Performances May 25
The different floors of the museum present a wide variety of performances, from choreographic practices, to sculptural sounds and interactive installations. In a world where culture and human connections are precious, experiences are shared across national borders. The final act of the day takes place at Köttinspektionen.
Presentation of today's programme
Revolve's curators Rebecka Wigh Abrahamsson, Kajsa Wadhia and Karina Sarkissova present today's programme.
- Time: 11.15–11.25
- Location: The reception, Uppsala Art Museum
Little artists – The home within us
A performance by Uppsala Art Museum's own art group with children and adults from Ukraine.
- Time: 11.30–12.30
- Location: Vasaborgens southern wall, near the art museum's café
- Durational
About the work
Our performance is the art of moving through time and space, where shelter becomes a work of art and hope becomes our inspiration. We embody the stories of those who left their homes during the war. We start from a void that symbolizes uncertainty and with each movement the contours of a house emerge, drawn with simple lines, as if they grew from broken threads.
We embody traditions, carrying them within us across borders and mixing them with the culture of another country and our own identities. In this performance, the audience witnesses the journey that each of us makes in our souls as we try to build our home from the void.
What does it mean to create a shelter out of nothing? Our performance is an invitation to understanding, empathy and inspiration to discover together new horizons in a world where culture and human connections are the most precious.
Stina Ehn & Oda Brekke – Manual
Stina Ehn and Oda Brekke, both dancers and choreographers, explore the relationship between place and body together with the students of the Dance Project Year at Region Uppsala Folkhögskola. The audience is welcome to come and go and move around the room.
- Time: 12.00–13.30
- Location: Uppsala Art Museum, floor 1
- Durational
About the artwork
MANUAL is a choreography by Oda Brekke and Stina Ehn created for and with the students of Dansprojektåret at Region Uppsala folkhögskola. During two weeks the dancers have been involved in methods where the relationships between place, body, impressions and form are being explored. Through a practice that alternates between writing and dancing, the students have conceived movement phrases that carry the meeting with a specific place.
In this project we ask how the spectator’s gaze can be choreographed in a way that renegotiates the hierarchy between body and space. Can formal dances become porous in contact with other materials?
Choreography: Oda Brekke and Stina Ehn
Dance: Milja Vilde, Emelia Muriel Koberg, Natalie Morén James, Ewemande "Smooth" Ehiwe
Costume: Elise Nohr
Wezile Harmans – Umdiyadiya – When we remember
What objects and memories do you bring to a place that will become your new home? In the installation you are invited to reflect on your memories, together with others through needle and thread. And to encounter memories and reflections from South Africa's turbulent recent history.
Time: 11.00–17.00
Location: Uppsala Art Museum, floor III
Durational
About the artwork
Umdiyadiya – When we remember is an open invitation from South African artist Wezile Harmans to collectively reflect on how a home is created. The work draws inspiration from collective memories and attempts to trace historical events in black households during South Africa's turbulent recent history of black displacement and segregation.
The performance installation consists of a sparse cotton that are sewn together into a simple square, replicating the informal settlements that surround major cities as they are close to job opportunities.
The artist processes memories of time spent in both welcoming and unwelcoming places with family and friends. Here, kindness and softness meet in an inhospitable and harsh environment. The work testifies that love also exists in unexpected places, in environments that seem broken. These beautiful and painful memories deserve to be remembered.
Due to strict EU visa regulations, the artist is forced to participate without being physically present on the day of the festival.
Narration: Wezile Harmans, Music: Mlondiwethu Dubazane, Holly Humberstone, Ceeys, Joep Beving & Tom Trago. Camera: Volodymyr and Katerina Pavelko. Thanks to Iaspis / The Arts Grants Committee.
Salad Hilowle – Untitled black gaze on Francis Bacon
A fabulating performance about the artist's self, identity and historiography.
- Time: 14.00–14.45
- Location: Uppsala Art Museum, floor III
- Audience: 70
- Entry 13.50–14.00
About the artwork
Untitled black gaze on Francis Bacon (2024) is a performance centered on search and struggle, premiering at Revolve with Salad Hilowle.
In light of the dramatic life of artist Francis Bacon, Hilowle explores his personal archive. His fascination with Francis Bacon's expressive paintings, loaded with layers of emotion and personal detail, acts as a projection surface.
Salad Hilowle uses speculative imagination and humor to make projections about the past and present. The work oscillates between the artist's ongoing efforts to inscribe the Afro-Swedish diaspora and the presence of these narratives in opposition to the established, white and masculine historiography.
Jenny Sunesson – Hymn for a Dehydrated Spruce
A sonic live performance that gives voice to a dehydrated spruce tree.
- Time: 15.00–15.30
- Location: Uppsala Art Museum, The auditorium
- Audience: 70
- Entry 14.50–15.00
Jenny Sunesson’s live performance Hymn for a Dehydrated Spruce gives voice to a spruce tree. As a result of the severe drought during the summer of 2018, the spruce tree started to produce masses of pinecones as an attempt to pass on its genes.
The work is part of a larger series of auto-ethnographical works exploring Western society and its relationship to the forest, often based on the artist’s locality in the small community of Örbyhus in the municipality of Tierp. The tree itself, with its distinctive voice, grows on the artist’s property.
Jenny Sunesson is interested in the materiality of sound and its image-making possibilities in the space. In the four-channel installation Hymn for a Dehydrated Spruce, field recordings of the spruce’s internal communication are combined with other scientific mappings of how spruce trees’ struggle against drought materializes. Photo: Trishula Littler.
Region Uppsala Folk High School Dance Project Year - Student Open Space
Performance in four separate parts inside and outside the art museum.
- Time: 16.00–17.00
- Location: Starts at Uppsala Art Museum, floor 1 and ends in the castle park
- Max number: 70
- Duration
The Dance Project Year is a extension education programme in dance that focuses on community-engaging dance projects. During the festival, participants share their various artistic processes in a self-curated programme at the museum and in the area outside the art museum.
Participants: Milja Vilde, Emelia Muriel Koberg, Natalie Morén James, Ewemande ‘Smooth’ Ehiwe, Alimatou Njie
Naledi Majola – In flux
A performance expressing a desire to become uncapturable.
- Time: 19.00–20.00
- Location: Köttinspektionen
- Audience: 70
- Entry 18.50–19.00
About the artwork
A performance of Black gender play, with suits and the performer’s body as its primary materials, In flux is an expression of a desire to become uncapturable. This desire has much to do with questions about gaze and how some ways of looking can be an attempt at restricting and classifying ever-evolving bodies.
Much of the movement, sound, and imagery tries to touch various Black contexts, with South African references, especially those originating during the latter part of the 20th century, in the country and abroad in exile, having a significant influence.