Max-Philip Aschenbrenner / Lucie Tuma

THE WELL – SPRING COLLECTION

During her residency time at SAARI Lucie Tuma will be working on a new piece titled THE WELL – SPRING COLLECTION (premiering fall 2018 at Gessnerallee Zurich). It’s a dance piece based on a series of 81 paintings by Jongil Choi (Seoul) that stroke a deep impression of wonder when she first encountered them.

Those paintings draw you in. Utmost absorption and an uncanny two-dimensional depth hovering above a surface that covers up an infinite number of dimensions. As there is no temporal necessity as to how your gaze is organized in painting, you may get a glimpse of getting it all at once – which is very closely related to losing it all, of course, on a cosmological level. Magic and an aesthetic shock proper, passing out the lineage of all kinds and variations of modernity. It doesn’t need to prove or establish itself nor exersize any kind of overwhelming rupture, cut or break no more. It’s so new, unknown, and at the same time completely ancient. Serendipity at large and splish splish splashhhh – it’s like having gazed into a waterfall without knowing how long for.

Rather than making a dance and a theatre piece about the series or her relation to it, the paintings are treated in their function as objects generating a particular gaze and attention. In order to produce this a-temporal absorption which may seem atypical for a time-based art form like dance yet has always been one of the core topics of Tuma’s work, there will be a thorough engagement with the materials and Choi’s practice of painting. The work will finally result in an overall spatial spell consisting of 81 dances carried out by a group of five dancers, a number of objects (textile and plastics both dry and liquid) and a soundtrack consisting both of spoken text, music quotes and (pre)recorded materials. The paintings themselves will never be shown.

THE WELL – SPRING COLLECTION is part of an independent structure initiated by Max-Philip Aschenbrenner that goes under the name Theory of the middle-aged Artist, a long-term endeavour that questions existing ways of working and institutionalized formats in the Arts by deeply engaging with a small number of artistic positions on the basis of their pro-ducing and making.