Transformance is a video-event-work that activates and documents a five-month durational performance. Over this period of time, Nina Kurtela establishes a daily practice of visiting and witnessing the changes at the building site of the Uferstudios, Wedding, Berlin – the warehouse for the repair of public trams and buses becomes a dance institution. She is spectator to the making of an institution, an art institution, the making of the theatre stage. The camera acts as a witness to her performing/witnessing. The piece emerges as a case study of an individual subject’s encounter with the radical transformations of social structures and operative models within the performing society. The artist is present at the birth of Berlin’s new contemporary dance centre, an institution that will certainly come to play a part in shaping and organizing the dynamic of the city’s dance community. The work emerges in the force field of a commitment to the daily execution of present-ness in relation to the specific context where this act takes place: the building site of the theatre. What unfolds is a 8-minute work with multi-faceted implications. The body is rendered a statue through the changes of time. The screen becomes the performing skin.

Text by Alex Baczynski Jenkins

About the artist

Nina Kurtela works in the cross-media field of research and production between visual and performing arts. Her practice does not exclude any medium and her conceptual and multidisciplinary approach provides a chance to all means of production. She is interested in re-evaluating different social, economic and political relationships of power, labour and work. While questioning notions of space, place, territory, identity, belonging and home, through her time-based art practice she works with choreographic and site-specific practices.