Meeting with 2015 Idiom Curator - Tim Etchells - on May 7th in Malta Foundation (44 Ratajczaka St.).
The future in this ‘new world order’ is an anxious one, on a personal level and in terms of bigger geo political and socio-economic questions. The works in the Idiom program are not offering solutions for this anxiety but in inventive, playful, troubling, rigourous, comical, challenging and surprising ways they are, I think, helping us to map and understand the territory in which we find ourselves.
Tim Etchells
Read Courator text.
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The question about the role of art in the argument on the vision of the new world and triggering a critical approach in the spectator towards the imposed order are one of the key goals of this year’s Malta Festival Poznań. (...) The subject of new orders will be taken up in performing arts projects, films and discussions – serious ones, ironic, amusing, speaking of global and personal matters, of history and fiction, of conditions in which new visions of the world are born and fall. One of the neon lights by Tim Etchells, this year’s curator of Malta, says: The future will be confusing. This sentence can be interpreted as a statement about the present state of affairs, a warning or a call for vigilance towards that which is unknown.
Dorota Semenowicz, Katarzyna Tórz
Programme of Malta Festival Poznń 2015Tim Etchells (born 1962) is a British artist and writer based in Sheffield and London. Etchells is the artistic director of Forced Entertainment, a world-renowned experimental performance company founded in 1984. He has published several works of fiction, written extensively about contemporary performance and exhibited his visual art projects in various locations. Etchells is Professor of Performance at Lancaster University.
Etchells regularly collaborates with many artists, including photographer Hugo Glendinning, with whom he has worked on several projects, such as the 1999 exhibition Void Spaces and the ongoing series Empty Stages,which has been exhibited widely, including as part of Etchells' solo show at Jakopic Gallery in Ljubljana in 2013.
Other collaborations include writing essays for performance artist Franko B's Still Lives publication, for the visual art duo Elmgreen and Dragset's project Drama Queens and working with the pair on their later project Happy Days in the Art World.The Art in America article on Happy Days in the Art World says, "Etchells is an experimental British playwright of some fame whose work is Beckettian, not Beckett-esque. His work is mocking and meandering but can really get under the skin, and prick at latent feelings of abjection, loneliness, the inability to communicate, futility".
Etchells collaborated with interactive performance maker Ant Hampton on two projects Lest We See (2013) and The Quiet Volume (2010) which has been produced in English, German, Spanish, Slovenian, Japanese, Polish, Dutch and Portuguese.The Quiet Volume won a 2013 Bessie Dance and Performance Award for Outstanding Sound Design following presentations by Performance Space 122 and PEN World Voices Festival. The citation for the award ran as follows: "For their use of intimately whispered text in a work in libraries across the city and for a score which heightened the experience in a space at once public and private".