Amy Ball | Women

About

Ball presents a new video piece shot in Canada’s remote Yukon territory, where she grew up. It pairs the region’s expansive landscapes with a lone dirt-biker, who remains masked and anonymous. The rider’s relationship to the natural terrain forms the backdrop to Ball’s layering of language and sound in her live performance.

Amy Ball (*1987, Dawson City, Canada) works with sound, sculpture, performance and video, as well as short stories, texts and drawing. Her work has been exhibited and performed at the Kunstverein Göttingen; KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin; The Banff Center, Canada and the Rijksakademie, Amsterdam.

ASSEMBLE is a series of new performances for art institutions throughout Berlin. Its monthly events move through art venues parasitically, adding live artworks to the institutions’ regular programs.

ASSEMBLE invites artists working with public space, and formation of identities within it, to create a site-specific piece for a Berlin venue. For the participating artists, bodies are tools for expression as well as political subjects, inseparably; the body is a medium of communication, and as such has a public meaning, a projection beyond the realities of skin and flesh. Their practices move people, bring them together, or force them to contend with their own bodies’ groupings and determinations. In their performances for ASSEMBLE, the artists consider the potentials of a gathering, the public dimension of their venue, and the transformation of the private body through public appearance.

ASSEMBLE looks at the conditions in which some bodies become visible in public, while others are hidden, exposed or discounted; how groups form and disperse; and moments of interdependence amongst bodies in an otherwise hyper-individualized environment. Over the course of the series, the performances suggest forms of public gatherings, resistance, or identities; and consider possibilities for action in public, private, and institutional spaces.

Anna Gien and Adela Yawitz are both independent curators and writers based in Berlin. They met in 2015 and have since started creative conversations and collaborations on performance art, the institutional landscape, and artistic production. In 2017 they developed the concept for ASSEMBLE, a traveling ‘parasitic’ performance series and a non-institutional platform for producing and presenting innovative performance work.