Elbow Room
Elbow Room, PE VII: Weak Links of a Strong Chain (pt. 1)
Nicholas Grafia and Mikołaj Sobczak
Friday, July 17, 2020
Weak Links of a Strong Chain by Nicholas Grafia and Mikołaj Sobczak is a new video essay series, commissioned by Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen Düsseldorf. Subsequently published on the institution’s instagram channel and website, the different performative video chapters allow for various insights into the latest registers of conceptual personae, narrative vehicles and metaphors, which inform the artists’ practices. The non-linear dialogue style and spoken word narration within the episodes is repeatedly disrupted by visual material, that Grafia and Sobczak have collected since February this year. Among other subjects, the footage contains audiovisual notes, performance script fragments, as well as reconstructions of public and private conversations. It is within this multiperspective style that personal and social observations are negotiated by the artists in those episodes; putting them into historical and cultural perspective. Various key elements introduced in the new video series will find their way into a new performance and installation planned by Nicholas Grafia and Mikołaj Sobczak for later in this year. (Nicholas Grafia / Mikołaj Sobczak)
PE VII: Weak Links of a Strong Chain is the third in a series of intermittent online events, which started during the closure of the Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen, Düsseldorf due to COVID-19 in March 2020. The focus of this series is the examination, appropriation and a joint negotiation of digital spaces of production – along their technological and spatial limitations, along repetitions and deceleration processes, and against the background of the current state of emergency, of masking, quarantine and self-isolation. Subsequent to the Instagram live performances PE V: NYC Makeup and Wakeup # 1-3 by David Mramor, the reading sessions PE VI: YGRG 166-168 by Dorota Gawęda and Eglė Kulbokaitė, Mi You´s reading list or a new video by Lena Willikens & Sarah Szczesny, artists such as Caner Teker, poet and philosopher Daniel Falb, and bookseller Siddhartha Lokanandi have been invited to elaborate new productions for our virtual Elbow Room editions, to provide insights into research projects, or to develop contributions in relation to the Kunstverein’s archive, and its newly programmed, recently published website. Information on further activities, future participants, dates and venues will follow shortly.