feel soft | Art House West

3 – 4 June 2023
Free & open to all

ASC Art House West | Grafton Rd, Croydon CR0 3RP

June 3rd, Saturday, 12pm-5pm

June 4th, Sunday, 12pm-5pm

– performative interludes at 12:30pm and 3:30pm
– ca. 40 minutes each

feel soft: Exhibition with performative interludes

by Mira Hirtz and Franziska Boehm
Coordinator: Mira Hirtz
Performers:  Kate Brown, Carolina Cury

How can our creative processes create agency in our lives?

In feel soft, two artists give each other company in their practices that evolve around the lived experience of chronic and mental health conditions. Both develop works that shift back and forth between felt states, bodily experience, collage and paint as well as expansive installation. Thus, the exhibition shows a dialogue between fine arts and performative approaches. It explores how creativity can foster agency and acceptance within our lives and how we, as part of this exploration, soften into complexity.

Franziska Boehm explores the weight and place of sounding through mapping and performing. She studies relocating the embodied awareness of our voice from the throat into our whole body. Within these relocated awareness states she finds the depth and richness that our human experiences offer. She works with what we come up against: desires, needs, frustrations, anxieties – once we manage to slow down from our busy lives. Those felt states are the material that she works with in her performance and visual art work. 

Mira Hirtz reflects on the anatomical and energetic alignment of the body –  its order of parts, its density and tone, its organic shapes. How do these define health? And how do chronic health conditions open up a reflection on what health, the body and organic shapes even are? Mira Hirtz uses creative tools to wonder about these questions. Therein, moving and sensing her body and its relation to others serves as a ground for her performance practice, as well as for her paintings and installative work in which she re/composes shapes and dynamic structures. Her performative response to the exhibition will focus on the state of being that comes with resting into soft spaces.   

Accessibility information:

The exhibition and performative interludes will take place in a relaxed atmosphere with seating and places to rest available. During the performative interludes, you are welcome to get comfortable, shift and come and go as you need.

There will be a dimmed light situation as sounds, voice and touch will be depicted and performed. Automatic doors, lifts, disabled toilet and water refill are available

We invite you to rest, dream and breath along!


About the artists

Mira Hirtz

Basing her work on performative tools and somatic techniques, Mira Hirtz explores multi-sensory experiences and and articulations of our being-in-the-world. Looking at the intersections of art, health, ecology and science, her practice embraces the messiness of navigating life and dives into concepts of body, care as well as human and non-human interdependencies. Her work takes many different formats, from performance, installation and painting to curation and mediation.

She graduated from the MFA Creative Practice at TL Conservatoire London and from the MA art research at University of Art and Design Karlsruhe. She co-curated the program series “How do we care?” at Badischer Kunstverein 2020, as well as the touring exhibition “Critical Zones. In Search of a Common Ground”, initiated by the ZKM | Karlsruhe, the Goethe-Institut South Asia, and Bruno Latour. Her recent exhibitions include “SOMA CITY” at We are Awareness in Art, Zurich; “Sensing P.: Kakosmos (after B. Latour)”, in “Every food is a landscape”, Milan and “Exploring notions of care: a performative workshop” at La Loge, Brussels.

In her current research project, Mira Hirtz investigates the dialogue between her own experience of chronic health conditions, healing and art, developing a series of participatory scores, performative installations and collections of research.

www.mirahirtz.de

Franziska Boehm

franziskaboehm-research.com

 

*Images courtesy of Mira Hirtz and Frankziska Boehm

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