Vika Kirchenbauer, Jules Fischer & Tinne Zenner

Wednesday November 27 Kunsthal Charlottenborg is excited to present Charlottenborg Art Talk with the artist Vika Kirchenbauer, also participating in the current exhibition Art & Porn.

The talk ‘Feeling Difference’ is moderated by Tinne Zenner followed by a conversation with Jules Fischer and questions from the audience. The admission is free and everybody is welcome.

‘Feeling Difference’ – Artist talk by Vika Kirchenbauer
YOU ARE BORING! (14”/2015)
FEELING DIFFERENCE (25”/artist talk)
THE ISLAND OF PERPETUAL TICKLING (excerpt 13”/2018)

YOU ARE BORING! (14”/2015)
YOU ARE BORING! discusses the troublesome nature of “looking” and “being looked at” in larger contexts including labour within the Experience Economy, performer/spectator relations, participatory culture, contemporary art display and queer representational
politics. Vika Kirchenbauer formulates from this web of thoughts a 3D video installation focusing on five performers’ bodies as sites-of-speech removed from any physical context. Through strategies that overload the capacities of affective multitasking and the selfconsuming illusion of total subjectivity, the spectator is personally addressed and promised exactly what they need. The work has been shown in numerous international exhibitions and is included in the collection of Neuer Berliner Kunstverein.

FEELING DIFFERENCE (artist talk)
An important economic shift can be witnessed in Western economies: value, rather than being based on an object’s trade value, is now created through the untradeability of the inherently personal experience. It can be stated that not only in politics and economy, but also in art, affects have become the most promising currency that stakeholders deal in. In her video and performance works, writings and teachings she has previously discussed
spectatorship and representation of the othered in relation to the Experience Economy and museum spaces’ increasing focus on the visitor’s engagement and immersion. In this artist talk she will expand that notion and depart towards a relational understanding of the act of looking whilst complicating some pre-conceptions about empathy and compassion. Particularly when considering the relational dynamics of encounters with art produced from a minoritised position: what difficulties arise around notions of “understanding” and how are empathy and compassion – emotions of profound historic entanglements with the arts – involved in shaping a centralised constitution of the world as such?

THE ISLAND OF PERPETUAL TICKLING (excerpt, 13”/2018)
This excerpt from Vika Kirchenbauer’s video installation is based on a performance of the same title that took place at District Berlin in March 2018. Having grown up not just with sports but very much within them, the artist gained understanding of arenas and stadiums to be disorienting places where people (mostly straight men) find access to and outlets for emotions they struggle to encounter or express in regular life. Similarly in art spaces she observes audiences find access to otherwise covered emotions triggered by looking at something foreign, accessing parts of themselves without having to live (or be able to live) the totality of that other “experience”. The audience spectacle of a tickling performance was the artist’s attempt at creating a situation of crossover art/sports spectatorship where the affective responses caused by minority art (assuming most “minority art” to consist of some degree of more or less abstracted or reenacted trauma) get intensified and displayed in a more open and legible way. There is shock, there is laughter, there is identification, there is disidentification, there is joy, there is feeling bored and there is wanting it to be over.