The a-un.or non-performative (state)

Tickets: The performance is free and open to everyone, but to make sure to get a spot on the guided tour.

ABOUT THE PERFORMANCE

The performance piece The a-un.or non-performative (state) is a city walk through the areas near Den Frie. Together with artists Rasmus Røhling, the tour guests explore the ambiguous meanings and connotations of performativity. The city walk will visit various public monuments and symbols, exploring their formal and informal meanings. The idea of ​​claiming that we can identify ‘the non-performative’ is precisely to examine the implications of performativity – both as an artistic concept, space of action and genre – but especially also to test the phenomenon in relation to larger societal and representational political issues. Does the state always just execute its functions – or are there cases where it caricatures and demonstratively performs a form of representative welfare? Are we ourselves performers in the welfare state?

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ABOUT THE ARTIST

Rasmus Røhling understands his own praxis as self-passage and argues that artistic practice works as a phantom limb among other bodies of knowledge. His video installations and sculptural works often revolve around this paradoxical self-concept and how it informs the interaction of art with the surrounding world and vice versa. Røhling has previously exhibited at Artist Space (US), Den Frie Udstillingsbygning (DK), Museum Fur Gegenwartskunst Basel (CH), Skovsnogen Deep Forest Art Land (DK), Primer (DK), Sismografo (PT), and SixtyEight Art Institute (DK) among others.

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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.