New exhibition at the Glucksman to dance the year away

A new exhibition exploring how visual artists dance through the lens of a camera is now running at the Glucksman Museum. 

Simply entitled ‘1,2,3,4,’ the four-month exhibition presents a series of programmes featuring films by contemporary artists, each exploring different aspects, atmospheres, arrangements and ideas relating to dance.

Showing everything from solo performances to synchronized routines, and spanning styles from ballet to hip-hop, the exhibition portrays an intimate and elegant exploration or movement, memory and environment.

Throughout ‘1,2,3,4,’ the artists themselves play a direct role in the choreography, whether as a performer, or behind the camera tracking the dancers’ movements.

In Sriwhana Spong’s film, the camera follows dancer Chiara Ferri as she performs a number of silent, solo dances against a sparse, dimly lit background.

Sammy Baloji’s ‘Mémoire’, shot in collaboration with Congolese performance artist Faustin Linyekula, employs dance and archival footage to address colonial violence, the shattered dreams of independence, and the postcolonial political fallout in the current Democratic Republic of Congo.

In Jimmy Robert’s filmed performance, props and gestures are variously negotiated and integrated into his movements, in an evocative response to Marcel Duchamp’s seminal 1912 painting ‘Nude Descending a Staircase’.

Úna Quigley re-imagines Guillaume Apollinaire’s 1903 play about a housewife who develops psychic powers to change her body, adapting his words to a contemporary context and the influence of post-structural feminist writers.

Part one of the four-part exhibition is now open and will run until 19 September. The exhibition will conclude on 19 December.

For more information visit Glucksman.org.