The Black Sheep - A Performance Seminar

We can only experience the strangeness and differences in comparison to something that has been accepted before. A black sheep is interesting because the majority of the sheep is white. In the seminar, participants will explore the possibilities of artistic defamiliarization and develop their own performative works.

This seminar will focus on how to create a frame of reference in a performance which exposes contrasts, differences and irregularities.

Since stranger- and otherness always manifest themselves against the familiarity and already-existence, we will first collect single situations. A set of unquestioned rules –tied up with expectations– will be subject to each situation and these rules and expectations will be described as well.

For example, a video piece demonstrated in the Rundlederwelten exhibition at Martin-Gropius-Bau in 2006 shows 22 football players dressed in Armani suits slipping through the mud on a football field, straddling forward and kicking the ball with the toe of their fine patent leather shoes, and this situation itself plays an interesting game with our seeing and visual  habits.

Following these preliminary considerations and discussions, the participants will select situational contexts as a starting point for their performative work. Later, possibilities of detachment and creating contrasts will be developed.

This way we can create works that take the stranger-ness literally and play with cultural differences. Artistic disassociations in broader sense are also welcomed.

The seminar is aimed for performance artists who want to learn further, who are interested in the history and state of performance art, as well as in developing their artistic work through building a strategy. The seminar is also suitable for all less experienced artists who are interested in performance art.

Maren Strack, born in Hamburg, studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich. During her studies, she already began to work in interdisciplinary artistic fields and develop her first performances and installations. She's now actively working in the fields of video art, photography, choreography and performance. 
Among other awards, Maren Strack received the Author's Prize of the Junges Theater Bremen and the special prize for the best German solo dance. She held a scholarship at the Künstlerinnenhof "Die Höge", Bassum (2000), the Akademie Schloss Solitude, Stuttgart (2001) and the Künstlerhaus Lukas, Ahrenshoop (2005). In 2008-2013 she was Guest Professor and Programme Director of the Spatial Strategies study programme at the Kunsthochschule Berlin Weißensee.

Maren Strack’s works and performances:
Pavillon Mies van der Rohe, Barcelona; Goetheinstitut Salvador Bahia, Brasilien; Städelmuseum, Frankfurt;  Stadtgalerie Sofia, Bulgarien; Akademie der Künste, Berlin; Panasonic Center, Tokyo, Japan; Printemps de Septembre, Toulouse; Berliner Festspiele; In Motion, Museum für moderne Kunst, Barcelona; Fondation Cartier pour l´art contemporain, Paris; Vooruit, Genth, Belgien; Haus am Waldsee, Berlin; Goetheinstitut Belgrad; Deutsches Museum, München; Ménagerie de Verre, Paris; Festival Tanz im August, Berlin; Yamaguchi Centre for Media and Arts, Yamaguchi, Japan; Künstlerhaus Mousonturm, Frankfurt; Festival Perspectives, Saarbrücken; Pina Bausch Festival, Essen; BankArt 1929, Yokohama, Japan; In Situ, Marseille; Neuer Berliner Kunstverein, Berlin; Rathausgalerie, München