Upfront was conceived for the season opening of Kaserne Glôbale in September 2019 and took place at the Rank Art Space, courtesy of the Ausstellungsraum Klingental.
Rather than adding another production to an all-ready jam packed festival programme, Upfront offered time in an intimate setting to learn a little more about some of the already invited artists and their practice. The artists were invited to use Rank as a temporary studio space to share aspects and sketches of their work and their work methods – not in form of an artist talk but rather in performative, playful, experimental and ephemeral ways.
Line Up
Salma Said (Cairo)
In her lecture performance, Salma Said takes us on a journey through a living archive of resistance, the 858 archive: 858 hours of indexed and time-stamped videos, photographs and documents, shot and collected during the Egyptian revolution since 2011.
Boyzie Cekwana & Danya Hammoud (Johannesburg/ Beirut)
Dancers and choreographers, Boyzie Cekwana and Danya Hammoud recap – without words, through movement and sound – the stations, the sources and the questions that led to their initial collaboration and which has since become their piece ‘bootlegged’.
Stacy Hardy, Laila Soliman, Nancy Mounir and Neo Muyanga (Cape Town/ Cairo)
Jolie Ngemi (Aclens/ Kinshasa)
As a dancer and choreographer, Jolie Ngemi constantly searches for “proximité”, where the boundaries between artists and audience are broken down. In the confined space of Rank, without the usual stage, she is testing a close-up interactive performance against the backdrop of a video installation.
Miriam Coretta Schulte (Basel/ Frankfurt) and Engy Aly (Cairo)
“The longer you look at a word, the stranger it looks back at you” (Karl Krauss). Graphic designer Engy Aly and theater director Miriam Coretta Schulte met in Cairo. In Basel they host a conversation, in the misty dark, on learning ‘right’ ways of writing the fruitful differences between Arabic and German. They also celebrate renaissance of the laser pointer.