Festival 2019
Poekhali!
, 21:00
Join us for the fifth edition of Bergen Kunsthall´s adventurous one-night festival POEKHALI:
CRYSTALLMESS
RIAN TREANOR
OTIM ALPHA
MARK FELL & MEYER-CHAFFAUD
CARMINA ESCOBAR
NATACHA DIELS, SAM SCRANTON & DOWN THE RABBIT HOLE
BENEDICTE MAURSETH & LEE PATTERSON
IDA NERBØ
PIP
ROOS DIJKHUIZEN
SUSAN SCHUPPLI
And more!
Buy your tickets here: 250,- /150,-
Free for our members, members in nyMusikk and Borealis Listening Club, and students of KMD and BAS.
Individual sessions of the performance “I Love Myself Fully and Unconditionally” by Natacha Diels and Sam Scranton will run from 18:00 and require registration (send an email to maria@kunsthall.no).
Poekhali! 2019 is inspired by “A Feast in Time of Plague” written in 1830 by one of the greatest minds of Russian classical literature, Alexander Pushkin. The play proposes a joyful gathering as a manoeuvre to overcome the horror of total decay. Over one night we draw inspiration from the play, celebrate and gather to speculate over various strategies for surviving a catastrophe.
Poekhali! 2019 traces a line from love and compassion to death through Carmina Escobar’s evocation of the Aztec goddess Coatlicue to Natacha Diels and Sam Scranton´s intimate, personal ritualistic work “I Love Myself Fully and Unconditionally”, performed with the ensemble Down the Rabbit Hole. On the way we meet a hyper-frenetic version of Ugandan wedding music by Otim Alpha colliding with the algorithmic structures of Mark Fell’s “Hominin”. The disruption of muteness by Lee Patterson’s hand-built instruments overlaps with the vibrational energy of Benedicte Maurseth Hardanger fiddle and the hypnotic drones of Pip, surrounded by soft sculptural landscapes by Roos Dijkhuizen. The night ends with a polyamorous dancefloor style of Crystallmess, juxtaposed with geometrical and idiosyncratic patterns of Rian Treanor´s live set and with Ida Nerbø´s cold-hearted techno throbbing in the darkness of the Kunsthall´s basement.
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
CRYSTALLMESS
DJ, producer, artist and writer Crystallmess operates from a place of generosity, shedding light on past and present subcultures. Her DJ-sets oscillate between raw rave energy, dark dancehall and melancholic ambient, and mix trancey, dreamy synths with hard hitting techno, logobi and kuduro.
RIAN TREANOR
UK-based Rian Treanor is an artist and producer working in the intersection of club culture, experimental art and computer music. His ear-opening debut album ATAXIA released this spring features off-centered rhythmic arrangements and fractured soundscapes of both techno and garage. The album is “conceptually rich but … remains a record built for bone-hard club systems and flailing limbs” (Noel Gardner).
MARK FELL
Mark Fell is a critically acclaimed artist and musician exploring algorithmic systems and computational technology. At Poekhali he will present his new work “Hominin” which brings together electronic music, light, kinetic objects and human movement, and explores procedural relationships between technical and non-technical elements. When describing his ongoing interests Fell refers to Karen Barad’s agential realism and the “open-ended, entangled material practices” within which the “social and the scientific are co-constituted”. The work’s distinctive non-unilinear topology is based upon algorithmic approaches to time-structuring.
OTIM ALPHA
At weddings in Northern Uganda, special Acholi songs are played known as ‘Larakaraka’. Over a decade ago, Otim Alpha began collaborating with fellow wedding musician and producer Leo Palayeng to mix up Acholi music into a newer hyper-frenetic electronic version known as Acholitronix – fast paced poly-rhythmic music ready for dance floor madness.
CARMINA ESCOBAR (presented by Borealis)
The vocalist, performer, improvisor and sound artist Carmina Escobar is coming to Poekhali with a new performance Insatiable Monster. Anima of pariadisac body, brut giver and taker of life, Insatiable Monster is a sonic performative installation based on the figure of Aztec Godess Coatlicue [koːaːˈtɬíːkʷe], the embodiment of creative destruction.
LEE PATTERSON & BENEDICTE MAURSETH (presented by nyMusikk Bergen)
Benedicte Maurseth is a Norwegian folk musician, composer and writer. Lee Patterson is a pioneering sound artist, performing with a selection of amplified objects, devices and processes, from rock chalk to springs, from burning nuts to vibrating metal. At Poekhali they will be performing as a duo for the first time!
PIP (presented by Playdate)
Pip is an acoustic duo working within the improvised/experimental field. They the possibilities of the acoustics of trumpet and guitar with a focused sense of intonation and timbre as a point of departure and create gradually developing textures in an intermediate state between static and organic.
ROOS DIJKHUIZEN (presented by After School Special)
After School Special is a collective of students at the faculty for art, music and design at the university of Bergen. They host bi-monthly event nights at Landmark, where aspiring artists both local and international are invited to share their work. For Poekhali they are presenting UK-based artist Roos Dijkhuizen, creating a sci-fi soft landscape installation .
IDA NERBØ
Ida Nerbø plays a dark, hypnotic and twisted mix of techno and acid. Known for delivering deep, yet punchy, sets, she is a key figure in the underground scene in Bergen as
well as in the established clubs. At Poekhali she will be playing a late night DJ-set in the depths of the Bergen Kunsthall basement.
JOHANISTYLE X CLUB.FEET
Jay & Johanne will be responsible for the music selection in the second floor lounge amongst the sculptures by Roos Dijkhuizen. Johanistyle will provide experimental tunes that tickle your ear drums for a smooth listening experience, and later club.feet will take it away with breaks, beats and rhythmic house for the third dance floor of the night.
BERGEN ART BOOK FAIR
Bergen Art Book Fair is an interdisciplinary art festival focused on art books and zines! At Poekhali! they will host a reading lounge with a library of zines from around the world, and a silk screen performance, where you can bring and up-cycle an old t-shirt or tote-bag with an original art print!
FILMPROGRAM
HARIS EPAMINONDA: Chapters
1h 37 min (short version for a single screen), 2013
Originally filmed in 16mm in the remote Cyprus landscape, Chapters is a lyrical series of meticulously staged scenes, in which Epaminonda transforms her home country into a backdrop for a multitude of mythological identities with underlying narrative elements of love, longing, afterlife and ritual. The viewer is led into an associative journey that is constantly altered and recombined by the action of chance, time and the viewer’s gaze.
SUSAN SCHUPPLI: Trace Evidence
53 min, 2016
The Trace Evidence video trilogy explores the geological, meteorological, and hydrological appearance of nuclear evidence secreted within the molecular arrangement of matter. Its focuses upon three events: the unearthing of ancient nuclear reactors at the uranium mine site in Oklo, Gabon in 1972, the discovery of Chernobyl’s airborne contaminates at the Forsmark power plant in Sweden in April 1986 and the 7,600 kilometre five year journey of Caesium-137 from Fukushima-Daiichi through the waters of the Pacific Ocean to the west coast of Vancouver Island.
An individual performance
I LOVE MYSELF FULLY AND UNCONDITIONALLY
by Natacha Diels & Sam Scranton, performed by Down the Rabbit Hole
ILMFAU is a 20-25 minute One-on-One guided tour through a feel-good haunted house, using theatre and sound to generate new connections between strangers. At its most aspirational, ILMFAU acts as brief escape for self-actualisation, putting forth a space where participants can engage with their monster and in so doing, face it, and realize their potentials.
SPACES ARE LIMITED, REGISTRATION IS REQUIRED (send an email to maria@kunsthall.no)
Poekhali 2019! is arranged in cooperation with Borealis – en festival for eksperimentell musikk, Ny Musikk Bergen, Playdate, Bergen Art Book Fair, After School Special, and Fett magazine, and co-funded by the Creative Europe programme of the European Union as part of Re-Imagine Europe project.
*“Poekhali!” (meaning ‘Let´s Go!’) – is a famous take-off phrase by the first man in space Yuri Gagarin, pronounced on 12 April 1961.