materiality of sound and its image-making possibilities in the space. In the four-channel installation Hymn for a Dehydrated Spruce, field recordings of the spruce’s internal communication are combined with other scientific mappings of how spruce trees’ struggles against drought materializes.
Region Uppsala folkhögskola Dansprojektåret – Student Open Space
Four student projects presented inside and outside of the museum
Time: 16.00-17.00
Location: Uppsala art museum och the park outside, starting in the museum reception
The dance project year is a course for dance artists focussing on community based dance projects. For the festival the students have curated a presentation of their different artistic processes inside and outside of the art museum.
Participants: Milja Vilde, Emelia Muriel Koberg, Natalie Morén James, Ewemande “Smooth” Ehiwe, Alimatou Njie
Köttinspektionen
Naledi Majola – In flux
A performance expressing a desire to become uncapturable.
Time: 19.00-20.00
Location: Köttinspektionen
A performance of Black gender play, with suits and the performer’s body as its primary materials, In flux is an expression of a desire to become uncapturable. This desire has much to do with questions about gaze and how some ways of looking can be an attempt at restricting and classifying ever-evolving bodies. Much of the movement, sound, and imagery tries to touch various Black contexts, with South African references, especially those originating during the latter part of the 20th century, in the country and abroad in exile, having a significant influence.
Oda Brekke (NO/SE)
Oda Brekke is a dance artist based in Stockholm. She is active internationally as a choreographer, performer and writer. Her works have been presented at MDT- Moderna dansteatern, Weld and Fylkingen, Stockholm, Museum of contemporary art in Zagreb and Bergen Kött. She is curious about spaces where one can linger and interested in methods that complicate linear narratives and instrumentalizing approaches.
Stina Ehn (SE)
Stina Ehn works as a dancer and choreographer in Sweden and internationally. Her choreographic work has been presented at Weld in Stockholm, Dance Nucleus, Singapore and HAUT and Kiezkapelle in Berlin. She is interested in the material relationship between the dance and the visual image it produces and experiments with this , often in close collaboration with other artists.
Wezile Harmans (ZA)
Wezile Harmans (b. 1990, Port Elizabeth) is a visual artist whose interdisciplinary practice includes performance, video, installation and mixed-media works as a tool for social change. His work confronts prejudice and advocates against social inequality, creating a platform for critical self-reflexivity in unwelcoming spaces. Wezile’s work has shown in several venues including the LSE Firoz Lalji Center for Africa (London), The Center for the Less Good Idea (Johannesburg), Hub Artivism and the University of York (CAHR) (UK). During the springtime he was an artist in residence at Iaspis – The Swedish Art Grants Committees studio program.
Salad Hilowle (SE)
Salad Hilowle is an artist and filmmaker based in Stockholm. He was born in Mogadishu in 1986 and moved to Gävle seven years later. His work revolves around identity, memory and place, making people of African origin visible in various Swedish contexts, now and in the past. Using artistic means such as video, photography and installations, Hilowle questions the precarious border between acceptance and rejection. He is offering a poetic black gaze on cultural artifacts that construct, limit — an act of claiming and longing for a space that can become “at home”. Through his research-based and yet intuitive projects, Hilowle gives greater depth and expression to the Afro-Swedish diaspora and to life as an Afro-Swede today.
Naledi Majola (ZA)
Naledi is a South African artist-researcher and performer, currently based in Berlin, Germany. With interests in Black histories and gender, Naledi uses movement, vocal practice, and writing to approach questions around these topics with decisive uncertainty. After graduating with a BA in Theatre and Performance in 2017, they worked as an actor, performance-maker, and sound designer in Cape Town, South Africa. ‘They have been living in Berlin since 2022 and graduated with their MA Solo/Dance/Authorship from HZT Berlin in February 2024. Naledi’s graduation solo performance, In flux, premiered at Uferstudios, Berlin in 2023.
Nazar Rakhmanov (RU/EU)
Nazar Rakhmanov (Votkinsk, 1991) Tatar-Russian choreographer and dance maker. Following his deep interest in philosophy and mysticism of Hinduism, Nazar obtained his bachelor’s degree in ‘Comparative Religious Studies’ in 2014. In 2011 he started his movement practice as a dance therapy assistant for people with special needs. After being introduced to butoh, nomadic physical theatre and contemporary dance, he came to the Netherlands in 2018 to deepen his independent practice. Currently considers himself a nomadic European.
“I have been born and raised in the Udmurt Republic where local spiritual traditions were purged during the soviet era. By now the ways of relating to unseen matters have almost vanished from the collective memory. Acknowledging the lack of my own lived experience of traditions of the past, I am searching for new forms that touch the unseen matters through my artistic practice.”
Jenny Sunesson (SE)
Jenny Sunesson (b. 1973) is a Swedish artist predominantly working with sound. She is an Assistant professor in Sonic Practice. Her practice ranges from field recording and live collages to conceptual sound art and video. Sunesson often uses her own life as a stage for dark, tragic, and sometimes comical work where real and invented characters and derogated stereotypes, collaborate in the alternate story of hierarchies and power structures in society. In 2021 the artist embarked on a new participatory project, paying attention to the more-than-human. UNDER was a solar driven sound installation that included an overnight hike and exhibit in Florarna nature reserve, Sweden, hosted by Konstfrämjandet Uppland.
Little Artists (UA/SE)
Little Artists is a group of Ukrainian children and mothers who have been meeting regularly at the museum since Russia’s full-scale invasion in the spring of 2022. Every Friday for two years, they have looked at the art and created together with the museum’s curator of education Natasha Dahnberg. The art has offered a playful way to approach the new country, but also an emotional place to process memories and the uncertainty of the future.
The Dance project year at Region Uppsala folkhögskola
The dance project year is a course for dance artists focussing on community based dance projects. Participants: Milja Vilde, Emelia Muriel Koberg, Natalie Morén James, Ewemande “Smooth” Ehiwe, Alimatou Njie
