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Abstract
With a clear focus on the precariousness of individual life amid the mass events of world history, the artist known under changing names and identities such as Claus Beck-Nielsen, Das Beckwerk, Helge Bille Nielsen, Sister Nielsen, Madame Nielsen and many others addresses a range of avant-garde conflicts and dilemmas, including the tensions between art and life, between aesthetic experiment and political impact, between the individual subject on the one hand and the collective mass movements on the other, and between the artist and their work. Indeed, Nielsen, in all their guises, challenges the idea of the organic work of art in every sense.
One of the most persistent focuses of the artist’s rhizomatic oeuvre is no doubt the question of how to address and represent the lives that are excluded from within the community, the lives we hardly recognise as subjects with the right to a place in society. The voices of the drowning refugees in the Mediterranean and the enslaved workers in Dubai, as well as all the dead of Europe’s refugee and concentration camps, echo through Nielsen’s work.
Author:
Abstract
Since the 1970s Kirsten Dehlholm has been a leading figure in the performing arts in the Nordic countries. From her first mature work in the collectively organised company Billedstofteater (1977–1985) she has contributed to the development of what would later be recognised as postdramatic theatre in the performative tradition of the American neo-avant-garde and the early European theatre avant-gardes, which first revolted against the hegemony of plot-based drama within the Western tradition.
Dehlholm placed herself in equal opposition to conventional institutional theatre and the political, left-wing theatre of the 1970s. Rather, she identified with the punk scene and the aesthetic turn of the early 1980s, including the phenomenological investigations into sense perception in performance art. Billedstofteater produced sensuous, site-specific performance installations that involved the audience in new ways in poetically transformed public and semi-public spaces. The poetic work was combined with a quasi-scientific interest in materials and textures and an almost anthropological or archaeological interest in basic human myths and figures.
With the production company Hotel Pro Forma (active since 1986) Dehlholm professionalised her approach to site-specific performance and specifically embraced new lighting and sound technologies in an extended play with the audience’s sense perceptions. The productions of Hotel Pro Forma have experimented with the use of non-dramatic texts and acting styles and have consistently developed new performative formats in collaboration with artists from different fields, as well as with scholars and scientists. In Hotel Pro Forma, Dehlholm has fused an avant-garde rethinking of the theatre with an ambitious investigation of the most fundamental existential themes of life and death, love and war, and of scientific mysteries such as outer space, climate change and the physical laws and substances.
Volume Editors:
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The Cultural History of the Avant-Garde in the Nordic Countries Since 1975 is the final volume of the four-volume series of cultural histories of the avant-garde movements in the Nordic countries. This volume carries the avant-garde discussion forward to present-day avant-gardes, challenged by the globalisation of the entertainment industries and new interactive media such as the internet. The avant-garde can now be considered a tradition that has been made more widely available through the opening of archives, electronic documentation and new research, which has spurred both re-enactments, revisions and continuations of historical avant-garde practices, while new cultural contexts, political, technological and ecological conditions have called for new strategies.
Volume Editors:
, , , and
The Cultural History of the Avant-Garde in the Nordic Countries Since 1975 is the final volume of the four-volume series of cultural histories of the avant-garde movements in the Nordic countries. This volume carries the avant-garde discussion forward to present-day avant-gardes, challenged by the globalisation of the entertainment industries and new interactive media such as the internet. The avant-garde can now be considered a tradition that has been made more widely available through the opening of archives, electronic documentation and new research, which has spurred both re-enactments, revisions and continuations of historical avant-garde practices, while new cultural contexts, political, technological and ecological conditions have called for new strategies.