Thursday, August 17, 2017 @ 8.00 PM
Friday, August 18, 2017 @ 8.00 PM

Please note: Seating is limited and available on a first-come, first-served basis. NO RSVP needed.

Concept and Performance: Simone Aughterlony & Michael Günzburger

This performance contains nudity, Viewer discretion advised

In this dirty art-making practice Simone and Michael invite a collection of commonly understood domestic forms of dirt to confederate and co-perform on a high gloss reflective surface. With dust, hair, fat, blood, ash, pigment and skin a temporary printing station is activated that pays close attention to qualities of materials, their desires and orientations towards bodies and their transformation through intimacy and movement. With a knowing wink but certain irreverence towards art-historical references they stage a close-up inquiry into both the happenstance and determinism of dirt transmission. Attraction and repulsion are mutual forces that go beyond the surface and play out in this sleazy cleaning/mess making fantasy. In an intensely concentrated environment and companioned by a queer alchemy of materials, Michael and Simone practice touch and the narratives produced by the surplus of touching. Vestige research accentuates the potentiality and futurity of indelible traces and acts as a response to the so-called ephemerality of performance.

Created within the project DRECK: EIN APPARAT at Ufer Studios Berlin, a project initiated and produced by Stephanie Wenner that examined dirt and the communion of all things through a new materialist perspective.

Simone Aughterlony is an independent artist based and supported in Zurich and Berlin, working predominantly in dance and performance contexts. Over more than decade, Simone she has been devising and producing choreographic works. As a performer she has worked with artists such as Meg Stuart/Damaged Goods, Forced Entertainment and Jorge León, Phil Hayes amongst others. In 2015 «Supernatural», a collaboration with artists Antonija Livingstone and Hahn Rowe premiered in American Realness while in the same year the performance project «Uni * Form», devised by Jorge León and Simone premiered at Zuercher Theater Spektakel. Alongside an extensive tour of these works and the «Biofiction Trilogy», she is currently touring with Jen Rosenblit «Everything Fits In The Room», a commission from HAU Hebbel am Ufer and Haus der Kulturen der Welt.

Engaging with alternative forms of kinship inside her process, new constellations of family emerge as possibilities for reconfiguring a culture of togetherness that fosters both familiar and unknown quantities. Her works playfully compose with representation and its saturation, seeping into and embracing the phenomenology of mis-recognition and the absurd. Simone approaches the performance genre as a world-building practice where she navigates the contradiction between the domination of desire alongside the agency of all elements.

Michael Günzburger is a visual artist living in Zürich, working with methods of drawing and printing and research on the reference to the materials of used production. Collaborations with other fields of the arts, sciences and crafts like performer Ntando Cele, writers Lukas Bärfuss and Raphael Urweider, Masterprinter Thomi Wolfensberger, hunters, gatherers, virologists, genetic scientist, etc. has always been an important part of his work. His works have been shown in galleries, museums, public spaces and project spaces across the world such as the Zürcher Kunsthaus, Kunstmuseum Bern, Galleries in Mexico D.F., Sao Paulo, New York, Paris, Bern and Zürich in solo and group shows. They found their way into many private and public collection, and he has received a numerous fellowships and grants. He is a research fellow at the Institute for Contemporary Art and Research (IFCAR) at the University of the Arts in Zürich (ZHdK).

Presented with support from the Getting To Know Europe program, awarded by the Delegation of the European Union to the United States