Each image needs a guest ― L’image a besoin d’être invitée

On the occasion of Session 15, k.g. Guttman will draw from her works ranging from the most recent one, I asked the audience to close one eye (2016), to an early project Elapse I & II (2006). In a lecture-performance format, the artist will follow a series of actions, words and visual interventions to explore the relationship between voice, body and image.

A background in dance and site-specific performance, Guttman experiments in Session 15 with performance as a form of image production. In other words, the image is conceived as the culmination of a series of gestures. The lecture-performance involves the situating the point of view of the public with unusual instructions: a visualization that influences the nervous system, and a spatialization of the gaze that explores the dynamic process of vision.

How to choreograph an image?

Each image needs a guest ― L’image a besoin d’être invitée questions the conditions of visibility of the image and the choreography of its constitution. The image becomes an immediate ground of encounter, a sharing between the public, the artist and the context. Each image is accompanied by its situation, that is to say the movement and the quality of its appearance. Each image is considered the guest of its sensory and historical circumstances. (Each image is the guest of the light in which it finds itself.)

The relationship between choreography and image will be addressed through this dynamic relationship between the host and the guest. This modality makes it possible to analyze the multiple references that compose and decompose each image presented as well as the influences, the resemblances and the agentivity that are specific to it.

Each image needs a guest ― L’image a besoin d’être invitée presents Guttman's work through the influence of various artists and theorists, including Alfredo Jaar, Trisha Brown, Kamal Aljari, Babette Mangolte, Françoise Sullivan, Lukas Töpfer, Arkadi Lavoie Chapelle, Petra Sabisch, Alice Chauchat, Tanya Lukin Linklater, and others. Extracts and references of these artists and theorists will be quoted during the presentation.

― k.g. Guttman