︎︎︎ Stockholm
Going to an exhibition: And moving weird
︎ Location: Moderna Museet
Artist: Klara Utke Acts
︎ Photo: Lou Mouw
Plot: This is a room just like any other. It is choreographed by outspoken and unspoken rules, telling us how to move, or maybe how not to move. Don’t touch? Lean forward? Find the masterpiece? Take a photo?
Task: Walk around and observe repetitive movements and patterns of behaviors in the room. Gather, reconvene and enact, then discuss. Try the different movement that would normally just pass as, yes, normal. What happens if we do them together as a group?
You know that move when someone leans forward, neck inching close close to the painting, hands clutched together behind their back? We named it “The Looker”.
Another move is the one where someone walks very quickly into a room, turns their head swiftly from side to side, then quickly walks on. This we named “The Scanner”.
Together with artist and choreographer Klara Utke Atcs we visit the collection of Sweden’s biggest museum, Moderna Museet. There we take our time to observe observers, look at looking, but most of all, move in their movements.
Circling in on returning patterns and behaviours, we discuss what makes these movements? Anatomy or architecture? Which came first, the spaces that makes us move in one way, or the movements that make the spaces ?
What happens if we amplify these gestures as a collective? If what is "real" is something we kind of decide together - a social agreement that: this way to act is normal. Then can we also decide to dis-agree? Make a new rule on what is socially normal? If there is a group of us, maybe it's easier?
Another move is the one where someone walks very quickly into a room, turns their head swiftly from side to side, then quickly walks on. This we named “The Scanner”.
Together with artist and choreographer Klara Utke Atcs we visit the collection of Sweden’s biggest museum, Moderna Museet. There we take our time to observe observers, look at looking, but most of all, move in their movements.
Circling in on returning patterns and behaviours, we discuss what makes these movements? Anatomy or architecture? Which came first, the spaces that makes us move in one way, or the movements that make the spaces ?
What happens if we amplify these gestures as a collective? If what is "real" is something we kind of decide together - a social agreement that: this way to act is normal. Then can we also decide to dis-agree? Make a new rule on what is socially normal? If there is a group of us, maybe it's easier?
︎︎︎About the artist
Klara Utke Acts (DK) is an artist working with dance and choreography; they work with poetics and body politics in the borderlands of performance, dramaturgy, curation, sound, film, and language. Their work is occupied with counter-hegemonic strategies from queer queries and crip currencies. Utke Acs is active in the scenes of Copenhagen and Stockholm and holds a BA in Dance Performance from DOCH, Stockholm University of the Arts. They are a part of the studio-cooperative höjden studios in Östberga, queer art-club collective Fake Daughter and activist group Queers Against Fascism.