Paper Tiger Her Face

Kleiner Wasserspeicher | Knaackstraße | Prenzlauer Berg

The snake bites its own tail. In an exhibition and final performance, the project „Her Face“ returns to its imaginative starting point: The underlying poetic matrix is once again „Windrose“, the lyrical obituary for the poet Zhang Zao by author Susanne Größe. Therein, an ephemeral path opens up, linking German, Chinese and other verbal and symbolic languages, „on a merry-go-round of tortured and bleeding words“ that creates delirium and the joy of disorientation.

With „Her Face“ ‚Theatre‘ has wandered as an exiled specter between the urban, historical and cultural spaces of Otherness. It visited eight homes in Berlin, the kitchens, bedrooms, living rooms and bathrooms of families. Eight homes were transformed by performers temporarily into artistical premises. Now the theatre situations will be collected and sculpted into the faded monumental walls of the „Kleiner Wasserspeicher“ in Prenzlauer Berg.

Following a fragmentary allegoric order, the exhibition space has the ground plan of a compass, the compass rose. On four screens 8 performances are projected back out of a linear sequence into simultaneity. In the parallelism of the artistic cosms, they are back-projected into individual appropriation. The viewer discovers the same in the other, the absurd, the foreign in the own. In the vexing mirrors „Her Face“ becomes also His Face, Its Face, Everbody’s Face. Appearing through the filter of individual fragmentation, transference and reconstruction.

The performance series comes to a temporary, provisional home in order to begin anew there like the horizontal eight. Every point is the centre. „The exile of art has many directions. It can be anywhere. That is the treacherous thing about exile. It has misdirections and lies and deceptions and shams.“

The water reservoir also becomes the site of the final performance. The audience gathers around an imaginary centre, a human pole. It forms a linguistic axis of rotation, the intersection of all visual and acoustic meridians. Performing „navigators“ paint possible paths of appropriation as lines from celestial point to celestial point. In the process, the spectators themselves generate a secondary textual matrix by reciting from poetical texts: Once again, fix stars will be the texts of Hölderlin, Celan, Zhang Zao and Susanne Göße. Together with the performers, the audience throw words from star to star, dance on the chains of words. Everyone spins around their own axis, in their own centre, hearing each other laugh: Unalignable.

Performance

Sonnabend, 1. April, 19:00 – 20:30 Uhr

Exhibition „Her Face“

Mittwoch 29. März 2023 bis Sonntag 2. April 2023

Adress

Kleiner Wasserspeicher, Knaackstraße, Prenzlauer Berg