Shahryar Nashat & Adam Linder

In Residence:
December 1, 2011 - December 22, 2011
Discipline:
Visual Art, Installation
Country:
Germany, Switzerland

Shahryar Nashat is a Swiss artist based in Berlin. His works include videos, photographs, sculptures and installations that interrogate dramatic structures characterized by an emphasis on display, staging and rehearsal. The works often give expression to unconscious desires, and accommodate the lingering gaze of the viewer. Nashat investigates collections, reproductions of art works, as well as questions relating to appropriation, display and the apparatus. He uses one mode, form or medium to surrogate another, and plays with the sympathetic relationship between these genres. Nashat is currently taking part in Bice Curiger’s ILLUMInations at this year’s International Venice Biennale.

Adam Linder is a Berlin based choreographer and performer. Prior to embarking upon his choreographic practice, Linder performed with Meg Stuart, Michael Clark, Jeremy Wade, Netherlands Dance Theatre, The Royal Ballet and visual artist Pablo Bronstein. Linder is currently producing a new choreography entitled Spectacular Vernaculars which weaves together live rapping, somatic movement research, historical anecdotes and booty grinding to create an original document in which two stray cultural underdogs, Hip Hop and contemporary performance, meet to give each other a helping hand.

 

Continuing onward from recent collaborations, The Rehearsal of Adam Linder andFactor Green, Nashat and Linder will utilize their residency time at The Watermill Centre to extend the dialogue between their two artistic disciplines. This collaboration is particularly interesting because it isn’t so much as the fusing of two forms to create a multimedia project but rather two artists merging their two different perspectives on equivalent conceptual concerns. The themes that have been at stake within their individual practices have now found a construct for a more rigorous discourse within their collaboration: the displacement of hierarchy between bodies and objects, the interplay of performativity between the observer and the observed, the translation of meaning through the substitution of one medium for another and the interrogation of the inherent role of seduction within the aforementioned dialectics.

At Watermill, Nashat and Linder will work on the creation of a performance installation that extends these themes into a complex matrix. Sculptures, performance props, body images, movement, spatial divisions, video, sound and the role of the audience will be engaged in a whole encompassing structure in which the nature and relevance of any single element is interchangeably being seduced, interrogated or authenticated by the relations between all the elements. The existence of any singular element will neither dominate nor be self sufficient enough to exist alone. This volatile constellation of mediums and representations will invoke the audience to question their preconceptions of how artistic meaning is derived, who is in control of the dissemination of this meaning and where the presence of power lies between what is being viewed and who is viewing it.

 

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