Rosa Doornenbal + Lea Collet at Forum: Bread and games

About

Lea Collet and Rosa Doornenbal perform as part of Open Space's programme for Forum: Bread and games. Rosa Doornenbal performs as she draws upon her work looking at the experience of hauntology in contemporary urban and domestic landscapes. She is interested in how people identify with their surroundings and how this relates to feelings of security and intimacy. Fictional identities are created from an early age, with toys and children’s games being the initiators. Doornenbal focuses on the way objects, clothing and even buildings can be seen as ghosts that envelop us with their wordless presence and influential capacity. Doornenbal will use props in her performance for Bread and games. Collet explores the collective disconnection induced by technology, through a phenomenon she calls online emotion, navigating towards a digital ritual, focusing her work between intimations of the future and personal stories.

Forum: Bread and games, a three-day exhibition of artworks and performances exploring fiction and trust, curated by Natalija Paunić. Over the course of the exhibition, six artists (Louise Ashcroft, Radek Brousil, Lea Collet, Rosa Doornenbal, Caz Egelie, Teal Griffin) will perform individual interpretations of the display, questioning the possibility of both neutral spectatorship and original authorship. Sculptures, drawings, photographs and text will be activated by artist-led guided tours, live performances, talks and sound.

Bread and games comes from the Latin phrase panem et circenses, which, in some languages, is a popular idiom for distraction, appeasement and mass manipulation. This phrase illustrates how the viewers' experience of the exhibition could be manipulated and deconstructed by each artist's intervention. Resonating with Open Space's 2020 curatorial theme Manufacturing Memory, which examines the dichotomy between memory and technology, Bread and games provokes personal experiences with an unpredictable fictional narrative.

The sequence of interventions within the exhibition is initiated by individual installations that explore different modes of storytelling, in relation to the real and the intended, the remembered and the known - in public, political and private life. Re-appropriating the space, the six artists fictionalise the narrative of the exhibition, so that the audience experiences their new interpretations rather than the original voice of the curator. Control of the original idea is lost, allowing the audience to have memories dependent on chance and choice, rather than a singular exhibition theme.

More information here.