Performance: Olia Sosnovskaya & Elske Rosenfeld — Archive of Gestures: Becoming In/visibile

A new collaborative performance by artist, writer, and cultural organizer Olia Sosnovskaya and artist, author, and cultural worker Elske Rosenfeld. The event is part of the full-day program of the second day of the biennale’s opening weekend. The performance-centered program at the Trade Fair Palace starts at 3 p.m.

…A4 papers with images of police violence, a white sheet of paper held in protest in Kazakhstan in 2019, a worker on strike holding an A4 piece of paper with a written statement and her ID, Elske’s experience of the 1989/90 revolution in the GDR, Olia’s experience of the 2020/21 revolution in Belarus… These are some of the materials that Elske Rosenfeld and Olia Sosnovskaya thread into their new collaborative performance Archive of Gestures: Becoming In/visible, in which they explore strategies of invisibility throughout the history of dissident cultures and protest movements in Eastern Europe and beyond. Proceeding from their research for Rosenfeld’s Archive of Gestures, they circle around notions of movement and “non-movement” (Asef Bayat), “weak resistance” (Ewa Majewska), and “sick woman theory” (Johanna Hedva), opacity and performativity, asking how it is possible to repeat or rehearse the (in)visible gestures of revolution.

Language accessibility: English
Free entrance → Reservation

Elske Rosenfeld (b. 1974, Halle, German Democratic Republic) works in different media and formats. Her primary focus and material are the histories of state socialism, its dissidences, and the revolution of 1989/90. Her ongoing project Archive of Gestures investigates how political events manifest and come to be archived in the bodies of their protagonists. Her works have been featured in international exhibitions at Staatliches Museum für Kunst und Design Nürnberg (2023), Bundeskunsthalle, Bonn (2022), 12th Berlin Biennale (2022), Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden (2020–21), Goethe Institute Moscow (2020), Palast der Republik, Haus der Berliner Festspiele (2019), f/stop Leipzig (2018), 3. Berliner Herbstsalon (2017), mumok kino, Vienna (2016), steirischer herbst, Graz (2015), Devi Art Foundation, Delhi (2013), and Former West, Utrecht (2010), among others. In 2018, together with Suza Husse, Rosenfeld organized the project wild recuperations. material from below: Artistic Research in the Archive of the GDR Opposition. In 2019 she co-curated the festival Palast der Republik at the Haus der Berliner Festspiele. Her texts have been published in Berliner Tagesspiegel, Der Freitag, Deutschland Archiv (BzpB), Berliner Hefte, eipcp.net, Reviews in Cultural Theory, Springerin – Hefte für Gegenwartskunst, and other publications.

Olia Sosnovskaya (b. 1988, Belarus) is an artist, writer, and cultural organizer based in Vienna, Austria. She is currently completing a PhD in practice program at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. Her artistic and research practice intertwines performance with text-based and visual arts, addressing forms of political organizing, protest choreographies, movement scores, and the intersections of festivity and the political within post-socialist contexts and beyond. She is a co-founder of the self-organized platform Work Hard! Play Hard!, which deals with the issues of work, leisure, and non-institutional infrastructures and knowledge. She is also a member of the artistic-research group Problem Collective, which focuses on strikes, archives and reading practices, and tools for engagement with overseen histories and social struggles. Her collective and individual works have been presented at institutions such as Tanzquartier (Vienna), Kunsthalle Wien Karlsplatz (Vienna), HAU (Berlin), Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, Display (Prague), Mystetskyi Arsenal (Kyiv), the Kyiv Biennial, e-flux (New York), and «Ў» Gallery (Minsk), among others.