Tim Etchells about Shifting Ground 

Tim Etchells can’t think of a better place to show his neon installation ›Shifting Ground‹: »The story here at PACT, the shift from industrial to cultural space, makes it a great intervention by evoking the question: How do we negotiate the shifting grounds as we go forward?« ›Shifting Ground‹ will be the opening of PACT’s 20 year anniversary festival from May 20 – 22.

Saša Asentić & Collaborators: DIS_Kurs 
Video series with Leroy F. Moore

Leroy F. Moore Jr. is an African American poet, journalist and community activist based in Los Angeles, California. In the second part of the video series, taking place in February 2022, some of Leroy’s friends and colleagues will speak about their favorite sections of his book ›Black Disabled Art History 101‹. The videos include contributions from Ottis Smith, Keith Jones, Toni Hickman, Ace Berstein, Lateef McLeod, Gabe Wilson and Krystina Jackson, who are themselves leading artists, activists and even Emmy Award winners.

Saša Asentić & Collaborators: DIS_Kurs
Video series with Artie Mack 

After DIS_Sylphide, DIS_Move and DIS_Lecture, Saša Asentić & Collaborators present their newest project DIS_Kurs. Saša Asentić curated DIS_Kurs as a digital video series on Disability Arts History and Politics and their critical intertwinement with ableism, racism, classism and capitalism. For the series they invited two artists/scholars/activists from the US who will share their knowledge and critique through a video series: Artie Mack and Leroy F. Moore.

IMPACT21 - Urgent Translations | Arne Vogelgesang: Let's play infowars! Games and Entertainment as political weapons in a right-wing cultural war.

The artist Arne Vogelgesang examines the aesthetics of radical propaganda and methods of political radicalization on the Internet and reveals how gamification, memes and viral fake news shape political discourse and increasingly intervene in social realities. 

IMPACT21 – Urgent Translations | Birgit Schneider: Imagining the future in times of climate change between collapse, techno fix and transformation

How can images foster social change in times of ecological crisis? To what extent can images become a driving force, convey knowledge and turn knowledge into action? Birgit Schneider analyzes the imagery of the climate crisis and its ascribed meaning and content.

Spot on Economies - 128 Research Forum: Talk with Surbhi Kesar / Ingrid Harvold Kvangraven

How are universities colonial? How are theoretical concepts in the economics field colonial? How may our teaching be colonial? What impact may this have in shaping the policy-making and society at large? In this talk we engage in an overarching conversation on the colonisation and decolonisation of the economic discipline.  

Spot on Economies - 128 Research Forum: Talk with the Common Wallet

Spot on Economies takes a look at economies as crucial cross-roads between social, ecological, and political futures. Radical questions on the economy meet with alternative practices and together open up new horizons of thought and agency. The Common Wallet is an initiative of 11 Brussels-based people who, since January 2018, live out of a common bank account. In their lecture, Ingrid Vranken, Tiziana Penna and Adva Zakaï introduce the basic principles of the project. 

Spot on Economies - 128 Research Forum: Lectures by Alakavuklar and Valeria Graziano & Giulia Palladini

Spot on Economies takes a look at economies as crucial cross-roads between social, ecological, and political futures. Radical questions on the economy meet with alternative practices and together open up new horizons of thought and agency. The lecture by Ozan Alakavuklar explores possible alliances between science and activism to promote other economies while Valeria Graziano und Giulia Palladini the logic of abundance in their lecture.

What traces do we leave behind in the internet? Made To Measure: An investigative data experiment.

In autumn 2020, the artists’ collective Laokoon called for anonymous data donations. The group then created the doppelgänger of one participant – only based on their data: reconstructed right down to the tiniest detail, Laokoon staged five years of the anonymous data donor’s life at PACT. The spectacular experiment is exposed on an interactive storytelling website and in a TV documentary. www.madetomeasure.online

Forced Entertainment: How the Time Goes 
Video performance in seven parts

Emerging from the delirious limbo of lockdown the fragmentary video performance features the core group of the company in improvised Zoom-interactions with the pianist Marino Formenti, from separate locations including Sheffield, Berlin, rural France, London, Vienna and Budapest. Available until August 31. In English. 

ATELIER No. 65 - Open Studio bei den Guest Fellows

In einem virtuellen Studiobesuch führt das ATELIER No. 65 vom 29. - 31.01. durch aktuelle Projekte der PACT Guest Fellows - in Künstlergesprächen, Vorträgen, Filmbeiträgen und vielfältigen Formaten geben sie Einblick in ihre aktuellen Recherchen und künstlerische Arbeiten und nehmen Besucher:innen mit in höchst unterschiedliche, eindrucksvolle Gedankenwelten. Einige Projekte sind weiterhin online verfügbar.

Open Day Digital - Online workshops for the whole family

The exciting craft or dance activities from our digital ›Open Day‹ are still online: Hakan Eren is leading a workshop showing you how to knot and bring your own amazing comic figures or balloon costumes to life; our friend Clara Gsella is introducing you to colourful handicraft ideas and Eloisa Mirabassi has a dance and movement workshop in store for you.

›IMPACT20 – Planetary Alliances‹ Lectures & Talks

For years, experts from all fields of knowledge have been occupied with the complex interconnections and vital dependencies between the human and the non-human. Under the title ›Planetary Alliances‹, IMPACT20 invites you to a polylogue on relationship net- works in which humans are just one actor among many.

Meg Stuart on the making of her new work ›CASCADE‹

In August 2020, Meg Stuart was working at PACT on her new creation ›CASCADE‹ which would have premiered at the Ruhrtriennale 2020. In September 21 it can be seen on stage at PACT as part of the Ruhrtriennale 2021. Click here for more.

Forced Entertainment: Complete Works: Table Top Shakespeare: At Home

36 plays in 36 nights. The idea of ›Complete Works: Table Top Shakespeare: At Home‹ by Forced Entertainment  is as simple as it is ingenious. Six performers bring every play ever written by Shakespeare to life using only a collection of ordinary everyday objects as stand-ins for the characters on the one metre stage of a table top. Broadcasted online directly from the performers’ homes to yours. Watch all episodes on the company's YouTube-Channel. 

1000 Scores - Pieces for Here, Now and Later: Online project with performance instructions

Initiated by David Helbich, Helgard Haug and Cornelius Puschke, the PACT-co-production ›1000 Scores‹ offers an online-collection of instructional performance works by international artists. The scores invite viewers to become protagonists and perform the instructions themselves – new pieces will be added each week! With Johannes Paul Raether, RYBN.ORG, Annie Dorsen, Tabita Rezaire and Trajal Harrell.

Anne Nguyen: À mon bel amour -
Video sequences and glossary

In ›À mon bel amour‹, which would have been presented at PACT in March, the French-Vietnamese choreographer brings different urban dance styles including Voguing, Waacking, Popping, Locking and Krump into mesmerising interaction with classical and contemporary dance. For #pactconnected, Anne Nguyen has now compiled a glossary of urban dance styles and shared three video sequences of her work.

Kat Válastur: Arcana Swarm – Video collage

This video is an attempt to bring to the surface the emotional core of ›Arcana Swan‹ and the thread that traverses it. ›Arcana Swan‹ is a work about the state of humanity today and an allegory of humanity.

Ingrid LaFleur: Breathing in Blackness – Temporal Dimensions of Utopia

In her lecture ›Breathing in Blackness: Temporal Dimensions of Utopia‹ in the framework of IMPACT19, La Fleur investigated the notion of utopia within Afrofuturism in an attempt to examine how Black bodies can access, build and evolve their safe spaces.

fieldworks portrait - Documentary 
A film by Klaas Boelen

fieldworks portrait (documentary) is a film by Belgian film maker Klaas Boelen. It was shot during the preparations and happenings of fieldworks portrait, a three-day performative exhibition devoted to the work of Heine Avdal and Yukiko Shinozaki that was held at PACT in June 2018.

Michiel Vandevelde: ›Ends of Worlds‹ – Video work

In his work ›Ends of Worlds‹, which Vandevelde would have shown at PACT in May, the choreographer looks into a distant and yet uncomfortably near future. For #PACTconnected, he has now made a video in which he revisits the epilogue of the performance. ›Ends of Worlds‹ takes place in the year 2300. The date marks year zero for reproduced homo sapiens informed by the algorithmic memories and patterns of the past. 

Online premiere: THE ART OF MOVEMENT - a film by Boglárka Börcsök +++ May 25 - 29 +++ Q&A on May 28 +++ Watch the trailer here

THE ART OF MOVEMENT is a sensual and insightful portrait of three dancers from Budapest: Irén, Éva and Ágnes, aged between 90 and 100 years old, were each once part of the early modern dance movement in Hungary. To survive the momentous socio-political changes of the last century, they transformed their lives and movement practices. The filmmakers Boglárka Börcsök and Andreas Bolm held a Live ZOOM Q&A talk with curators Katalin Erdődi and Léna Szirmay-Kalos. 

New interview series with Saša Asentić / Per.Art

Saša Asentić - a recent resident at PACT - is one of the most prominent activists for inclusion in dance. As part of the project ›Europe Beyond Access‹, the artist and founder of the NGO Per.Art (Novi Sad) publishes a new conversation every Friday with artists and colleagues from the fields of contemporary dance, performance and disability arts. 

Flora Détraz: On ›Muyte Maker‹ - A video collage about the piece

›Muyte Maker‹, the performance that choreographer Flora Détraz would have presented at PACT during our Spring Festival, is a sensual, humorous and energetic experience, a homage to the power of transformation and joy. In her video, Flora offers us a closer, more intimate insight into her work: She shares her influences and sketches, designs for both the choreography and singing, as well as models in art history that inspired her production’s fulminant setting. 

Get Lost - Podcast by Wendy Houstoun with Jonathan Burrows, Francesca Fargion, Matteo Fargion

Wendy Houstoun fronts a rock band to deliver a short talk on lostness, at once funny and deeply moving. You are invited to listen while walking or running in a moment of escape from the house, colliding your travels with a virtual journey that goes nowhere. Available until July 31 2020.

Online Performance: Forced Entertainment's ›End Meeting For All‹

Amidst the omnipresence of ongoing lockdowns and social distancing, the Sheffield based company Forced Entertainment turns to the web tool Zoom to present their new PACT co-production ›End Meeting For All‹ in which they explore the trials and tribulations of a new everyday digital reality. Free to watch via www.forcedentertainment.de

Alexandra Bachzetsis: Chasing a Ghost - Short film documentary

›Chasing a Ghost‹, the latest work by artist and choreographer Alexandra Bachzetsis, questions the choreographic archetype of the duet in a succession of doubles und doublings of bodies, sounds, spaces and images staged in a spectrum of violence and desire. The performance was due to celebrate its German premiere on the 03.04. at PACT. In the meantime, Alexandra has put together a short film featuring footage from the world premiere of ›Chasing a Ghost‹ at the Art Institute of Chicago.