Oktoberdans & Bergen Kunsthall Live Studio
Weixin Quek Chong & Astrid Sweeney
18:00
Weixin Quek Chong and Astrid Sweeney invite us to a work-in-progress excerpt of the piece they have been developing whilst in residency during Oktoberdans at Bergen Kunsthall’s Live Studio. Titled ‘ontogenesis dreams: a sideways stretching of the limbs’, the piece is a collaborative hybrid of performance and sculpture.
The artists began their collaboration sharing a desire to shape a choreography simultaneously and alongside the development of sculptural objects/skins to adapt and transform the performer’s coordination and function: exploring themes of the body adapting and shifting form/s, sending and responding to its environment.
In this first iteration of ‘ontogenesis dreams’, they envision future/alternative forms of existence that both reference while they interrogate the past – an underlying theme in science-fiction literature such as the ‘Xenogenesis’ trilogy by Octavia Butler which depicts, in lush and scintillating detail, a radical vision of post-apolyptic adaptation; or the haunting and existential sensorial visions conjured by Olga Ravn in ‘The Employees’: questioning and elaborating on ideas of identity, being and becoming.
Weixin Quek Chong is a visual artist who works with image, object, audiovisual and at times performative elements to play with perception and tantalise the senses.
Astrid Sweeney is a performer and choreographer interested in interrogating movement through stasis, stimulus and isolation of individual body parts.
Please come to the Live Studio side entrance, and email sofia@kunsthall.no if you have any accessibility questions.