Photo

From the performance 'Dead Matter Moves' at Performa 19

Location

Outdoor at concrete circle by Café Pegasus, Den Frie

Time

5/6 - 8/6, every day between 14.00-18.00

Genre

Performance Bulletin

Éva Mag

A part of the festival Performance Bulletin at Den Frie

Tickets: The performance is open and free for everybody.

ABOUT THE PERFORMANCE

Éva Mag has invited eight local performers to co-create a new collective performance piece, based on Mag’s previous piece Dead Matter Moves, showed during Performa in New York in 2019. During a longer in-process clay making situation, the eight performers join in the labor of sculpting with textile and wet clay. During the performance, the performers examine the vulnerability and needs of a body, overcoming the demanding task of getting the heavy clay sculptures to take shape and to try stand up. In a collective laborious process, the group experiences different conflicting emotional stages, such as care, love, and attention against feelings of weakness, exhaustion, struggle, and despair. The evocative register of the mass weight of a wet clay, shaped through textile as bodies, can open strong affective ruptures in times of war and violence. Mag’s works functions as situated embodied research into both the possibilities and impossibilities of living through resistance. What does it take to stand (or not stand) through challenging situations and emotions in our world? How can bodies act through the tough weight of lived experiences?

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ABOUT THE ARTIST

Éva Mag was born in 1979 in Transylvania, Romania and grew up outside Stockholm, Sweden. Mag works with narratives about the body, both the human and the sculptural, and particularly its amorphous forms. Her practice also includes an archive of the working process, and she is engaged with the social aspects of art, such as workshops, choreography, dance, and performance. Previous exhibitions include Wanås Konst (2017), Moderna Museet, Stockholm (2018) and Performa 19, New York (2019). She is a recipient of the Åke Andrén Foundation grant (2017).

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PERFORMANCE BULLETIN

Den Frie and Toaster presents the upcoming performance festival The Performance Bulletin, which will take place June 5-8 2025. Together with Danish and international performance artists, we investigate how situational performance pieces can introduce alternative ways of engaging and experiencing contemporary art.  Formed by artistic actions that disrupts our attention and opens the senses, the program asks what kinds of imaginations can be activated through embodied, situated, and processual performances.

The program is based on close collaborations with artists, who experiment with everything from feminist openings of symbols and monuments in the city, to collective dance ecstasies, vocal performances, joints dinners, performative explorations of the city’s infrastructure,s and traffic hubs, to as well as performance pieces that slow down the paste pace and enhance our sensitivity. Improvisation and movement are central forces in the program, which experiment with access and negotiate of the use of the public space. Celebrating the unexpected, indeterminate, and estranged impulse of performances, the program tests public attention and social processes by the happening of art.

The program is curated by Iben Bach Elmstrøm in close collaborations and dialogue with the artists and the, Toaster and Den Frie curatorial teams. The program is generously supported by New Carlsberg Foundation, Bikuben Foundation, Danish Arts Council and Roskilde University.

Photo

From the performance 'Dead Matter Moves' at Performa 19