Greeting

Qiu Zhijie

Siamo venuti per dire di NO, 2011

Cèline Condorelli

The Lesson on Dis-Consent 2011

Chto Delat

Stano Filko

Happsoc

The Dramatist (Anne, Blind Boy, Koba)

Peter Friedl

Carrousel de Jeux

Yervant Gianikian

Nature Forever 2017

Piero Gilardi

PerformerAudienceMirror 1977

Dan Graham

Far from Vietnam film

Joris Ivens

Joan Jonas

Stream or River Flight or Pattern II 2016

Ilya&Emilia Kabakov

The Paradise under the ceiling 1997-2009

Notes Towards a Model Opera 2014-2015

William Kentridge

U.F.O.-naut J.K. (U.F.O.) 1970

Julius Koller

Theatric Piece 2017

Mao Tongqiang

Just Beautiful 1970

Michelangelo Pistoletto

Rithy Panh

Les Artistes du theatre brule

Lisl Ponger

Gone Native

Puppet

Pedro Reyes

Cabaret Crusades The Path to Cairo 2012

Wael Shawky

La trampa 2007

Santiago Sierra

Die Antigone des Sophokles 1992

Daniele Huilet

single channel vide 2006

Sun Xun

Marko Tadić

Imagine a moving image 2016

Ulla Von Brandenburg

HausKonstruktiy 2016

Metropolis

Maya Schweizer

Multimedia installation 2014 - 2016

Yang Yuanyuan

Mei Lanfang’s travel in Russia 1935

Mei Lanfang

The Rent Collection Courtyard 1964

Zhao Shutong

Cornelius Cardew

Scratch Music 1974

Wei Minglun

The good woman, the bad woman

The thirties was a crucial turning point for the USSR too. Initial more eccentric post-revolutionary avant-garde experiments and their authors were facing a whole new generations of the society with radically different claims. If initial revival of the theatre was to be grounded in the cultivation of a new generations, growing up under modern conditions and ready to serve as flexible and sensitive material for creative experiments, if the the education of the actor was understood not merely as technical development but as a sharpening of his social viewpoint too, now the new generations were claiming that a subsequent further renovation of the theatre would take place. The same theatre innovators Alexander Tairov, Konstantin Stanislavsky, Vsevolod Meyerhold, Yevgeny Vakhtangov had to deal with the demands of their already mature "children". A quest for new type of realism was emerging and imposing itself within the cultural field. Similarly, the German directors such as Bertolt Brecht, Erwin Piscator and others had to face the fact that Fascism tried to render invalid many years of their experimentation and an urgent necessity to individuate effective tools to counter pose its populism were required. Encounters and debates during the thirties in Moscow fostered what Pavel Markov defines as an elaboration of a synthesis of acting styles. We may also claim that the vast number of magazines published in Russian, German, English and French languages kept alive a vivid international theoretical debate that has no precedents in history.

Having chosen this historical meeting as a symbolic moment, where different cultures meet shortly before the beginning of the second world war is a deliberate choice. Lanfang's visit to USSR thus appears here as a historical threshold and a symbolic reminder. It is perhaps the last moment where the modernist utopia manifests itself so purely before being bent by the weight of history.

Mei Lanfang

The ensemble of documentary and archival materials presented in Anren Biennale is centered around two interweaved histories. One part of the materials represent the development of the Soviet theatre from 1917-1938, focusing on its different phases of development- from mass re-enactments and interventions in the public space, Agit-prop, proletkult, children's and workers theatre experiences up to the development of various actors studios run by the main directors of the era, each one introducing its proper reinterpretation of the quest for "new theatre". Lively exchange between main European theatre representatives and the Russian context will appear through the materials attesting the efforts of directors and theoreticians such as Anna Asja Lacis and Bernhard Reich among others. Materials included here show also the familiarity of numerous Russian poets, actors and directors with the Asian theatre practices. The book My Notes about Chinese Theatre by famous actress Vera Yureneva or writings by poet Sergey Tretiakov who had spent long periods in China in the 20- ies, together with writings of Sergei Eisenstein- show that Chinese theatre has been a subject of interest, together with the Japanese Kabuki theatre practice, explored in the west directly or indirectly already since the beginning of the 20th century.

“I saw Chinese performer Mei Lanfang and his troop perform. He played the part of a young woman and was incredible.”

Other part of the materials instead will focus on the first visit of Mei Lanfang /1894 – 1961/ – the Chinese Peking Opera artist known for his female lead roles «dan» to Moscow in 1935. During the tour in Moscow and Leningrad, according to Lanfang, his troupe staged several performances: Yuzhou feng (Beauty defies Tyranny), Fenhe Wan (By the Fen River Bends), Ci Hu (Killing the Tiger), Dayu Sha Jia (The Fishermans Revenge), Hongni Guan (Rainbow Pass) and Guifei zui jiu (The Drunken Beauty) as well as six dances from other plays .

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Mei Lanfang’s travel in Russia 1935

Numerous Russian, German, French, English and American theatre and cinema directors, playwrights, poets, writers visited Lanfang's performances or joined the additional events and participated in debates. Photos on display illustrate these stimulating encounters. Mei Lanfang appears there with Konstantin Stanislavsky, Vsevolod Meyerhold, Alexander Tairov, Sergei Tretyakov, Edward Gordon Craig, Sergei Eisenstein among many others. A particular perception and interpretation (or mis-interpretation as claimed by numerous Chinese scholars) of the «Peking Opera», with its particular stage construction, the direct exhibition of its stage design devices and props, its masks and a radically different acting principles left a notable impact on all those present. The visit of Chinese actor provoked also an extended debate in the local and international press. Some of the most illustrious articles by authors such as Karl Radek, Carola Neher (Brecht's actress), Sergey Tretiakov, Sergei Eisenstein are on display to testify this vivid exchange. A set of rare documentary filmic materials, including a footage by Sergei Eisenstein for his movie «Rainbow Pass» capturing Lanfang's performance will complete the presentation.

"In the physically grubby Moscow theaters of the twenties and early thirties," writes John Fuegi in his seminal work Brecht and Company, "Meyerhold, Stanislavsky, and Tairov rubbed shoulders with Mei Lanfang from China, Erwin Piscator, Edward Gordon Craig from England, French writer André Malraux, and a host of Americans including Joseph Losey, Hallie Flanagan, Harold Clurman, Lee Strasberg, and Stella Adler -- all visibly dazzled by what they saw and heard." These encounters, made in the stillprogressive Soviet Union, would prove crucial turning points not just for Bertolt Brecht but for art in the West and Soviet Union of the thirties alike. Before the definitive rise of the totalitarian policies, the eruption of the second world war and the following separation inflicted by the Cold War politics –the traditional Chinese culture seemed to shed the light on what could be the eventual future development for the "agonizing" tradition of western modernity.

Mei Lanfang in return saw some of the most representative performances of the day -«The Barber of Seville» and «Boris Godunov» of the Stanislavsky Opera Studio, Meyerhold's «The Lady of the Camellias» and Vakhtangov's «Turandot», Tairov's «Egyptian Nights» and Okhlopkov's «Aristocrats», ballets and puppet performances. Several posters of these performances will be on display also in Anren.

In the work 'Greeting'about 80 ready-made masks painted with colorful hilarious faces are exhibited at the entrance for the visitors to wear them. The inspiration originates from the traditional masks that were worn in Chinese festivals in the earlier days. QiuZhijie invites the audience to wear these amusing masks to become part of the exhibition and its 'story'. A funny but indescribable atmosphere is created in the gallery space when visitors look at each other with their masks on. As if by wearing the masks, the audience becomes part of those who have read the forbidden book and have gained the freedom to laugh.

In the exhibition, the artist QiuZhijie claims to 'own'a version of this forbidden book and to show case some chapters of it. The research of this book, in QiuZhijie is strictly connected with the important cultural heritage of the woodblock printingthe practice totally in decline that the artist is trying to resurrect to an new life.By 'presenting'this book to the audience, laughter and its techniques are opened for acquisition, therefore this 'this knowledge'can be gained freely; with this act, a certain kind of freedom can be achieved. It's a gesture of challenge and resistance made by the artist. The 'laughter'in this exhibition is more than a simple cheerful one, it has a penetrating power and contains deeper awakening implications.

The exhibition "Satire" by Qiu Zhijie makes a reference to the book "The Name of the Rose". In the book, the Italian philosopher Umberto Eco narrates a meaningful story: a series of bizarre murders took place in a monastery, as the detective investigated deeply into the case, the reason was eventually uncovered: the cause of the murders was a book that resided in the library of the monastery. The book was the legendary second volume of Aristotle's 'On Poetics'. In the first volume, Aristotle talks about tragedy; it is said that in the second volume, he talks about the meaning of comedy and the techniques of how to create laughter and to bring pleasure to lives and the society. A book like that was deemed to be intolerable for a medieval world that was under Christian rule. Because the "evil, bore, shameless, stupid and dissolute laughter' would have certainly subverted the order and the authority that has been built by the church. So the librarian guarded this 'forbidden knowledge' warily, and whoever read the book was killed by him. At the end of the story, this forbidden book, the murderer and the whole library were all burnt to ashes.

Greeting

Qiu Zhijie

He is also an author of the book Sex of the Oppressed, FreeMarxistPress, Moscow, 2013, and PS-Guelph, 2016

NikolayOleynikov

ChtoDelat (What is to be done?) was founded in 2003 in St. Petersburg by a working group of artists, critics, philosophers, and writers from Saint Petersburg, Moscow, and Nizhny Novgorod with the goal of merging political theory, art, and activism. The group's name recalls the first socialist workers' self-organizations in Russia, which Lenin portrayed in his "What is to be done?" (1902). ChtoDelat as a collective operates in different media such as video films, graphics, and murals, learning theater, newspaper publications, radio plays, and militant theory.The artistic activities of ChtoDelat are orchestrated by four member artists—Tsaplya (Olga Egorova), Nikolay Oleinikov, Glyuklya (Natalia Pershina), and Dmitry Vilensky—who often cooperate with Russian and international artists and researchers in joint projects realized under the collective name of ChtoDelat.

Nikolay Oleynikov (1976) is a St. Petersburg based artist, member of ChtoDelat, and a tutor at the School of Engaged Art of ChtoDelat. Known for his didactic murals and graphic works within the tradition of the Soviet monumental school, surrealistlike imaginary and punk culture. Oleynikov is an author and editor for artiseverywhere.ca

The idea of the work for Anren Biennale comes from P. P. Pasolini's Ucellacci e Uccellini , 1966. At the very beginning of the film a crow dedicates it to Palmiro Togliatti, head of Communist Party of Italy. The film was made two years after his death, exactly same year in Soviet Union a town of Stavropol on Volga river, was renamed "Togliatti" and became a new industrial center in the region. Nikolay Oleynikov - member of ChtoDelat - comes from the same area and from the same setting of late-Soviet industrial city where he experienced a dissident atmosphere of that time, participating to the avantgarde performance company at the peripheral house of culture. In this piece through his surrealist mural fable piece using oneiric metaphor of birds who act consciously, as in Pasolini's movie, Oleynikov speculates on the politics of the language of resistance and radical change, that eventually comes from critical art practices as well as from political analysis of everyday.

The Lesson on Dis-Consent

Theatre and History

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THE SZECHWAN TALE

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12 APRILE - 15 LUGLIO 2018

sound off

Introduzione

Collezione

1964

THE GOOD PERSON OF SZECHWAN

1935

1940

THE RENT COLLECTION COURTYARD

TODAY'S YESTERDAY

GODS ARE ON THEIR WAY TO THE CITY OF SZECHWAN

1940

Rent Collection Courtyard was regarded as a 'diorama of the society', directly reflecting class conditions and class struggle in the Chinese countryside before 1949.

Explore the exhibition

ABOUT EXHIBITION

ANREN BIENNALE

1935

The 1st Anren Biennale will take place from October 28th 2017 till February 28th 2018 in the well preserved town of Anren, Chengdu.

Curated by Marco Scotini for the Anren Biennale, focuses on the relationship between the theater and history.

1964

HISTORICAL MEETING

as the fictional background to one of the most popular and mature works of the German playwright Bertolt Brecht: The Good Person of Szechwan written in 1940.

2017

The Good Person of Szechwan:

Numerous Russian, German, French, English and American theatre and cinema directors, playwrights, poets, writers visited Lanfang's performances or joined the additional events and participated in debates.

BACKTO EXHIBITION

2017

ONCE UPON A TIME

Curated by Marco Scotini

There are two motives underlying the origins of the thematic choice of this section. The first is the very location of the Biennale, in Sichuan, as the fictional background to one of the most popular and mature works of the German playwright Bertolt Brecht: The Good Person of Szechwan written in 1940. The other topic is the famous...

ORIGINS

The Section, The Szechwan Tale. Theatre and History, curated by Marco Scotini for the Anren Biennale, focuses on the relationship between the theater (as the space of masks) and history (in the making). There are two motives underlying the origins of the thematic choice of this section. The first is the very location of the Biennale, in Sichuan, as the fictional background to one of the most popular and mature works of the German playwright Bertolt Brecht: The Good Person of Szechwan written in 1940. The other topic is the famous plastic clay group of 114 life-sized figures from 1964 hosted in the city of Anren and entitled Rent Collection Courtyard. In both cases, and despite their differences, they concern the ongoing dialogue, between the East and the West, between the past and the present, around finding in theatrical play (of masks and unmasking) a series of references, contaminations, exchanges and fictional or real projections.

ABOUT EXHIBITION

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Duration: 00:1:10

"The good woman, the bad woman" is based on the film script, even if it was modified to be staged as a Szechuan opera.

The Szechuan opera "The good woman, the bad woman", is a typical opera by Wei Minglundespite being based on Brecht's storywith transformedscenes.There is a whole western tradition that recreates a new opera starting from an ancient story – many famous authors have even rewritten important works. However, since the Twentieth century, rewriting an ancient classic work has become, in the West, a very free method that can be identified in three types: 1) the recreation of a new opera following the original philosophical theme; 2) using the original story which is modified to present a contemporary subject; 3) the replacement of both the story and the original theme, that is considered as being turned upside down by the opera but does not work at all. But, Wei Minglun,when he rewrites a classic work, is part of the first type. So, let's see what problems Minglun is faced with: 1) how to present Brecht's original subject; 2) how to rethink the narrative method and the scenography in order to be closer to the Szechuan opera; 3) how to adapt Brecht's dialectic subject matter to a Chinese context and its current society; 4) how to resolve the problem of renewing the Szechuan opera. Wei Minglun is an intelligent dramatist and a pioneer of the Szechuan opera. He knows the traditional form of this opera very well and, at the same time, also knows the local Szechuan culture. As a consequence, "The good woman, the bad woman" becomes an ironic opera based on the local Szechuan culture.

About Exhibition

Audio Guide

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MEI LANFANG

PETER FRIEDL

DAN GRAHAM

CORNELIUS CARDEW

LISL PONGER

CÉLINE CONDORELLI

PIERO GILARDI

CHTO DELAT

EXHIBITION

YERVANT GIANIKIAN AND ANGELA RICCI LUCCHI

STANO FILKO

JOAN JONAS

Mei Lanfang and Meyerhold courtesy: Mei Lanfang Museum

I saw Chinese performer Mei Lanfang and his troop perform. He played the part of a young woman and was incredible.

CHZUNGO SERGEY TRETYAKOV

scenery of the rainbow passMei Lanfang and Eisenstein courtesy: Mei Lanfang Museum

Deng Shi Hua

My Notes about Chinese Theatre

The International Olympiad of the Revolutionary Non-Professional Theatres Bulletin, no.5, 1932

Mei Lanfang, Tretyakov and Eisenstein courtesy: Mei Lanfang Museum

Bertolt Brecht - 1935

Soviet Theatre, no 3-4,1930

The night of Mei Lanfang's performance in Russia

Sketches from QiuZhijie's book note SATIRE solo show - 2013 ink on paper San Gimignano ／ Beijing ／ Les Moulins ／ Habana Courtesy: GALLERIA CONTINUA, San Gimignano / Beijing / Les Moulins / Habana

Greeting - 2013 papermasks, silicone masks 300×330×26 cm Photo by: MengWei San Gimignano ／ Beijing ／ LesMoulins ／ Habana Courtesy: GALLERIA CONTINUA, San Gimignano / Beijing / LesMoulins / Habana

Elysian Fields - 2013 crossties, bamboorootcarvings, electricalmachines 620×580×550 cm San Gimignano ／ Beijing ／ Les Moulins ／ Habana Courtesy: GALLERIA CONTINUA, San Gimignano / Beijing / Les Moulins / Habana

Chto Delat

Perestroika Timeline. Chto Delat, realized by Niklay Oleynikov Istanbul Biennial - 2009

Togliatti RED CROW CALLED PALMIRO from TOGLIATTI and HIS CIRCUS of RESISTANCE, Sketch for Anren Biennale realized by Nikolay Oleynikov mural - 2017

Stano Filko belongs to the founders of Conceptual art in Slovakia and to most radical artists engaged in the underground art scene of the 60s and 70s of the 20th century, during the era of political repression. He has a comprehensive oeuvre, encompassing conceptual practice, (anti)happenings, land art, ambients, installations, objects, multiples, text-art projects and all kinds of diagrammed drawings. Although many works that he made in the time of strong censorship question the cultural and sociopolitical context (for example, the photographic series Freedom, Tanks), they are often deeply immersed in notion of the research of the Universe. Thus he had developed a philosophical system of division of the Universe, consisting of 5 dimensions and 12 chakras, each followed by colour equally treated: RED as biological sphere, GREEN as socio-political space, WHITE as ontological space, BLUE as cosmic space, or INDIGO/BLACK as space of the subject. This system is also the main code for understanding his works. Despite the media he is using, the works bare his own individual mythology of a universal model of the world that, in a search for "universal experience", he has developed in his ambients from the 60s. In 1965 together with artist Alex Mlynárčik and art historian Zita Kostrová, he published the HAPPSOC manifesto (shortcut of Happy Socialism), subversive total actions, aim of which was to immerse art into reality, and that would exist in the frame of duration of real-time social or political manifestations in Bratislava. At the end of the 60s his interest turned towards transcendental philosophy and cosmology. With the use of HAPPSOC on geographical maps, Filko had the intention to make the entire world his artistic ready-made. However, these artworks are the most powerful answers and critique the time of cultural and political regime in Slovakia in the 60s and 70s. Ivana Janković

Whatever one may think about the evolution of post-dramatic theater [the theater that privileges activity over action], peter Friedl, as demonstrated by The Dramatist , has always been interested in the other scene, the historic scene in which biographical subjects are dependent on the relationships between power and the mechanisms of social subordination. History and geography are the contexts of « audio-visual » art. Despite the fact that these take over the script and subvert the conventional authority of the author, de-dramatization (the breaking up of causal sequences) still operates in time and in history. As Eva Schmidt observed, Friedl has often "emphasized the theatrical", causing "short-circuit effects". This approach corresponds to an ambiguous position with regard to a "sense of history". If in one instance, Friedl, as revealed in his essay on Theodor Lessing (1984), belongs to the school of Nietzschean antihistoricism, in another, when he integrated some of his childhood drawings into his 2006 retrospective in an attempt to produce continuity, he acknowledges that he finds "theatrical discontinuity" unsatisfactory. The four marionettes in The Dramatist refer to childhood through the simple relationship that the marionettes have with childish toys. However, this derives from a collector's approach, that implies a fragmented and discontinuous image of history that, precisely, it is trying to overcome. The four characters do not form any objectively coherent series. They are four biographical profiles without any apparent links with the constellation created by the fifth, invisible character who maneuvers them. We might think of Ariadne's thread. But there's no thread. What is there are "four characters in search of an author", in accordance with Pirandello's model. Friedl's constellation is an open one. The drama still has to invent the plots that make up the script. The possibility of the script is given as a subject of writing, a poetic effort. Friedl often talks of an "active" reader born from the "death of the author". There is one, pressing, question: what history of the modern era can link, interweave and animate these four figures; what dramatic strategy will be able to organize the story outlined by the four biographical profiles? Jean-François Chevrier

One enters into Yervant Gianikian and Angela Ricci Lucchi's films by means of the chemical dust (or the superficial scratches) of the images of which they are composed. Before encountering any fragment of the landscape (the Alps, the Danube, the desert) or recognizing a particular event in the frame (a military parade, a bear hunt, a surgical operation), it is its materiality that offers itself up to our gaze in all its state of deterioration. Lacerated by the emulsions, stained, linked together, attacked by mold, tinted, and slowed down, these frames— in their projection—do not allow their material premise, their physical support to be extinguished. It is rather a display of ruins that presents itself, the debris of a cinema battling against its own form of amnesia: that of the images it has produced and that of the inseparable device onto which such images have been inscribed. At the basis of Gianikian and Ricchi Lucchi's archaeological research is their stubborn attempt to demonstrate the bond between modernity and imperialism—the film-camera plays a major role as apparatus in the service of the colonialists' gaze—of which their films never cease to provide evidence for. Gianikian & RicchiLucchi Whether this be the filmed journey diary of an anonymous French tourist in 1927, or the material of an Italian documentary pioneer such as Luca Comerio, or, further still, of Austrian medical-military films of the 1920s, Gianikian and Ricci Lucchi—both born in 1942 in Italy—have collecteda multitude of lost and refound views (never neutral or innocent), together with the use of a variety of anachronistic technologies. Archive film together with thinking through the "evidential paradigm" (Carlo Ginzburg)are the means by whichtheir radical research has developed; they are pioneers of an artistic trend that, in recent years, has been defined as "a historical turn."On the one hand, digging through existing material, refilming, reframing, and recoloring, subjecting it to a new montage according to junctions and leaps, a collage. On the other, the enlargement of the frames allow marginal traces and details to emerge, hidden elements through changes in speed to appear, all part of the Benjaminian "optical unconscious" that only the camera can capture. And, it is by these means that we can access a history that begins "from the ground, from the minimal, from the detail." De-archived and re-archived, it ends up liberating us from the imperium of time, from its univocal narrations, from its dictates. Marco Scotini

The belief on social change led Piero Gilardi, in the 70s', to different forms of associationism, which saw him fighting in the student movement, in counter-information, in the reality of psychiatric institutes, in factories, in low-income housing districts. Carrying out both political and artistic experience at the same time, without subordinating the one to the other and without abandoning the one for the other, is the priority of any new creative reality that increasingly sets aside its emblematic nature to favour its anonymous and relational one. What emerges is a whole artistic production carried out in relation to the political struggle that situates the graphic arts (workers' cartoons, tazi bao) the urban murals with the La Comune Gourp, the street theatre in public marches on May 1, the neighbourhood festivals, and the social activities for the elderly. Let's just say that in this passage, foam rubber, the material Gilardi prefers to use, goes from being an instrument used to reinvent the habitat (thanks to the nature- carpets and the "Arte Abitabile" exhibitions) to a means used to elaborate the habitus (via mascarons, theatrical animations, allegorical oats). What remains constant is the usability and polyvalence that this plastic output promotes, together with a hobby-like and do-it-yourself aesthetic, with a transformative and participatory potential inherent to the biomorphic and economically irrelevant features of the material per se.15 This is the origin of the carnivalization of the world that for Gilardi (as well as Bachtin) is an indispensable element in desecrating the temples and overturning the sites, the functional distributions, the social attributions. With respect to the "distant and absolute" object that art endlessly continues to pre figure, in Gilardi there is nothing other than the proximity to a familiarized world that is approached, a world that is not meant to be contemplated but turned upside down, taken apart and put back together through laughter, the imagination, and joyous cursing. The carnivaleseque does not respect the divisions between the political and the aesthetic, between high and low, between sensitive and immaterial, between the idealization of the past and the un nished present: it transgresses them with a combination of bodies and signs that are constantly coming apart and being put back together, with a mixture of seriousness and amusement, with challenges to the irreversibility of time. Marco Scotini

So, we could say that the performances are the most genuine part of Dan Graham's work and already contain many elements we can find later in the pavilions and other works. That is why they are not just one segment of the artist's entire production, but are in fact its foundational acts. The performance as an art tool was connected in the early seventies with sexual and body liberation, coming from many social experimentations like hippy communities and women's movements. In general, the performance at that time represented a revolutionary attitude in the art world because it connected art directly with the social environment. The performances of Dan Graham tried to treat the art world, with its rules, like any other social environment, pushing it to change by creating new rules and completely redefining the relation between the artist and his/ her audience, the structure of the work of art and the way it is received. In a sense, the performance represents a way to melt the physicality of the art piece in a cloud of human relations that are always intrinsically connected with the art work but which the performance reveals explicitly. Like in other early performances, also in Performer/Audience/ Mirror, 1972, the artist created another mirroring situation: he is standing and describing both the audience and his reaction to them. This is a way to propose that the artist and his audience are in an equivalent situation. It means the artist and the people are observing each other and they have the same relevance in the performance. In this action there is a strong will to democratize the art process, putting the artist and his audience on the same level. At the same time, the description of the audience's behavior is the content of the performance and this means bringing the audience to the centre of the art piece. Indeed, moving towards a democratization of art is one of the most important features of Dan Graham's work. In that sense, pavilions are not elitist architectures but a new way to connect the audience with a conception of an art work which is strictly related to the environment determined by the human presence. The audience is integrated in the art work. Therefore, Dan Graham's performances are experimental situations in which he sets up a totally new conception of the art piece: not objects or paintings for the room of a museum. He creates performative situations in which the artist mirrored himself in the audience and the entire action is framed by the environment or location. And these elements will later be developed in the pavilions. Maurizio Bortolotti

Ivens' and Loridan's finest contribution to Far from Vietnam film, however, was conceived in his own style. No preconceptions of Parisian intellectuals were necessary to stimulate four or five concise sequences of matchless precision and calm attention to detail which stand distinctly apart from the other currents in the film. The Ivens sequences are all silent and all in color with one exception. This is the first brief scene, in black and white, which shows peasants defusing and collecting small fragmentation bombs filled with tiny ball bearings aimed at chest level, the target of which "is human flesh." The camera follows the defusing process in close-up, scans the stockpiles that the workers have accumulated, and records their absorbed expressions and purposeful gestures. The same watchful attitude informs the color sequences, which record brigades preparing individual concrete air-raid shelters for the streets of Hanoi. The first of these, an attentive record of women filling wooden moulds with concrete, is followed by an actual alert with passersby running to the shelters we have just witnessed being built as the camera tracks up and down the street from a car, recording rows of faces settling in to or emerging from their individual shelters beneath the street. Detailed subjective information on the future of the war is offered in the Ivens/Loridan footage. Their tightly coordinated close attention and panning close-ups of moving workers' faces and hands and the product of their labor seem to encapsulate materialist cinema. A further sequence records a troupe of agitprop players performing in a village, the camera shifting back and forth between the relaxed and cheerful spectators and the ingenious show, which presents an unrecognizably painted President Johnson lamenting his woebegone U.S. Air Force. The commentary repeats Ivens' impression of the great calm pervading the atmosphere in Hanoi. However, it is not only Hanoi but Ivens' footage itself which seems an island of calm in this otherwise chaotic film, relying mostly for its impact on sensory and affective discourse, rather than factual exposition. Ivens' footage of concrete activities on the part of both Hanoi civilians and rural peasants offers clear evidentiary support for the range of perspectives and emotions expressed elsewhere in the film by the collective. As usual with Ivens, the ordinary tasks accomplished with the hands of workers, unassumingly and unremittingly, constitute the most visible and most truthful emblem of the revolution in action. Thomas Waugh

Joan Jonas' performance has roots not only in her training as a sculptor in the early 1960s, but in her work with 'post-modern' choreographers, including Trisha Brown and Yvonne Rainer from 1967-1969. Influenced by the concerns of Process Art of the late 1960s, but rejecting the Minimalist aesthetic out of which these concerns arose, Jonas' performance from 1968, and her use of video from 1971, engaged with mythological sources while making use of acutely personal objects and imagery. From 1974, Jonas turned explicitly toward fairy-tale and myth, using narrative structures alongside her own complex iconographies. Jonas' work has been influential not only through its complexity in the wake of the Minimalist aesthetic and her shaping of early video art, but also through her concerns for issues of identity and personal history, as well as the meeting her work presents between vocabularies drawn from fine art and theatre. While continuing to produce her own work across a variety of media, Jonas has also collaborated with the Wooster Group, performing in Nyatt School (1978) and Brace Up! (1990). This text is derived from conversations recorded in New York in April 1990, at the time of her work on Brace Up! With the Wooster Group. Stream or River Flight or Pattern II reflects recent thoughts or ideas. I continuously collect/record images at home and while traveling. During the past year I was particularly interested in the mosaic floors of Venice, birds caged in Singapore, Genoa's graveyard, redwoods in California and various trees of Santander, Spain. With simple performances in projections of mosaics, trees, and passageways a montage was fashioned that includes beautiful birds that dance and preen, talk, and finally gaze at us with curiosity, longing and a sense of loneliness. This is a visual narrative that relates to our world of animals, of life, of death, of beauty and sadness. We also worked with shadows, props, movement, and song in scenes set in several landscapes of the Nansa valley in the vicinity of Santander, Spain. Both works are partly inspired by fragments edited and rearranged from several Noh Plays translated by Ezra Pound and Ernest Fenollosa 100 years ago. Joan Jonas

Groys: the concept of theatricality is often used in a negative sense: when we, for example, say that a person carries himself theatrically, that he behaves in real life as though he were on stage. This is really what Michael Fried had in mind Kabakov: the reproach of theatricality cast at the installation is conditioned by the imperative of modernism that demands the position of a cold observer, the position that the viewer is supposed to occupy. Most of all the viewer must possess a sober memory, a sober consciousness, and he must evaluate the work of art in the context of other works of art, in the context of an archive, library, etc; that is, the viewer is supposed to be distanced in relation to the artistic object. the artistic object in this case functions like an object of evaluation, but by no means as an object of consumption. The theater, by its very nature, is a space of a certain type of obscuration, a seizing of the imagination, a kind of reveling-like in a stadium or a sports hall, etc. In other words, instead of being a cold and sober intellectual observer, a person turns out to be astounded, shaken. Moreover, the very specific nature of theater demands this. After all, what is theater? Theater is that place where, sitting in the seat and looking at the stage, we find ourselves drawn into something without our consent, we lose the ability to comprehend, we lose the will and capability for reflection. Groys: Yes，but yet this criticism of theatricality was also an internal-theatrical criticism. Firstly, Meyerhold, and then Brecht, attempted in their theaters to eliminate the direct identification of the viewer with the heroes and to create a more distanced analytical position in relation to the theater as such. From this perspective, the accusation of theatricality, it seems to me, in a familiar sense ignores the development of the theater itself. There are also different kinds of theater. It can be just like you just described it, but it can also be the kind that tries to occupy a different position in relation to the viewer, and to force the viewer to occupy a different position in relation to itself Kabakov: Yes, but we know full well the hypocrisy and self-irony of the Brechtian and Meyerholdian positions reflection inside the theater-that is just one more incident of the very same theater. Not one of these directors renounces the power of the theater or the power inside the theater. They were reformers, but reformers with the goal of achieving an even stronger influence of the theater. To step beyond the bounds of the theater was unthinkable to Brecht and to others, they all wanted to add yet another component to the theater besides the 'capturing’ of the viewer, besides to the unconscious or irrational influence it exerts over him: intellectual influence in addition to all of that, and not at all in place of these other things. Boris Groys

The Great proletarian cultural revolution I want to look at these questions in relation to a project I am currently working on in the studio, a series of projections and drawings being made for an exhibition in Beijing. China certainly hovers over us like a huge zeppelin. The scale of it, the scale of its hunger for resources, the scale of everything. China in Africa today, a sense of a series of questions rather than any answers. Are we there the tethered goat waiting for the tiger? Easy pickings? The project began with an invitation to show a selection of my work in a museum in Beijing. Curiosity, flattery are part of the equation. What is it in my work that would interest people there? I wanted both to find a link to it and to make a work that would refer to this question. Drawing, film, performance, posters, sculptures – all was possible, everything was open. The project began as many do with a distracted reading and looking. I read the books of Lu Xun, a modernist whose sensibility placed him with Japanese writer Aktugawa and European writers in the tradition of the absurd modern like Gogol and Kafka. I looked atbooks of revolutionary posters. Here the language pulled me in, the exhortations, the instructions, the clamour of incredible and unstoppable enthusiasm. This became one starting point. Another starting point. And then some videos of the model operas performed during the period of The Cultural Revolution from 1966 to 1976 (from when I was eleven to when I was twenty-one). Echo of rebel The model operas were theatre pieces exemplary in revolutionary content,the form of the Peking operas reworked with revolutionary stories: through passionate song, speech or dance, a peasant, a young soldier, a young communist, roused their fellows to fight the Kuomintang or the Japanese. There is singing, ballet or martial arts with its precise percussion. Many red flags are waved, the enemy id defeated, and then there is a singing of the Internationale. Seeing these films of the opera started the project. William Kentridge

Július Koller (Piestany, 1939-Bratislava, 2007) is one of the pioneers of the Czechoslovakian Neo-Avant-Garde scene of the 1960s and 1970s, within a time of the political repression. In this period he created a series of anti-paintings and objects as a critique of the "modernist cult of painting and object." At the same time, in the spirit of Dada and Fluxus, Koller created the anti-happening manifesto, a term which is defined not as an action but a call for thought. In the early 1970s, he started his series of photographic antihappenings U.F.O.-naut (Universal Cultural Futurological Operations), as a continuation of his "cosmos-humanist cultural situations" in the time of great public interest in space explorations. On these black-and-white photographs the artist's figure, his alter ego of the U.F.O.-naut, is being involved in everyday prosaic tasks in mundane spaces, with the goal of achieving a dialogue with others outside of the Czechoslovakian reality. The series of photographs bears variants of the U.F.O. name (U.-Universal, Utopian; F. - Futurological, Functional, Fantastical, Fictional; O.-Operations, Occupation, Object), usually followed by text-cards.With the various combinations of the U.F.O. name, text-cards, bore the question mark (?) motif. While the question mark can be referred to "critical thinking and attitude towards the situation in the...state", the "conceptual antihappening information on new subjectively-objective realities, illusion, permanent mystification, shockism (messages in the form of postcards with the text written out in green)" are explained by the artist as "reactions on the tumultuous situation in Czechoslovakia in 1968." His anti-happenings were undetectable, and did not cause the authorities' reaction. The only witness was a photographer. Among others were series of U.F.O.-naut selfportraits, which were dedicated to the mindless search for the ping-pong ball. The artist's preoccupation with the need to communicate with other beings outside of the Iron Curtain of the Eastern bloc, reached climax in the founding of a fictitious U.F.O.-Gallery Ganek (1971 -1989), a gallery on the highest point of the High Tatras, an alternative space for artistic work. There, he spent time with like-minded individuals such as Stano Filko, Alex Mlynárčik, and Rudolf Sikora, with whom he made many collective works. Ivana Janković

We could link Mao Tongqiang's work with that trend of contemporary art that has recently taken the name of the Historiographic Turn: an archival impulse, a passion for excavations and extractions, a way of looking back.If Mao Tongqiang's archeological imagination could be considered in excellent company with western art, it is relatively isolated within the Chinese artistic scene: this being not one of the last reasons for its extraordinary importance. When, in 2008, Mao presented his project Tools at the China Art Archive and Warehouse in Beijing, it was the conclusion of research that had lasted three years and had seen him collecting and accumulating tens of thousands of used and abandoned hammers and sickles through to saturating the exhibition space where the emblem of Communism was multiplied in its physical, lived and material presence. Far from being an amorphous mass of objects, each piece was obsessively numbered and placed in an inventory, but also set out according to a basic classification that recognized both their identity (all the sickles on one side) and differences (all the hammers on the other). Nonetheless, the great impression that this archive of silent testimonies makes on the spectator derives from the theatrical nature of the choral, epic, tragic (as it might be the image of a genocide)mise en scène. The same could be said of an entire further series of collections of found objects that, although substantially different, Mao Tongqiang subsequently presented in various solo exhibitions. From the land title deeds of Leasehold (2009) to the bibles of Scriptures (2011), from the judicial documents from the rectifications campaigns of Archives (2013) to the mug shots of Theatric piece (2017). Something antecedent, that exists "somewhere else", in a written form or a folder, is made visible in its entirety, appears sensitively on the scene. In these collections, the power of every single element is weakened by the power of the archive as such. A collective, group nature prevails over the individual. The very process of enumeration plays on the repetitive nature of the objects and of the substantially homogeneous signs that have a meaning only in relation the one with the other, always making reference to even bigger, innumerable, endless classes of objects. It is not just the nature of the display that makes each object an anonymous representative, subjugated by an overbearing power. It is also the forensic and documentary nature of the archived objects that reveals the archiving procedure as an institution. However, there is no form of History-telling but only the silent and interrogatory evidence of one object next to the other, according to a paratactic arrangement, that makes visible how our realities are stages and, also, how our histories are constructed and performed, by means of controlling technologies, surveillance devices, etc. The archive is the last trace left in history –Mao Tongqiang has claimed since 1998, the period of his pictorial work entitled The Files, against amnesia and forgetfulness. Marco Scotini

The theatrical nature of Michelangelo Pistoletto's "Quadri Specchianti" is well known, as are the performative and temporal dimensions which – beginning with these works –characterize the exhibition space. Since the early 1960s, Pistoletto's work has been populated by people – reflecting in his "Mirror Paintings". Without an audience, these works do not truly exist, as they only come into being in relation to the people who are looking at them. What all these works are promoting, is the physical and virtual presence of both the actors and the spectators, interchanging roles that, between 1968 and 1971, led Pistoletto to experiment with a genuine theatrical activity carried out with the men and women of the Turin based group, Lo Zoo. However, the true antecedent of the establishment of Lo Zoo was Pistoletto's solo exhibition held in the L'Attico gallery in Rome, in February 1968. In this exhibition, Pistoletto definitively renounced the symbols of authorship and created the conditions for a "creative collaboration" with the public. He decided not to produce any objects and limited himself to taking, on loan, theatrical props, papier-mâché backdrops, film costumes and show hats from the Cinecittà Studios. This transformed the exhibition space into having the two-fold identity of a parterre and a theatrical backstage in which the spectators (and, equally, the artist) were called upon to gain experience of that "limit between themselves and the choreography of themselves", between fiction and reality. 1000-watt reflectors hit the spectators' eyes as they entered while some "mirrorpaintings" multiplied the play of reflections and ambiguity, and some film makers recorded the scene. "In the empty space, spliced by the violent light of the spotlights – Alberto Boatto testifies – action has possibly already been called, since many extras can be seen acting. (…) In this way, the unreality of reflected life and the still and weightless one of the photographic image match the unreality of the material environment and the people". For the Anren Biennale, Michelangelo Pistoletto decided to set up a similar space to that presented at L'Attico fifty years earlier and which he called Memory/Wardrobe. This new version of the work refered to his personal memories and to those of Twentieth Century China. The clothes that the public found in the long wardrobe in the first room (that they were invited to choose and wear), went from those from the Beijing Opera to those of the Szechuan peasants, from the zhongshanzhuang ( 中山装) type jackets of the Chinese Republic to the uniforms of the Red Age period. Marco Scotini

The Khmer Rouge evacuated Phnom Penh on April 17, 1975. They didn't touch the theatre, whereas they blew the national bank up. While they were in power, the theatre operated occasionally - during official visits. Instead of staging traditional dances in their shows, artists praised revolution, workingclass and peasant heroism or anti-imperialist struggle through armed choreographies - as we can see in some Khmer Rouge propaganda films. In 1994, repairs to the roof were carried out and an accidental fire broke out on the construction site. The theatre burnt down. Over the following ten years, no one came up with a serious restoration project. The theatre gradually lost its soul, it was abandoned, like a lapse of memory at the city's heart. This place went from one extreme to the other: from the Khmer Rouge who endeavoured to shatter Cambodian identity to unbridled capitalism which annihilates whatever has any positive cultural impact. In a society where identity roots have been destroyed, where people's culture and dignity have been challenged, points of reference are lost. Such loss leads dominant political and economic powers to join forces, unchallenged. This is what's happening to Cambodia today. But the country's desperately in need of participation, civic commitment and particularly of the sense of duty towards the community. When it comes to reconstruction, we must restore our identity first and have some space of cultural expression to do so. In Cambodia, we say: "When culture vanishes, the nation collapses." How can we build our country if culture remains confined to survival when transmission of memory's so much at stake? Culture should be a priority because it is so instrumental in healing our wounds, overcoming traumas and building democracy. The situation of the burnt theatre serves as a symbol of Cambodia's situation, just as of many other developing countries'. Are we to reduce culture to its folklore dimension? And yet… To break away with "culture of survival", and overcome stupor of trauma, we need a link, we need continuity. Artists embody such a link. Through creations, they can avoid breaking up with our past, they can restore dignity of memory. Rithy Panh

In the work biography up till now, the point of departure for this stage of development is formed by photographs in which the artist has, since the early 1990s, used the method of staging in ever more differentiated ways for the iconography of her works. For Lisl Ponger staging means a making a cut between reality and photographic representation. While the series XenographischenAnsichten from 1995 subjected the pictorial structure to the rhetoric of ethnographic documentation in its combination of locations, clothing, poses and attributes, the most recent works additionally mirror art history. That means that at one and the same time Ponger perceives the history of dramatisation as the expressive content of her pictures. Thus scenography, dramaturgy and composition are as much pictorial and design instruments as they are the subject matter. Each photograph communicates the artist's awareness of the status of the image as a representation of conventions of structural depiction and composition, its history and contexts in painting "but also (in) other forms of art such as film, literature and theatre (…) in which narrative revelation, figural depiction and dramatic production are central concerns". With her analysis of images, the research on examples, the construction of 'after images' and parallel pictures she undermines the perceptual consensus of images as a whole. With that, Ponger positions herself in a field of discourse that is working on new configurations of modernity in various disciplines and on the basis of colonial and postcolonial studies. Thus she finds herself embedded in an understanding that has reflected the global interactive connections between different societies in the most diverse areas of politics, religion, culture, forms of knowledge and gender. The perception of the Other as an object, an onerous legacy from the colonial era is taken by her as the subject for consideration. For her, difference means a concept of modernity that is plural, one in which the sphere of the art she reworks goes considerably beyond the conflation of colonial and art history. Ponger's pictures do not ascribe an exclusive role as perpetrator to the development of European art since the Baroque. Instead, her dramatisations impart an art history that she regards in part as being the result of far-reaching colonial involvement.At this junction it becomes clear that Lisl Ponger pursues an "art about art" that is highly topical because it is also political. Martin Hochleitner

Pedro Reyes's use of the puppet theater in both Baby Marx and The Permanent Revolution, is not exactly a cabaret, nor is it television, nor is it Twitter, but it has something of all of them. Strange as it may seem, one of the most interesting aspects presented by an experiment such as this one by Pedro Reyes, lies in the good use of humor, already present beforehand in the characterization of truly monumental historical figures (all of this in capital letters) and in the humor inherent in the puppets themselves. This is a kind of humor that stands out and makes evident how media, old and new, presents and determines the conditions under which we are accustomed to witness "History." With this experiment, Pedro Reyes poses the possibility of creating a new format – as well as a new dramatic form – by adopting a spatial and narrative formula that borrows from several other narrative forms. Reyes opens the possibility of investigating the past and its relation to the present without being media, but rather sculpture, by being movement, without being representation, by making non-militant commentary, while also being literal (with his text) without being so with History. Pedro Reyes's theater/cabaret is a sphere. Complex forms of telling, showing, acting, and referring, circulate within this microcosm he has imagined in a manner more like a current of air than the phrases and arguments that compose a text. A sphere: his puppet theater works as a soap bubble within the history of the transmission of ideas. His work must be understood not only as a contribution to the genre of political commentary, but also as a volume that stores data about the past and its protagonists in a non-linear, quantum fashion. In this sphere, the principles of textual organization are not characterized simply by whether they are or are not fiction, but rather by seeking to turn spatial information of very diverse nature into this curious bubble-puppettheater- cabaret. The characters and their dialogues truly live within this strange and exciting historical sphere created by the artist, and this is why they posses the absolute freedom to acta s they see fit, and they enjoy the full credulity of those of us who believe that the sphere is the model for a new way of relating memory with narration, artistic aspiration, transformation, and political imagination. Chus Martinez

In the three-part film Cabaret Crusades Wael Shawky has devoted to the history of the crusades, marionette comprise the cast in lieu of actors. While the films offer many passages in which "no stone can be overturned without revealing a stream of fresh blood" 1 all moralizing is kept at bay by focusing on the events rather than on psychological interpretation. The marionettes are many things in one: sculptures created or restored by artist; stand-ins for specific historical figures; and embodiments of archetypal characters in a narrative of war and conquest. They are hybrid creatures, often resemblinganimals. The suggestive force of voice and sound gives each puppet the semblance of a face. It suspends our disbelief in the same way marionettes are suspended by strings. "these puppets posses the virtue of being immune to gravity's force. The knownothing of the inertia of matter… because the force that lifts them into the air is greater than the one that blinds them to the earth" 2. Marionettes embody a paradox of representation: they stand in for the human figure while abstracting it from itself. They challenge our categories of subject and object, our distinctions between beings and things. They model our perpetually denied year-ning for political autonomy: the strings are conspicuous, their pullers invisible. There is an unseen higher power in charge. Between puppet work and camerawork, Wael Shawky's historical drama holds up a critical mirror to our present moment: in rhetoric reminiscent of modern –day "jihad", Urban II promised those who are willing to die, a definite place in heaven. We are still living in the age of the crusades, only experiencing them through the peculiar prism of our time, that of politics as entertainment, cabaret style. While Shawky's Al Araba al Madfuna tells a story that is like a fable, the Cabaret Crusades couch their telling in direct historical action. The films are replete with short dialogues and brisk decisions edited into suites of brief scenes often interrupted by diegetic music. One battle follows another. A crowning gives way to a beheading. Countless dates, places, and proper names appear onscreen. The narratives rarely lingers on the story of a single character. All of them , rulers and victims alike, are toys of history, cogs in a ruthless machine of conquest and destruction. Omar Berrada 1 This phrase occurs in The Secret of Karbala, part 3 of Cabaret Crusades (2015). HD video. 2 Heinrich von Kleist, On the Marionette Theatre (1810).

"Visibility is a trap," says Foucault in Discipline and Punish, describing the Panopticon prison structure. A disciplinary model, in other words, in which the simple fact of being exposed or made visible is automatically transformed into a method of subjection and repression. And an actual human trap that works optically is also what Santiago Sierra created for the Centro Cultural Matucana in Santiago, Chile. A large device for seeing. Indeed a trap, as the title of the work La Trampa says. But to capture who? Using what tactics? And why? On the evening of December 27 2008, a handful of members of the Chilean "power base" were invited to the Centro Cultural Matucana to take part in an event with a rather unusual procedure. According to a hierarchical ranking system from political to cultural and lastly to media power, their respective representatives were invited — one at a time — to pass through a doorway from which they would never return. Once beyond the doorway, each of them, completely alone, followed a seventymeter- long narrow wooden corridor that brought them to the center of a theater. Suddenly each one found him/herself surrounded by 372 eyes staring impassively and in silence under spotlight beams. Arranged in tiered rows, 186 Peruvian workers occupied the entirety of the stalls, under the formof a theatrical audience Having assumed the role of spectators in the Santiago Sierra show to which they had been invited, to their surprise and unease, the 13 representatives of Chilean power found themselves unwittingly transformed into actors before a crowd of observers composed in the main of illegal immigrants, underpaid and exploited in Chile. But also the actors of the piece (the Peruvians hired and paid by Sierra) found themselves playing the role of spectators — in this case consciously. So who is watching and who is being watched in this performance? Who has been caught in the trap in this piece for 13 spectators and 186 actors? The Chilean spectators who found themselves observed and judged? The Peruvians who were willing to become spectators on the order of the director for the meager payment of 7000 pesos? The Spanish artist himself who plays the power role, accepting a fake, precautionary, personal alienation as a defense against an imposed social reification? Here the trap does nothing less than make the different scenarios of power visible. Sierra's LaTrampa is a representation of a representation of contemporary power. A great "Las Meninas of our time". Marco Scotini

German theater criticism saw an "anti-aesthetic demonstration" in the Living Theater's Sophocles-Hölderlin-Brecht Antigone produced in February 1967 at the Stadt-theater Krefeld. The Brecht text was used in an English prose translation with German subheadings, but not the "Model". German critics detected artlessness and identification above all, over-identification with the political concern of questioning authority as a force in its own right. The expressivity contrasted with Brecht's "demonstration", as the photos make quite clear: the performance was characterized wholly by the bodies, by the language of the bodies and the symbols. German critics talked about text, while the Living Theater was concerned with body. In 1991-92, Jean-Marie Straub and DanièleHuillet staged the Antigone of Sophocles-Hölderlin-Berchtfot the theater- the Schaubühne in Berlin- and made a film in Sicily. "The text we use is a filmscript consisting of 147 takes". The starting point was "a place, a topography." In reality and in the film:"Segesta, a Greek theater, a hole between the hills, with a gap to the sea." In the theater:" The same setup. We have three screens arranged in exactly the same manner as the perspectives we will have for the filming." Perception is the fundamental political and aesthetic category of this work. For the film, the camera was installed at one spot but at different heights. Thus it established a location, from within which spaces could be formed by the movement of the language and of the bodies. The "rigid" view determined the spaces. There are three: that of Antigone, that of Creon, that of the chorus. They involve the surroundings, nature, in different manners, they take possession of it in different ways:"Yet the whole thing belongs to no one. During the filming process there is one surface which no one is allowed to enter, and it is shown in its entirety at the end of the film" (Jean-Marie Straub, 1991). For Antigone Straub and Huillet worked with location and space in a way previously undertaken, though in a different fashion, by Brecht and Neher. They emphasized the boundary between the spaces. But the faculty of perception was directed towards yet another element: the language. The verses and caesuras of the text are clearly accentuated.The Antigone Model 1948 commented on just that subject: "Question: How were the verses spoken?" […] In the Straub / Huillet work the accentuation of the language found expression in what its opponents and advocates described as lay declamation, amateur theatricals. Straub and Huillet thus come the closest to the 'deathly factual' character of the drama's language by means of the technique of hesitation and suddenness. Hans-Joachim Ruckhäberle

Recent and past histories, intransigent conflicts and tensions, sequential flashes of hand-created images – these are the irrevocable features of Sun Xun's artistic practice that fuses the line between art and animation. His work primarily involves making images using various materials such as colour powder, woodcuts and traditional ink, and collating these to produce a film, which is often presented in an immersive setting. Sun Xun's art thus acts as a theatre of memory, replete with shuttering sequences and jarring juxtapositions of surrealistic and recognisable images, which collectively serve to scrape the uncontested surface of politicised truth. From Sun Xun's early oeuvres, through to his most recent pieces, one comes to identify various protagonists that repeatedly appear in his probing chronicles. The mosquito, for example, which sucks on the blood of mammals and primarily of men to survive, was the subject of "Insect Archeological" (2005) and reappears periodically in works such as "Requiem" (2007). The incontestable central figure of his narratives, however, is the magician, which Sun Xun has remarked is "the only legal liar". The magician appears, over and over, as a well-suited dark figure, representative of humanity's willing submission to falsehood. Sun Xun's works are alternative histories, which beautifully rendered, thrive off the fear they instill, the perplexion they instigate and the dark inquisitive attraction they project. The memory is empty, when man gets into a state of shock. The shock of time can also called the shock of history. The most important element of this work is some old paper from 50's and 60's. The papers recorded some important information of China. To me, it has become history which I can never get close to. For this reason, I can only use my work turned this history into a doubtful legend. Our conception of history is fragmentary. The conception of history more like a placebo for ourself. our conception of history has been twisted passively or voluntarily. There are lies, secrets or maybe farces behind all these things. Maybe it is just the real history. History is how we think but not what it is. Even we have archeology and museum, we still sorrow when we face the real history. Sun Xun

Where all the potential actions are never exhausted in a defined number of realizations, they remain capable of ever new manifestations, of possible new beginnings. It was when faced with the inertia of the detritus of the past, such as Yugoslavian 'Socialist modernism', that Marko Tadic decided to "make History with the rags and refuse of history"– as Walter Benjamin would have said. But these elements of detritus are not such solely because, after some fateful date, they ceased to work. They are rather things or signs which, possibly, have never really had a proper function and can, therefore, be considered as 'toys' in Benjamin's sense. In other words, "collective products" that always refer to a comparison with the adult world and through this, each time, free up the first and original play that had become fossilized through habit. Postcards, geographic maps, old slides, notebooks found in flea markets, personal photographic archives and second-hand books make up this Lilliputian (static and mobile) archive that Marko Tadic tries to reactivate through the simple process of video animation. Tadic uses these objects as sources of the past which, more than providing direct information about facts and dates, produce an idea of the weave of time. The title which, beginning in 2013, repeatedly reappears in many of his works, not by chance, is Imagine a Moving Image and immediately states the obscure force of return and repetition that presides over Tadic's whole artistic production so that an image becomes dynamic rather than static, is re-immersed in a temporal duration, within a narrative. Those objects considered to be lifeless take on a life and an existence that has, by now, exited from the infinity of happening and haspassed on to acts, becoming events again, starting everything ex-novo, 'from the beginning' . The Zagreb School of Animated Films – one of the most significant phenomena of Yugoslavian film making in the 1950s and 60s – itself becomes, for Tadic, a sort of workshop to be reopened with all its symbolic capital and its challenges to the rhetoric of political realism. With the last chapter in his work, Events meant to be forgotten (2017), Tadic uses a series of post-war photographs rather than sequences designed and edited with stop-frame animation. That which takes place here is the start of a continuous game of appearances and disappearances in which urban and natural landscapes, just as building sites for monuments or industrial plants, become not only the scenario but the very body of the author's constructive intervention. Marco Scotini

Textiles are objects of transition to the afterlife and a key element in funerary rituals, often produced by women; they are portable, foldable, and adaptable; they circulate and change hands, operating as vehicles for stories and motifs. This power of dispersal is the great strength of textiles. Carpets and clothing make excellent forensic evidence (they absorb and enwrap blood, fibres, bodies, and hair) but are poor historical witnesses, too often damaged, lacunary, and difficult to piece together. The textile medium has the singular quality of allowing a figure and its setting to coexist in the same plane, and to be produced through the same gesture. Thus, a textile history of art spanning the past few centuries would rework of one of the fundamental dialectics of artistic modernity: that of ground and figure. Textile practices form an interesting crosscut with this central question in modernity. Where modernity emerged according to the articulation, distinction, or blending of ground and figure, textile thinking used a topology that radically reworks the terms and space of inscription. These textile gestures and the space they produce will be articulated here through a narrative of fibered figures and patterns and their resonance in recent art history, as they constitute, the materials of Ulla von Brandenburg's work. One could say that in Ulla von Brandenburg's work, the function of the exhibition – and which can also be observed between exhibition – is a fibered function. Figures and ground are in movement; in the subtle reversals, certain figures become grounds, and we can observe the unpeeling of grounds that move up into the foreground. Starting from visual mode of relations, the textile thought process unfolds in a pas de veux with its subjects, far from the rigid categories of representation or face-to-face contact. In textiles, scale is the measure of a movement. Ida Soulard

METROPOLIS, REPORT FROM CHINA is a documentary essay about a research for an adaptation of the legendary 1927 feature film "Metropolis", resulting from the artists' trip to China in 2004. Maya Schweizer's and Clemens von Wedemeyer's42 minute film provides insight into growth of the Chinese mega-city, but also questions the implications of modernity, development and progress at all costs. And while site-seeing in New York, I imagined that it was a crucible of diverse and chaotic human powers, blindly bumping into each other in the untamable desire to exploit each other and thus living in a state of constant fear. I spent the whole day walking around the city. I saw the buildings like a vertical curtain, shimmering and very light, filling the back of the stage, hanging from a sinister sky, in order to dazzle, to divert, to hypnotize. During the night the city gave the impression of being alive: it lived like illusions live. I knew that I would have to make a film based on these impressions. It lived like illusions lived. These gorgeous, haunting words are Fritz Lang's, and they provide the voiceover—read plainly, without inflection—during the opening scenes of Maya Schweizer's and Clemens von Wedemeyer magisterial 2006 film Metropolis: Report From China, one of the most moving works of art to emerge from Metropolis's influence. From a car driving through the urban night, the filmmakers' camera records grimy images of the crowded cursive of freeways that surround Beijing, its jagged fluorescent skyline in the distance. Contrasted and then conflated with these images, which are tinged a neon crimson by hundreds of sunspot-like brake lights, Lang's recollection of his 1923 trip to New York makes clear the nature of Schweizer´s and von Wedemeyer´s own film in front of us: China is their— and perhaps our—Metropolis. Or as their own voiceover notes, "Eighty years after Lang's visit to New York and exactly in the estimated time of the futuristic projections of the film Metropolis. It is the time that skyscrapers are being erected, the dawn of the twenty-first century." Against nighttime shots of the cityscape, with its sprawling constellation of construction sites lit like stars against the dark, the project before us comes into shape. Quinn Latimer

By experimenting with different ways of visual storytelling, Yang Yuanyuan creates narratives where facts and fiction coexist and speak about topics such as memory, history and time. Most of her projects are closely related to particular locations, and usually begin with extensive research developed from specific key elements. Yang describes her way of working as "weaving": creating a complex structure in which different materials intertwine with each other. Yang's practice involves various mediums: mainly photography but also text, video and performance. The projects are usually presented in the form of books and installations. Before arriving in Chongqing, I purchased an old photo album online from a second-hand bookseller. The album had almost 300 photos taken in Chongqing around the 1960s, all focused on architecture, with the street address of nearly every location written underneath. This photo album, compiled 50 years ago, became the index for my wandering in Chongqing. I tried to revisit the places where these photos were taken, following the addresses marked in the album. Soon I realized it was a mission doomed for failure— many street names had changed, and nearly all the architecture from the photos was gone. However, I managed to visit 26 of the streets that still existed, taking photos of the surrounding areas and looking for the addresses listed. In addition, I visited two other types of locations for this project: one group comprised of factories that played an important role in Chongqing's recent development, but are currently abandoned or in disrepair (Chongqing Second Steel Factory, Chongqing Jiulong Electricity Factory and Jiangyu Ship Factory); the other category consists of several large construction sites in the city center. I don't intend to compare images of the past and present in a typological way. By juxtaposing images of architecture taken from different times, different media (television and newspaper advertisement from different times), in different forms (ruins or buildings under construction), and inserting images of people related to the architecture (portraits, interview excerpts and archival documents), this project produces a montage of imagery where new relations and dialogues form. I hope the pluralized relations and dialogues among these images can provide the structure of an invisible web, the transection of a kaleidoscope reflecting the current and continually changing composition of the city of Chongqing. Yang Yuanyuan

If there is one characteristic trait of marionettes, as Celine Condorelli has written, it is that they "do away with the status of both object and subject", because they are always thought of as a device that can speak through someone else's voice but only move (articulating parts it is made with) when directed by outside forces. An entity that is not self-directable, in other words, yet is also capable of wholly expressing itself, the marionette overcomes the false dichotomy between means and ends. It is an "additional”, to use Condorelli's term: something that is in excess of its own role, that supplements it. Something that, while stubbornly preserving its nature as a means, escapes the sphere of mediality, though without thereby becoming an end. This last aspect is unquestionably at the root of Kleist's interpretation of the marionette theater. On the other hand, the mechanical characteristics of puppets allow the gestural coding of a finite number of highly stylized possible movements, just as they allow a very limited syntax of staging. Yet it is precisely this degree of imperfection defining the existence of marionettes, their archaic capacity to transform themselves and be reborn in other forms, and even the mechanisms that make them depend on the visible strings from which they are hung, that become fundamental in Condorelli's investigation of systems of representation and their temporality. The marionette (and the theater it belongs to) entails a condition of being in time and space that always openly declares its mechanism of appearance, its propensity for transformation, the elements that limit or encourage it, the forms of its iteration and of its variability, its capacity to form different configurations and adapt to different contexts. Without ever excluding, however, the here and now of the unforeseen and unplanned that turns each performance into an event. Indeed, while it is true that marionettes have always been used as a metaphor for subjugation and manipulation, it is precisely because, more than any other device, they allow one to see the process by which they function, the imperative relations that guide their gestures and condition their behavior. In this sense, the marionette becomes an operating model that is every bit as important in Céline Condorelli's artistic repertoire as the stage itself and the curtain, the theater drape that establishes and presides over systems of visibility: rising and falling, hiding and revealing, excluding and including, dividing spaces and times. Within Condorelli's discourse, those elements end up becoming archetypes of the exhibition space as such. Marco Scotini

Cornelius Cardew was the fundamental figure in the British avantgarde of the 1960s, and founder (with Howard Skempton and Michael Parsons) of the Scratch Orchestra, an experimental performing ensemble. He later rejected experimental music, explaining why he had "discontinued composing in an avantgarde idiom" in his own programme notes to his Piano Album 1973 in favour of a politically motivated "people's liberation music". I have been talking about politics. It's evident that the criterion of 'the people's good'is a political criterion. In music, the criterion 'good music is that which benefits the people'is a political criterion. 'Raising the level of consciousness of the people'is a political task. Everything that music can do towards raising the level of consciousness of the people is part of this political task, it subserves this political task. The artist cannot ignore politics. As Mao Tsetung says, 'There is no such thing as art that is detached from or independent of politics'. And I think I have also made clear what he means in the sentence, ' Each class in every class society has its own political and artistic criteria, but all classes in all class societies put the political criterion first and the artistic criterion second.'This is profoundly true, this point about the precedence of political criteria over artistic criteria. It can be seen to be true, objectively, in capitalist society and it will still be true in a socialist society. To deny this is to cast yourself adrift in the realm of fantasy and, if you are an artist, your work will still be judged according to the political criterion first and the artistic criterion second and it will be seem – notwithstanding any artistic merit it may have – to be misleading the people, not raising their level of consciousness, and hence supporting capitalism and serving to prolong its domination of the working and oppressed people. Cornelius Cardew

In 1987, the opera"The Good Woman of Szechuan" was presented at the Szechuan Theater. The original story of this opera is by Brecht but had been adapted for the various techniques of the Szechuan opera as a significant trial which, nonetheless, had been very successful. Wei's work "The good woman, the bad woman" is not a simple adaptation but, using only Brecht's main character, rethinks the dramatic development, even changing the title. This is how Wei's work was created: in 1998 or, in other words, on the 100th anniversary of Brecht's birth, the director of the Shanghai film company, Xu Songzi, wanted to adapt Brecht's "The Good Woman of Szechuan" to make a film and, as a consequence, invited along Wei Minglun as the author and me, as literary consultant. The text was published in the magazine "Literature of the World" (). "The good woman, the bad woman" is based on the film script, even if it was modified to be staged as a Szechuan opera. The Szechuan opera "The good woman, the bad woman", is a typical opera by Wei Minglundespite being based on Brecht's storywith transformedscenes.There is a whole western tradition that recreates a new opera starting from an ancient story – many famous authors have even rewritten important works. However, since the Twentieth century, rewriting an ancient classic work has become, in the West, a very free method that can be identified in three types: 1) the recreation of a new opera following the original philosophical theme; 2) using the original story which is modified to present a contemporary subject; 3) the replacement of both the story and the original theme, that is considered as being turned upside down by the opera but does not work at all. But, Wei Minglun,when he rewrites a classic work, is part of the first type. So, let's see what problems Minglun is faced with: 1) how to present Brecht's original subject; 2) how to rethink the narrative method and the scenography in order to be closer to the Szechuan opera; 3) how to adapt Brecht's dialectic subject matter to a Chinese context and its current society; 4) how to resolve the problem of renewing the Szechuan opera. Wei Minglun is an intelligent dramatist and a pioneer of the Szechuan opera. He knows the traditional form of this opera very well and, at the same time, also knows the local Szechuan culture. As a consequence, "The good woman, the bad woman" becomes an ironic opera based on the local Szechuan culture. The subject matter of "The good woman, the bad woman" follows the spirit of Brecht but, obviously, modifies it. Wei Minglun developed the story and the relationships between the characters in the original work but moved the background to the 1920s in Szechuan. He also modified the roles, the language and the context: this type of theatrical opera is not just part of the Szechuan opera's traditions but has various elements of the movie genreadded, in such a way as to make the opera richer; it also has various considerations on contemporary societyadded, making it more realistic. Ding Yangzhong

The task of depicting class struggle in the sculptures called Rent Collection Courtyard could be entrusted confidently to sculptors from Sichuan. The sequence of tableaux that mad up Rent Collection Courtyard was not attributed to particular artists by name, in conformity with the practice at the time of denying the idea of personal fame, but today we can list their names: Zhao Shutong and Wang Guanyi of the Sculpture Department, and their students Li Shaorui, Long Xuli, Liao Dehu, Zhang Shaoxi, and Fan Degao; participants from outside the school included Li Qisheng, Zhang Fulun, Ren Yibo, Tang Shun'an and the folk artist Jiang Quangui; taking part in the later stage of the work were Wu Mingwan and Long Dehui of the Sculpture Department, as well as their students Long Taicheng, Huang Shoujiang, Li Meishu, Mahetuge(Yi nationality), and Luojia Zeren(Tibetan). In June 1965, Sichuan provincial party committee entrusted the Sichuan Academy of Fine Arts with the task of making the clay sculptures of Rent collection courtyard in a display hall created within the original manor of the landlord of Dayi and here the teachers and students embarked on their sculptural 'class struggle'. The sculptural work made up of more than 100 life-size clay figures took only four months to complete, and they were arranged in the compound in Dayi of Liu Wencai, the Sichuanese landlord cum warloard. The recreation of the figures in Rent Collection Courtyard was, according to an official statement, the reenactment of a story that had actually unfolded in this courtyard before 1949. Miserable peasants, men and women, old and young, paid their annual taxes to the landlord, after which they were left with nothing. Using false weights, the landlord left them so destitute that some were forced to sell off their children. Others were said to have been imprisoned in a water-filled dungeon, even though there is no evidence that such a dungeon ever existed. Others were even starved to death. In the final scene of the 1965 work, peasants with shoulder poles rise up to resist the landlord. In the sculpture's 1968 modification, the work concluded with peasants holding up political slogans and quotations from Chairman Mao. Rent Collection Courtyard was regarded as a 'diorama of the society', directly reflecting class conditions and class struggle in the Chinese countryside before 1949. The sculptors hoped to 'show the cruelty, as well as the weakness of the landlord class; they wanted to show the misery and suffering of the oppressed peasants, as well as their spirit of rebellion; they wanted to depict the local grim realities of that time, as well as hinting at the bright future.''They not noly wanted audiences to shed tears of sympathy for the peasants who suffered in the past, but also wanted to arouse the audience's hatred of the old society and love of the new society.'This was the express aim behind the creation of the Rent Collection Courtyard, the artistic techniques and characteristics of which were deemed to be its nattative form, its use of local methods for fashioning Bodhisattva images by applying clay mixed with straw to a base, and the insertion of black glass balls into the eye sockets of the figures so that eyes seemed to reflect what they 'see'. Lu Peng