Performance Course Visiting Artist Lecture #3
Galerie
Circulation
"I have long been interested in instructions, protocols, scores – rules for simple procedures – as a ‘translational’ device. What attracts me is how it seems to go beyond temporal and spatial distances as well as our individual bodies but ultimately fails to do so, and through this essential impossibility, generates the most genuine form of self-portraiture and auto-biography of the performer as a lived body bound to the here and now. While I see the same thing happening in Galerie’s activities, their exploration focuses on another aspect of this device, namely its potential not only to present but also to ‘represent’ and ‘promote’ immaterial works of art for which Simon and Adriano’s own bodies serve as the sole, time-based medium. Since I witnessed their brilliant 2017 'group show’ at Jan Mot in Brussels, I have long wanted to learn their practice in depth. I am so happy they accepted my offer."
Yuki Okumura (PhD researcher / tutor of the Performance course)
About Galerie
Galerie was initiated with a spell in 2014, when Simon Asencio and Adriano Wilfert Jensen announced themselves as Galerie, an immaterial gallery for immaterial artworks. The mission of Galerie is to promote immaterial objecthood: works that cannot be reduced to an object or to the documentation of an action. Simultaneously a commercial entity, a performance and a research project, Galerie has been involved in a wide range of activities since its launch, including Group Show - a performed exhibition, The Booth - an empty artfair booth where the two gallerists represent artworks using their own means and offer the works for sale, The Intensive Curse - a workshop on artist and artwork representation a.o.
Since 2020, Galerie has been undergoing renovations and has focused on publishing to reflect on modes of conservation, circulation and inscription of immaterial practices within the format of the artist monograph. This includes Krõõt Juurak - Animal, Family, Bad mood Audience, Sleeping Bad Mood (2020) and As If They Had A Spirit (2024).
https://www.galerie.international/
About the Performance Course at the Academy
Inaugurated in 2022, the Performance Course is an elective course for the 3rd year bachelor students of the Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp, tutored by the PhD researcher Yuki Okumura. Aiming at opening up one's working process to chance through instructed actions after conceptual art, it focuses on the artist's doing rather than showing, exploring performance as a way of self-reflection rather than that of self-expression.
Image: Galerie portrait, "You're Such A Curator" Symposium, De Appel, Amsterdam (2016)