Installation #24 - Murat Adash - Similitudes – A Duett
Installation #24 - 19 November 2018
Similitudes – A Duett is an exercise in proximity and distance. Performed as part of the ongoing Installation Series, the choreography occurs as an experiment amongst a dancer and her setting, set against a rhythmic light alternating between lightness and darkness. Through a game-like structure, the dancer invents rules and systems, both choreographed and contingent, predictable and unpredictable, as ways to measure the shared space – calling into question the boundaries of the self. The movement unfolds in a constellatory flash – a sudden, ephemeral coming-to-appearance – testing out the process of mirroring and the capacity to assimilate to see how similarities crop up and disappear. Extending movements both out of and back into the body, the dancer measures relationships of alternation, overlap and unison through the threshold of darkness. The immersive hold of darkness, which blurs the boundaries of the bodies in space, evokes a dialectics of seeing, in which subjects become fused for a brief moment, like in a flash. As the rhythmic cycle is repeated, awareness expands. Through organizing and accumulating recognizable structures and shapes, the dancer channels gestures and geometries of resemblance, correspondence, similarity and difference to illuminate a situation.
The performance-based work of German-Turkish artist Murat Adash operates across expanded fields of choreographic inquiry with an architectural concern. Through the medium of movement, he creates choreographies in a range of media that seek to investigate relations and frictions between corporality and spatiality. Assemblages of bodies intervene in both live and mediated situations, both given as well as constructed, to probe how space is occupied, shared and transformed – calling into question the nature of physical boundaries, processes of assimilation and the formation of embodied subjectivities. By proposing organizing structures on how to move in space through task- and rule-based game systems, his choreographies invoke the extension of a ritual: as impetus towards the animation of bodies in space.
Recent exhibitions and performances include: Royal College of Art, London, 2019; Barbican, London, 2018; Delfina Foundation, London, 2018; Tanzfabrik – Centre for Contemporary Dance, Berlin, 2018; SALT, Istanbul, 2017; The Hangar, Beirut, 2017; Manifesta 11, Zurich, 2016; Art On Istanbul, Istanbul, 2016; Alt Art Space, Istanbul, 2016; Julius Caesar Gallery, Chicago, 2015; EXPO Chicago, 2014; Iceberg Projects, Chicago, 2013; Grimmuseum, Berlin, 2013; Motorenhalle, Dresden, 2013; Kriti Gallery, Varanasi, 2013. He has recently participated in residency programs at Delfina Foundation (London), Utopiana (Geneva), Mountain School of Arts (Los Angeles) and conducted research on social choreography during a one-year studio grant in Istanbul supported by the Hessische Kulturstiftung (Wiesbaden, Germany). Adash holds an MFA in Visual Arts from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.