Streets, squares, parks, supermarkets, Internet portals, and other sites have become stages of urban life that allow us to display our everyday actions and behaviors. Many artists today work with the theatrical aspect of staging the self in everyday life. The question of the theatrical has taken on a new relevance due to the multiple forms of self-staging and lifestyle. If everyone plays the main role in his or her own lifestyle film, what is the role of art? The exhibition Die Welt als Bühne (The World as Stage) uses the increasing trend towards lifestyle theater as an opportunity to confront ourselves with alternative life models and to show how existing forms of self-staging can be reinterpreted in an emancipatory fashion.

In their work, the participating artists mediate among art, media staging, and real life. In the exhibition, stages are created (Tilman Wendland) to show collective forms of acting (Mads Lynnerup, Jan Northoff), or interaction takes place with already exiting platforms for performance (Jan Mančuška, Carey Young). The exhibition is a combination of performance, video, photography, as well as the stagings of virtual and architectural platforms that challenge in performative terms existing conventions of the theatrical.

Book Series “n.b.k. Discourse”

To accompany the exhibition, Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König is publishing Die Welt als Bühne by Solvej Helweg Ovesen, 126 pages with color illustrations, German/English, 19.80 € (15.00 € members).

Program

Thursday, November 26, 2009, 7 pm

New Berlin in Second Life

3D tour with Jan Northoff (artist, Berlin)

Thursday, December 10, 2009, 7 pm

Artist discussion with Tilman Wendland (artist, Berlin) and Solvej Helweg Ovesen (curator, Berlin/Copenhagen)

Sunday, January 10, 8 pm

KONTRA 23 min., Denmark/US 2010

Film premiere and discussion with Claus Carstensen, Peter Bonde and Thomas Andersen (artist and filmmaker, Copenhagen)

In English