Wednesday, January 15, 2014

Adam Kinner & Jacob Wren performance and conversation with Jeanne Randolph

 

Watch Adam Kinner & Jacob Wren's Performance:

 

 

 

 

Watch the conversation with Jeanne Randolph:

 

 

 

 

Adam Kinner & Jacob Wren, Music and Theatre Must Learn to Disassociate, 2013, performance, edition of three records, turntable, speakers, courtesy of the artists.

 

Different art forms have different modalities, one might even say different personalities, that run within and alongside them. Some aspects of these modes are directly connected to the nature and history of the form, while others are more anecdotal in nature. For their first collaboration, Adam Kinner and Jacob Wren will focus on the art forms of music and theatre. The project began simply enough with the observation that Adam began his career in Music while Jacob began in Theatre. Yet along with these beginnings come questions, ambiguities, frustrations, ambivalences, joys, resentments, trajectories, observations, histories, something we might call experience, training and untraining, insights, panic, paranoia, etc.

 

Their collaborative performance Music and Theatre Must Learn to Disassociate will take the form of an ongoing series of questions. For these questions, Adam will take on the role of Music while Jacob will take Theatre. Music asks Theatre questions, and Theatre returns fire by asking questions of Music. By embodying (in a kind of semi-anthropomorphism) the art forms from which they began, then interrogating each other in and through these perhaps ironic embodiments, their semi-improvised questions and answers will continuously circle around the facts of what it means to work in one field as opposed to another. This performance will also be an ongoing act of disassociation.

 

Alongside their performance will be a single vinyl record, produced especially for this exhibition, placed on a functioning record player for visitors to play as they wish. On one side of the record, Adam answers questions as Music, with the space of Jacob’s questions left silent. On the other side Jacob answers questions as Theatre, with silence in the place of Adam’s questions. Each side features a series of complex answers and absent questions. This absence, and the way it frames each reply, perhaps suggests something of what is meant by the title Music and Theatre Must Learn to Disassociate.

 

- Adam Kinner and Jacob Wren

 

 

 

 

CVs

 

Adam Kinner

 

Adam Kinner is an artist based in Montréal who works along the interstices of dance, music, and visual art. A trained saxophonist, he started performing his own choreographies in 2011. His interest lies in the modes of presentation and the conventions we take for granted as show goers. By restaging these conventions, and twisting them, he pushes us to reconsider our relationships to each other and to the art we see enacted in front of us.

 

He has presented his work at Usine C, Tangente, OFFTA and the McCord Museum in Montreal and has held residencies via the Third Floor Project at Usine C and at the Banff Centre for the Arts. As a musician, he’s performed solo music in New York, Montreal, Berlin, Toronto and Washington, D.C. and has toured North America and Europe with various Montreal-based bands.

 

 

Jacob Wren

 

Jacob Wren makes literature, performances and exhibitions. His books include: Unrehearsed Beauty, Families Are Formed Through Copulation, Revenge Fantasies of the Politically Dispossessed and the upcoming novel Polyamorous Love Song, a finalist for the 2013 Fence Modern Prize in Prose.  The first two of these have also been published in French translation by Le Quartanier. As co-artistic director of Montreal-based interdisciplinary group PME-ART he has co-created the performances: En français comme en anglais, it's easy to criticize (1998), the HOSPITALITÉ / HOSPITALITY series including Individualism Was A Mistake (2008) and The DJ Who Gave Too Much Information (2011) and their current project Every Song I’ve Ever Written (2012). He has also collaborated with Nadia Ross and her company STO Union. Together they co-wrote and co-directed Recent Experiences (2000) and Revolutions in Therapy (2004). International collaborations include: a stage adaptation of the 1954 Wolfgang Koeppen novel Der Tod in Rom (Sophiensaele, Berlin, 2007), An Anthology of Optimism (co-created with Pieter De Buysser / Campo, Ghent, 2008), Big Brother Where Art Thou? (a project entirely on Facebook co-created with Lene Berg / OFFTA / PME-ART, 2011) and No Double Life For The Wicked (co-created with Tori Kudo / The Museum of Art, Kochi, Japan, 2012.)  He travels internationally with alarming frequency and frequently writes about contemporary art.

 

 

Jeanne Randolph

 

Jeanne Randolph's cultural work (books, lectures, performances) twists psychoanalytic until it is relevant to technology, advertising,  ethics, mass spectator sports, consumerism, and philosophy.  Jeanne's most recent book is OUT OF PSYCHOANALYSIS: ficto-criticism 2005-2011 published by Artspeak, Vancouver.

 

For recommended readings by Adam Kinner and Jacob Wren, please consult the Research Station.