Rehearsals of Metabolising

Noit Banai, Steph Holl-Trieu, Johannes Porsch
Event Series

The event series Rehearsals of (…), taking place in four iterations, explores the potential of embodied and situated artistic critique. Kevin Space invites artists, writers, and performers to site-specifically think and work through ways of shaping the frameworks within which they operate – including the respective relationships to bodies, places, knowledges, and histories that these infrastructures allow for—and to push their material and ideological boundaries. After nine years of exhibition making, Kevin Space furthermore aims to critically reflect on our own involvements, desires, and motivations.

The final iteration of the series Rehearsals of Metabolising delves into archival configurations of the art space, encompassing material, social, and symbolic assemblages of knowledge production that enable both the reinforcement and the challenge of its fundamental values, asking: how does an art space constitute and reconstitute its significance and how is artistic knowledge produced and archived within this context? Together with invited artists and scholars, we reflect on the non/material, ephemeral and historical conditions of exhibition making while focalizing on the emergence of sites for relational interactions, dialogue, cultural critique, discourse, and the ‘archiving’ and ‘metabolising’ of these shared experiences.

The infrastructural intervention Retrospective Repertoire by artist Johannes Porsch addresses both the given non/institutional setting of Kevin Space—its modalities of transmission, interaction, and maintenance—and Porsch’s broader body of work, proposing a quotational repertoire to explore the art space’s epistemological and ideological thresholds. His Retrospective Repertoire engages with the “repertoire” as a model of interaction—a practice of embodied performances and reiterations that transmit knowledge across time.

In her impulse talk archive…, in the lowercase, as nervous system, Noit Banai will consider what it means to approach the archive-as-exhibition-space / exhibition-space-as-archive within multiple logic(s) of the lowercase. Drawing on historical examples of small-scale initiatives in different contexts, she will explore the forms of knowledge that simultaneously emerge, (re)emerge, and/or become submerged when we posit the nervous systems of cities and nations, institutional and artistic structures, and biopolitical subjects as constitutive elements.

The Score for Rehearsals of Metabolising by artist Steph Holl-Trieu is a proposition for a collective digestive practice that invites participants to contribute to a shared script. Adapted from a score developed in collaboration with Carina Erdmann, the script takes the form of a screenplay—a collectively authored multilogue—where conversations can be summoned in a non-chronological order and through the registers of fictional voices. By performing the score, participants metabolise archives that are typically difficult to document—whether carried by the fragile vaults of human memory, the fleeting vibrations of oral conversations, the embodied inscriptions of lived experience, or histories sedimented within physical objects that crowd analogue storage space.

As part of Rehearsals of Metabolising, Kevin Space will present the inaugural section of a small book collection and library that comprises materials produced by artists who have previously collaborated with Kevin Space and printed matter gifted to the space.