Kat Válastur

The FarNear

The work “The FarNear” by Kat Válastur,  brings in the Basilica space of the Bode Museum a group of female performers. The works in the space are exclusively made by male artists of the Italian Renaissance. A wooden surface is precisely placed according to the ornament of the floor following the design. The female dancers activate a ritual in which they use the wooden surface to generate sound and music with sculptural extensions that are adapted on their bodies. The activation of the wooden primal speaker by their bodies produces a reverberation in the Basilica space that lasts 6 seconds. The work is based on the scientific fact that every sound or any other exterior parameter affects the physical condition of all  artworks in time. The work “The FarNear” creates a speculative condition in which the sound that is produced collectively by the female bodies and is manifested as a female sound monument could symbolically and speculatively affect and transform the art works that are in the space  and therefore destabilise their patriarchal historical roots.

January 17th, 2023

Posted In: Other Art Projects

ANGEL GREEN

ANGEL GREEN, is a solo work performed by Kat Válastur at the Georg Kolbe Museum in the context of the “SCULPTURE” festival on the 5th of September 2020

October 5th, 2020

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SLOTHIAN DAYS

“Slothian days” is a sci-fi story filmed in various locations in Berlin. Featuring three notable performer’s of Berlin’s dance scene, Τy Boomershine, Ogbitse Omagbemi and Leah Katz, “Slothian days” is liberating in these striving times, with its humor and dance motivating us to start all over again…

 

October 4th, 2020

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Stellar Fauna film

In the film “Stellar Fauna” that accompanies the performance, we see the two performers in a an outside environment. Without knowing what  happened and the two women have arrived there, we see them in perfect harmony with the environment, which seams to have some unfamiliar qualities. They lay under the sun and next to purple coloured and saturated waters. Their activities follows a voice over which describes the cardiovascular system of a species that can stay submerged underwater for a long period of time. In our contemporary times of  climate change, environmental destruction and animal extinction, the film “Stellar Fauna” is an absurd mockumentary  about a new environmental condition in which our species has found a way to adapt on a mutated and alienated ecosystem. 

January 23rd, 2019

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AS THE BRIDGE SHAKES

A hammock full of soil is connected with two of the iron arches that constitute part of the foundation of the Hamburger Bahnhof building. A group of young female hip hop dancers occupy the space around the hammock setting a kind of a territory for their ritual. Their presence is strongly manifested through the sonic amplification of their breaths that fill up the space. With slow precise movements the girls pass to one another in a circular mode, a piece of silk fabric on which the image of the Tāq Kasrā bridge of Iraq is printed. The circle of this ritual occasionally breaks as each one of the girls let their explosive energy out and throw themselves into powerful dance momentums. The work is rooted in the story of sacrifice as it is found in the folk Greek myth The Arta Bridge in which the head builder had to build his wife inside the bridge in order for the bridge to not collapse and the myth of Ifigeneia, the daughter of Agamemnon who was meant to be sacrificed in order for Agamemnon ships to sail to Troy. The young girls perform a ritual of Anger, Love and Sorrow for every female soul that was sacrificed in the altar of our brutal History.

October 1st, 2017

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WE WERE BETTER IN THE FUTURE – A RETROSPECTIVE

In her retrospective ” WE WE BETTER IN THE FUTURE” Kat Válastur  focuses on her last productions which are part of the trilogy “The marginal sculptures of Newtopia,” exploring the encounter between the body and a ritual utopian topology it inhabits. Fragmentation, time lapse, entropy, and virtuality are some of the notions that emerge from her dance works. Highly intense atmospheres are created, challenging the senses and the rules of ordinary perception. The works emerge out of a fictional condition, where the narrative is part of the process either relating to a post-apocalyptic environment or to science-fiction existentialism in the era of the Anthropocene. Besides the performances, the retrospective hosted several videos, a new performance ” Samsa Samsa Samsa” in collaboration with the visual artist Leon Eixenberger, as well as sculptures designed specially for this frame. 

OILinity
Ah! Oh! A contemporary ritual
GLAND
Samsa, Samsa, Samsa
The traveler revisits a deconstructed landscape and faces the bones of the past in a new ground and time. Natural elements and objects are reassembled in new ways forming a new use. Structures and bodies are exposed to dimensions and dimensions are elevated to deeper and more complex systems of cosmologies. The beehives structures are used to stimulate the traveler´s cocoon like a charger of transformative power. The meaning of the clock falls into an abstract  assemblage of annual growth rings, exceptional fossils are detached from the soil and the food becomes monolithic.
Lang

June 1st, 2017

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SULANTAT

In 1924 Prokofiev was commissioned by a choreographer to make a ballet. The ballet was called Trapeze ballet. It was composed for five musicians and had five movements. In 2016 I was commissioned to create a piece based on the music of that ballet and I commissioned a composer to make the music based on Prokofiev’s music. The ballet in 1924 was choreographed by Boris Romanov and it was about a group of trapeze artists, therefore I chose to work with the trapeze. The trapeze inspired me to make a dance piece about a suspended body and for that I chose the myth of Tantalus, as he depicts a body that is suspended in a kind of zero zone. He is unable to reach the fruit that hangs above him when he is hungry, or the water below him when he is thirsty. So the composer that I commissioned for this special piece had to use Prokofiev’s music in order to transform it into a piece about another trapeze dance that is called SULANTAT, which is an approach of Tantalus name read backwards. The piece was composed for five musicians and lasted for 15 minutes and 7 seconds.

December 29th, 2016

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WE WERE BETTER IN THE FUTURE

We were better in the future is an art-work that displaces the rehearsal of my unfinished dance-piece “Ah! Oh! – A contemporary ritual” into the public space. For a limited period of time we will occupy the hallway of Neue Nationalgalerie and turn it into our working space.The usually hidden and intimate elements of rehearsing a dance-piece will be exposed and convert the museum into a creative and social laboratory.

December 20th, 2015

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SOLO FOR VOICE 8

Solo for voice 8/ songbooks by John Cage
(In the frame of “A year from Monday” 365 Tage Cage)

I am up for a game, the rules are hidden inside the “solo for voice, 8”. He did set the rule when he wrote “solo for voice, 8”. The rule is the quote: “in a situation provided with maximum amplification no feedback perform a disciplined action” itself. I had to follow his rule. I have to produce something by doing a disciplined action as I have to fulfill the task. I will on the contrary perform a disciplined action to produce a situation of maximum amplification in order to prove that he literally is the initiator of the maximum amplification.

Concept and Performance by Kat Válastur

December 20th, 2015

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