Collective Mourning and Planetary Mourning. Unending love, or love dies, on repeat like it's endless

Alex Baczyński-Jenkins

Saturday, 12, and Sunday, 13 November 2022 - Check times
Admission

Free, until full capacity is reached, with prior ticket collection at the Museo’s Ticket Offices or on the Museo Reina Sofía website from 10am on the last working day before the activity. A maximum of 2 per person. Doors open thirty minutes before the activity. Punctuality is required given that entry will not be allowed once the activity is under way.

Place
Sabatini Building, Floor 1, Room 102
Capacity
80 people
Duration

Saturday, 12 November 2022 – 7pm; Sunday, 13 November 2022 – 12pm

Curator
Isabel de Naverán (ARTEA)
Organised by
Museo Reina Sofía
Collaboration
The Community of Madrid’s Autumn Festival
Inside the framework of
Tiz 5. Phantasmata and TIZ 6. Planet A: Green World
Alex Baczyński-Jenkins, Unending love, or love dies, on repeat like it’s endless, 2021. Photograph: Diana Pfammatter. Courtesy of the artist
Alex Baczyński-Jenkins, Unending love, or love dies, on repeat like it’s endless, 2021. Photograph: Diana Pfammatter. Courtesy of the artist

Collective Mourning and Planetary Mourning’s live arts programme is held in conjunction with the Community of Madrid’s 40th Autumn Festival and features the screening of the stage piece MONUMENT 0.6: Heterochrony, by Eszter Salamon, and the performance of Alex Baczyński-Jenkins’s dance piece Unending love, or love dies, on repeat like it’s endless. The project occasions experimentation with a sensitive approach to choreographic pieces and other physical practices which contend with different states of transit between life and death: the multiple and complex forms of mutual care; support for different states of mind stemming from loss; the invention of our own corporal or symbolic ritualisms which, upon being shared, resignify and establish new relational forms with life; and, finally, mourning as a state for perception and listening. 

Unending love or love dies, on repeat like it's endless is a choreography which explores relationships between desire, dance, fragmentation, love (understood as communality), mourning and time. Through the gesture, sensuality, relationality and touch, Baczyński-Jenkins’s practice unfurls structures and politics of desire, including a study of the relations between feeling and sociability, embodied expression and alienation, textures of daily experiences, and latent queer utopian legacies.

Alex Baczyński-Jenkins is a choreographer whose work flows beyond dance as an artistic discipline upon addressing it as an area of knowledge and the production of social meaning. In his artistic and activist practice, dance functions as a place to test out forms of mutual support and to cross through the gestures and behaviours that determine relationships on a small and large scale. Each of Baczyński-Jenkins’s choreographed works is a physical, affective and intellectual experience with a unique sensibility which adds complexity to spatial relations with the space where it unfolds: in this instance, in the Sabatini Building’s Room 102, which houses the work of Richard Serra.

The space is not simply the room’s architecture, but also the intervened light from the windows or the vibration of sound produced and mixed live by Krzysztof Bagiński, working as a kind of membrane upon which perceptions and receptions, the opening and closing of meaning, are negotiated.

Within the context of Collective Mourning and Planetary Mourning, this work by Alex Baczyński-Jenkins calls upon the concurrence of human affliction evidenced by the losses in the recent pandemic. It is also an observation of environmental collapse and the ensuing desire to intervene from an awareness reflected in fragile compositions of choreographed gestures.

Alex Baczyński-Jenkins is an artist and choreographer whose work involves relationality, corporality and affection generated in queerness. Some of his exhibitions have been carried out in spaces like Chisenhale Gallery, London (2017), Foksal Gallery Foundation, Warsaw (2018), and Kunsthalle Basel, Switzerland (2019).

He has also presented his work in institutions such as Swiss Institute, New York (2016), Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw (2017), Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (2019), and events that include the 58th edition of the Biennale di Venezia (2019), Riga International Biennial of Contemporary Art, (2020), and the Future Generation Art Prize, Pinchuk Foundation, Kiev (2021). Furthermore, Baczyński-Jenkins is the co-founder of the feminist, queer and activist collective Kem, which focuses on choreography, performance and sound in interference with social practices.

Financiado por la Unión Europea

Credits

Choreography:
Alex Baczyński-Jenkins
Performed in different constellations with the collaboration of:
Agata Grabowska, Arad Inbar, Beverly D. Renekouzou and Thomias Radin
Museo Reina Sofía constellation:
Arad Inbar, Beverly D. Renekouzou and Thomias Radin
Sound design and artistic support:
Krzysztof Bagiński
Sound contributions:
Zoi Michailova
Lighting design:
Jacqueline Sobiszewski
Dramaturgy:
Andrea Rodrigo
Poem:
Ezra Green
Studio assistant:
Sarie Nijboer
Curator and support:
Andrea Rodrigo
Executive production:
Holly Shuttleworth
2022 co-production tour:
: De Singel, Antwerp; Arsenic – Centre d'art scénique contemporain, Lausana; Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma, Helsinki; ANTI – Contemporary Art Festival, Kuopio; Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Copenhagen; Kunstverein Düsseldorf and Neuer Aachener Kunstverein, Aachen; Klosterruine Berlin and Disappearing Berlin – Schinkel Pavillon, Berlin; Museo Reina Sofía and the Autumn Festival, Madrid.
Acknowledgements:
Dareen Abbas and Thibault Lac
Developed with the generous contribution of the residency at Callie’s, Berlin, with the support of NATIONALES PERFORMANCE NETZ (NPN) – Co-production Fund for Dance, founded by the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media.