Artist of DAY 18 / Wed, May 2
Curator: Maria Nadia S. Nielsen (DK)
Inga Gerner Nielsen (b. 1983, Denmark) is part of the group of performers who has been developing the genre of interventionist immersive performance art in Scandinavia. In 2007 she co-founded the performance collective Club de la Faye and in 2010 the performance agency Fiction Pimps with a partnership in the futurist association House of Futures. She has worked with the groups in order to make performance installations, which manifest imaginary universes and enhances specific sensuous modes of being – in different sites of society. A work dedicated to what she conceptualizes as materializing imagination.
By now she has come to be as much of a director of the audience as she is of the performer. In her solo-works she uses the context of the gallery to exhibit how the interactive performer is able to direct / guide the movement, gaze and imaginary of an audience. Her performance installations allow for her to temporarily change the structure of social behaviour and point of focus. In the context of science and interdisciplinary projects she stages sensuous spaces, in which the body becomes the focal point of knowledge production.
Project for EC1 24H CPH
My Protestant Origins & Catholic Fantasies
IGN will use her 24 hours to introduce her two concepts, My Protestant Origins & Catholic Fantasies, which will come to inform her new performance series with the working-title COUNTER REFORMATION. The series highlights the possible religious ideology inherent in the aesthetics of different genres of contemporary performing arts.
The performance research takes its starting point in sociologist Max Weber’s ‘Protestant Ethics and Spirit of Capitalism’ (1904) in order to examine how the work ethics of protestantism might help us look closer at the values of authenticity and presence, feeding the neoliberal paradigm. As IGN claims herself to be a “bad protestant”, she will create a setting for being trained in the work of presence.
When night falls IGN intends to collapse into a kind of performance default mode together with friends, lovers, new and former collaborators such as her long-time artistic partner Madeleine Kate McGowan from the group Club de la Faye. Through the pleasure taken in performing rituals and embodying classical gestures of saints they will try to open up into yet another realm; of being fully present with you elsewhere.
EC1 24H 