The workshop starts from the assumption that the work of Samuel Beckett can offer a variety of tools for contemporary forms of artistic research. In the workshop we will focus on absurdity, melancholy, exhaustion, sense/nonsense and emptiness as main signifiers of Beckett’s work for stage, TV and film. We will watch and analyse selected scripts, dialogues, spatial set-ups and performances in order to transform them into our own experiments, exercises and techniques using body, space, camera and text. The challenge of the workshop will be to make those categories mentioned above appear as twofold: as artistic concepts from the past but also as embodied experiences and potential tools for our own artistic research.
Biography:
Ana Hoffner is an artist and theoretician working in the fields of queer and postcolonial/migratory politics. Her interest lies in creating conditions for recognizability of non-normative forms of life through a performative practice consisting of reenactment and lecture performance. Ana Hoffner researches currently as a candidate of the PhD in Practice program and a lecturer at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna.
Artistic research projects: Reenacting Intervention – Intervening in Reenactment/PhD in Practice; Queer Perspectives in and on Europe/Künstlerhaus Büchsenhausen.
Last publication: “Was ist Kunst - a Product of Circumstances?” in: Private Investigations, Ed.: Andrei Siclodi, Büchs’n’Books, Volume 3, Innsbruck.
Upcoming performance: „Wissensdramatisierung – Sprechstück“, Critical Voices, Platform3/Munich, Künstlerhaus Stuttgart.