A Conversation with Roos Gortzak, Anik Fournier and Grace Schwindt

In relation to Grace Schwindt’s exhibition ‘In Silence’, we are happy to invite you to join us in a conversation about the living body in an exhibition space with Roos Gortzak, director of Vleeshal; Anik Fournier (If I Cant Dance I Don’t Want To Be Part Of Your Revolution) and Grace Schwindt.

We shall initiate a process of connecting and disconnecting the living body through the genre of performance and theatre within the exhibition context. What are the conventions of looking to sculpture and what is its’ relation to the stillness of the body on a screen or a drawing? Can the body through stillness, for instance, become a sculpture, or will we always relate to the body as a living being?

Through conversation and witnessing Schwindt’s latest performance Remembered Positions (2019), which premiered during the opening of her exhibition at Rozenstraat, we shall aim to answer just a few of these important questions.

Roos Gortzak is the director of De Vleeshal in Middelburg, where in the last few years she made solo exhibitions with performance artists as Cally Spooner, Simone Forti and Paul Maheke. Before starting her directorship at De Vleeshal she worked for CASCO, Kunsthalle Basel and Badischer Kunstverein, among others. Gortzak studied Art History at the University of Amsterdam and gained her MA in Curating Contemporary Art  from the Royal College of Art in London.

Anik Fournier is in charge of the research, archive and publications at If I Can’t Dance, I Don’t Want To Be Part Of Your Revolution. She teaches contemporary art theory at Artez in Arnhem and is also teaching on a regular basis at the School for New Dance Development in Amsterdam. Fournier obtained her doctorate from the Amsterdam School of Cultural Analysis (University of Amsterdam).

Grace Schwindt is an artist whose practice is primarily focused on performance and film. Many of her works explore aspects of historical events with an emphasis on social relations. It is however never obvious where she draws the line between fact and fiction. Schwindt aims to clear institutionalised spaces from meaning and to de-construct narrative structures; while acknowledging that spaces will always stay loaded with given connotations. In the last few years, she has had solo-exhibitions at Badischer Kunstverein and The Showroom among many others.

Photo Credit: Grace Schiwndt, Remembered Positions (2019), Performance installation. Installation view at Rozenstraat- a rose is a rose.