SULK IV
(2021)

This is a 3G event. Please bring a poof of vaccination, recovery or a negative test result. Please register at presse@kunstverein.de Performers: Karim Boujimar, Justyna Chaberek, Philipp Reinhardt Infinite shades and intensities of green, violet, purple, brown, red. Vegetable colors and shadows. Infinite silences. Hot summer morning; all the vines in flower, perfuming the air, all the gardens blooming, bearing, fruiting. We were on the ground. Couldn’t get up. Our faces were in the dirt, in that soft leaf mold. It was in our nostrils and eyes. Couldn’t move. Couldn’t see. As if we were in the ground. Sunk into it, part of it. In their series of performances titled SULK, Dorota Gawęda and Eglė Kulbokaitė focus on performing a notion of embodied text. They see this as a process of collapsing the relationship between reading and performing, in both physical and digital spaces, to enact networks between texts and their readers. Drawing from a variety of authors, including Octavia Butler, Sara Ahmed, George Eliot, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Olga Tokarczuk, the artists construct scripts for their performers-cum-readers that collapse these texts into a plural voice. This multiplicity is given further emphasis in their use of documentation, where each iteration of SULK presents the audience with several elements that reference its previous stagings, while its video documentation is simultaneously being uploaded live to the internet. Here the artists are interested in the implications between documentation and surveillance, data collection and quantification, and the distribution of lived and shared experience. The environment of SULK IV is composed of movable space dividers depicting photographs of SULK II at Spazio Maiocchi in Milan (2018). These semi-transparent screens serve to both frame the live action of the performers while superimposing the previous documentation onto the bodies of the readers and their audience. The air that fills the room is suffused with RYXPER1126AE, a perfume capturing the scent of a previous performance synthesized by the artists with International Fragrances Inc. Extending from its location at the Kunstverein, the performance will be live-steamed via Instagram Live: @gawedakulbokaite.