Karina Sarkissova: Temporal others
‘Aeroponic’ – root systems nourished by air – Acts is the name given to the nomadic Dutch Art Institute’s final & festive iteration of the two year long so-called Kitchen* trajectory. Aeroponic Acts are conversations-in-a-form. Each presenter addresses one question as a practice of engagement.
Here you will find the documentation of Karina Sarkissova's presentation as filmed by Silvia Ulloa, followed by a written report, authored by Ayesha Hameed, which includes a summary of the spoken comments by esteemed respondents Antonia Majaca, Ghalya Saadawi, Laura Harris and Hypatia Vourloumis.
Introduction: This is a research in sensorial performative matters. Parts of this material has been developed in collaboration with Natalia Rebelo.
Question: What lies in this field of relations?
Ayesha Hameed's report: The chairs are arranged in a circle, with some of the audience standing outside it. The artist enters and roller skates inside the circle leaving her shoes in the middle. She stops in front of a chair – starts and then stops again, and again. She looks into the eyes of everyone as she skates in circles, ultimately sitting down in the middle and removing her pads and skates to put on her shoes. She then walks around the room with her hands held in front and waving her arms so you can smell her sweat, cataloguing the senses starting with smell. Without a microphone, the sound is quiet and intimate. Hearing is the next focus: she stamps her feet, leaps and trots around the room, out of breath. Then she turns to touch: rolling down her sleeves, crawling and sliding. The kinaesthetic is the last sense on which she lands – spinning around the room, fragments of dance movements and then she is motionless.
Ghalya Saadawi thought it seemed like a set of warm-up exercises for a dance performance that draws on the sensorial – partly humorous, a caricature of a rehearsal, which might need to be developed further.
Antonia Majaca said it felt like an experiment with the sensorial, which the body processes without cognition. ‘We get a sense of the body and the limbs, how you move your body, and its tensions,’ she said, advising framing the presentation ‘as a negotiation between the smoothness of mediated movement, i.e., skates, and a more visceral relationship to the floor.’
Laura Harris addressed the focus on self-stimulation as non-relational but which also raised the question of how to relate to others. Unsure of how it related to the audience, Harris wondered what would have happened if the audience was invited to come in.
Hypatia Vourloumis was confused by the title as it refers to the temporal. She thought the ways in which gestures and movement marked time. ‘This aspect is more evident in the beginning,’ she said. ‘It presents a kind of sensory movement: wind from movement and the sound it produces.’
Karina Sarkissova's 'Temporal others' was presented before live audience at Silent Green in Berlin on the 21st of May, 2019.
Find the overview of all 28 AEROPONIC ACTS 2019 here: AEROPONIC ACTS - growing roots in air