23/09/2021
Twos, threes (against a misknown idea of protection)
Matty Davis and Ben Gould, Onyeka Igwe
bologna.cc @ Mistral Amsterdam
bcc and mistral are proud to present a performance by US artists Matty Davis and Ben Gould, alongside a film by London-based artist and researcher Onyeka Igwe.
Presented for the first time in the Netherlands, Davis and Gould’s viscerally physical Carriage Bearance Severance tracks a process that began with sharing, reciprocity and endurance, transforming into one that deals with separateness, autonomy, and new forms of radical empathy. Parts of the performance trilogy have been presented separately since 2015 in venues such as Bozar, Carnegie Mellon’s Miller ICA, Palais de Tokyo, Human Resources, the Chicago Cultural Center, a former military battery in San Francisco, a limestone cave network in Kansas City, and aboard a moving vessel on the Chicago River. Davis and Gould bring together this time period saturated by surgery, healing, friendship, and mutual learning, performing in an unbroken sequence beside the Veemkade.
Meticulously constructed, Igwe’s the names have changed, including my own and truths have been altered (2019) narrates and represents a story of the artist’s grandfather, a recent visit to Nigeria, and an account of British colonialism and enslavement. Recurring through the film are two dancing figures (the artist, and her collaborator Titilayo Adebayo) who gaze down the lens, arms pulling and selecting through space and named as a chorus, their image meeting other caption texts. Igwe performs an ongoing criticality to continuous approach and assemblage of an archive, telling it multiply.
The subtitle of the event draws from the narration of Igwe’s film, in which a ring is worn by a visitor on the wedding finger as a talisman against unwanted attention. During travels, the ring migrates to the adjacent middle finger, fitting under the tattoo of the Nsibidi letter O.
October 3 (1645 for 1700, then til 2000)
Carriage Bearance Severance
Matty Davis and Ben Gould
90 mins
The names have changed, including my own and truths have been altered
Onyeka Igwe
October 4-6 (1600-1800)
Film remains on view