Triptych and Two Balconies: Constantin Hartenstein, Jake Kent, [{“CIBELLE”(CAVALLI}BASTOS)], Nanna Stigsdatter&Snorre Hansen, and Caner Teker

While performativity holds many promises of liberation, freedom, and direct engagement with the viewer, it also holds the existential concern that we are compelled to be on stage for each other every day, both on social media and in the flesh. This contradiction is at the heart of “Triptych and two balconies”, which refers to the architecture of the gallery -- three main exhibition rooms and two balconies -- and the question of how works of art engage ideas of performance through the “I”, “We” and “It”, which is a triptych that includes the individual, the collective and object-oriented ontology.

 [{“CIBELLE”(CAVALLI}BASTOS)] has created a new performance-lecture that gathers fragments from old bodies of work into a multi-layered installation to address the post-rational take on individuation, identity defragmentation.

Nanna Stigsdatter and Snorre Hansen will perform Drivtømmer, a choreography as-a-water-stream in which the dancers move like water flowing through space exploring issues of care and sensitivity in queer friendship, romance, siblinghood and kinship and explosions of love.

Caner Teker, who is among the most accomplished performance artists of their generation, will create a new work that explores the queering of martial arts through a perfectionist choreography of repetitive labour movements that is open to spontaneous improvisation where neither performer nor viewer knows what will happen.

Jake Kent presents new wall-based ceramic works and small stuffed puppet-figures that seem to perform quotidian gestures of standing, leaning, propping, which straddle between delightful and terrifying as they inhabit speculative futures.

Constantin Hartenstein will re-present the video installation NARC which examines narcissistic phenomena of a digital society and its fitness industry aimed at self-optimization through the perspective of a lone shirtless figure.

The one-night event at XC.HuA Gallery inaugurates a new approach for galleries seeking to experiment and collaborate with independent voices in Berlin. “Triptych and two balconies” will be the first event of this kind in 2020 with performances by Caner Teker, Nanna Stigsdatter & Snorre Hansen, and 

[{“CIBELLE”(CAVALLI}BASTOS)], and works by Constantin Hartenstein, Jake Kent and [{“CIBELLE”(CAVALLI}BASTOS)], curated by Justin Polera.