For its first edition of 'A Performance Affair', titled 'Panopticon Edition', VITRINE was selected to present established British artist Tim Etchells new performance work ‘All Going’.
A PERFORMANCE AFFAIR (APA) is a new flexible platform presenting performance art to stimulate discourse around the economies of performance. With a strong online presence, APA compiles performances, discussions and researches to find solutions for the unique challenges that surround this sector. APA aims to provide the best content to a wide public audience while offering artists, gallerists, curators and collectors an arena in which to play. A PERFORMANCE AFFAIR is not another art fair, but a flexible stage aimed at stimulating the acquisition of performance while finding solutions for its development and sustainability. The Panopticon is the inaugural edition, which will be iterated in several countries in parallel to other events in order to highlight progress to the wider public, collectors and professionals.
'All Going' is performed by a single performer in response to a score and instructions by the artist, ‘All Going’ built on and developed Etchells’ ongoing experiments with linguistic fragmentation and repetition, exploring the tension between the semantics and the musicality of spoken language.
In the performance a series of short texts (incomplete sentences, fragments) are repeated by the performer, looped vocally, shifted and transformed in the process as well being edited and intercut with each other. Created through this public improvisational process of ‘speaking out’ the text that is also an animation of it in the social and artistic space of performance, ‘All Going’ creates new meanings from a limited economy of text fragments that both support and contradict each other.
The key phrase in this work are variants on “This is all going wrong / It is all going wrong / Things are all going wrong” creating a spine to the work in semantic terms in which it appears to reflect on its own situation and process of verbal unravelling as well as on broader social and political contexts. Linked to existing currents in Etchells work in performance and sculpture this new work created a unstable teetering, playfully testing the fabric of social space by invoking a crisis that is at the same time deadly serious.
A paradigm of Etchells practice as a solo artist and in his work with the performance collective Forced Entertainment is the process by which texts are understood and explored mutable objects whose meaning shifts in relation to context and in relation to the person speaking them, as well as in relation to nuances of emphasis, gesture and performative inhabitation. In this new work Etchells extends his practice to create a score for enactment and materialisation by others - further opening his enquiry into the nature, location and malleability of meaning in language.
'All Going' Performances will happen on:
Saturday 8 at 12pm, 3.15pm, and 6.30pm
Sunday 9 at 11am and 1.30
Each performance lasts 15 minutes. The performance note cards will be exhibited in the space between performances throughout.