The Space In-between HAU1

Rachel de Joode is a great connoisseur of surfaces—wet, smooth, crumpled, drooping. The Dutch-born, Berlin-based multi-media artist conflates the mediums of photography and sculpture via photorealist sculpture and sculptural photography. Her works distort familiar structures, lending new shapes to bodies and objects.

De Joode has worked together with Jared Gradinger and Angela Schubot on several occasions, this time she will turn the space that exists in-between the bodies of Gradinger and Schubot into sculpture.

 

 

BONE - A performance and installation by Rachel de Joode, in collaboration with Jared Gradinger & Angela Schubot

This performance explores what it means to be human, what it means to have a body and what this human body is. In order to do so, artist Rachel de Joode uses the bodies of others as raw material, the bodies of the two dancers Jared Gradinger and Angela Schubot. Since they are both dancers/performers, Jared and Angela's bodies are products and prerequisites of their work. In this respect, dancers are exemplary for what it is to be be human. On the one hand, the shared, common body is what defines us as a species. On the other, the body serves very different cultural purposes that constitute individual life-forms. The cultural function of the body cannot be understood in biological terms, and correspondingly the biological dimension of the body requires its abstraction from concrete life-forms. Ultimately, the body is a paradoxical thing to play with. It is the foundation of everything we do, but we can - almost by definition - not see it as it is.

BONE: a transcendental anatomical lesson.