 |
| Showing at NYU, May 2013 |
(Jacques
Derrida in Specters
of Marx)
Mêlée and Voelkskoerper - The People‘s Body form part of a series of installations and performances dealing with embodied history and identity, developed by Veronika S. Boekelmann as scholar of the German Cultural Exchange Service / DAAD at New York University.
In Mêlée and Voelkskoerper, the intimate sphere turns into a battle ground where we may rebell against identitarian attributions, and yet can hardly escape their affective impact on our bodies and interactions. The audience member watches himself in a mirror. In the reflection, his face merges with the lips of the artist talking, screaming, laughing, eating from a small screen. The audience member is taken on an emotional journey echoing the pain, the violence and the potential desire that can be produced by identitarian dichotomies. Intimately mingled, the audience members face muscles twitch in tune with rhythm of the speech of the mouth. Also his breath seems to accelerate in orchestra with the mouth on the screen.
Shown at NYU-Tisch-Academy, New York, May 2013 & 27th Stuttgarter Filmwinter Festival, Stuttgart 2014 & Symposium Transnationality & Translinguality - Month of Performance Art Berlin 2014.
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The series of works results from a one-year stay in
New York supported by the DAAD – German Cultural Exchange Service.
It formed part of the final project in Performance Studies at New
York University.
