PS/Y’s Hysteria programme and LUX hosts an outdoor celebration of autumn equinox led by Danish artist Marie Kølbæk Iversen and accompanied by Diana Policarpo. The evening will be centred around the performance of magical songs inherited by the artist from her great-great-great-great-grandparents, who in 1873 were the ethnographic subjects of folklore collector Evald Tang Christensen. The songs relate to the Southern Scandinavian shamanist culture Sejd and springs from a very different cultural source than the Protestant Christian time of their collection: They are largely (and in places explicitly) feminist, apocalyptic, anti-Christian, anti-nationalist and anti-Danish.
In the Northern hemisphere autumn equinox marks the threshold into winter darkness – and symbolically into the dreams of an extended night. It therefore celebrates the power of dreaming to unsettle the fabric of reality by rendering weird—Wyrd—and contingent, the waking life of our troubled modernity.
Marie Kølbæk Iversen’s Autumn equinox celebration is part of PS/Y’s Hysteria – a combined arts programme that explores health and illness in contemporary society, focusing on issues of gender, race and cultural identity. Hysteria is curated by Mette Kjærgaard Præst and takes place in partnership with organisations and institutions across London from August 2017 until April 2018.
Marie Kølbæk Iversen, b. Herning, Denmark, 1981. Lives and works in Copenhagen. Emphasizing the presence of technology and the concreteness of feedback loops, the performances and installations of Marie Kølbæk Iversen challenge representational powers of mediation by reducing it to those material properties through which it is in excess of itself: patterns, waves, vibrations, flows. Media are thus conceived as a multiplicity of forces and intermediaries that are staged and traced through the effects and affects they elicit across human, machinic, and geological bodies, and which massage and shape subjectivity through their interaction with emergent realities; a virtuality that is inseparably bound up with the real without resembling it. Studies: Visual Artist MFA from the Department of Time-Based Media at Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, Copenhagen, DK, 2008. As of October 2017 artistic PhD scholar at the Oslo National Academy of Fine Art, Norway, and Aarhus University, Denmark, with the project “Neo-worlds: the transformative potentialities of fright.” Recent exhibitions: “Io/I” and Matrilineal Collapse, PARMER, New York (2017); The Eight Climate (What Does Art Do?), The 11th Gwangju Biennial, Gwangju, (2016); Spin and the Wolf, Overgaden, Copenhagen (2016); Transformer (solo), Brandts, Odense, Denmark (2015); Mirror Therapy (solo), Fotografisk Center, Copenhagen, (2015); BIM, Centre d’Art Contemporain, Geneva, Switzerland, and MONA, Hobart, Australia, (2014-15); Consciousness, ARTEFACT ‘14, STUK Kunstencentrum, Leuven (2014); Dexter Bang Sinister, Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Copenhagen (2012); Execution – into decapital (solo), IMO, Copenhagen (2012)
Diana Policarpo, b. Lisbon, Portugal, 1986. Lives and works between London and Lisbon. Diana Policarpo is a visual artist and free composer working in drawing, score, sculpture, performance and multi-channel sound installation. She graduated from Goldsmiths College with a MFA in Fine Art in 2013. Her work investigates power relations, popular culture and gender politics, juxtaposing the rhythmic structuring of sound as a tactile material within the social construction of esoteric ideology. She creates performances and installations to examine experiences of vulnerability and empowerment associated with acts of exposing oneself to the capitalist world. Policarpo has recently made live performances with Scratch Orchestra, Hákarl, Áine O’Dwyer, AAS, Cabiria, Erinyes and The Orchestra of Futuristic Noise Intoners. Recent solo exhibitions include lAB Artists Unlimited, Bielefeld (2016); Xero, Kline and Coma, London (2015); Kunsthalle Baden-Baden, Baden-Baden (2014); and Kunstverein Leipzig, Leipzig (Upcoming). Recent group exhibitions include: Guest Projects, London (2017); Francisco Fino Gallery, Lisbon (2017); Mars Gallery, Melbourne (2017); North Gallery, New Castle (2016); Peninsula Gallery, NYC (2015); W139, Amsterdam (2015); Shaun Fenster, Berlin (2014). Policarpo has presented performances and readings at Tenderpixel Gallery, London (2017), Cafe OTO, London (2017), Pump House Gallery, London (2016) and Institute of Contemporary Art, London (2015).
PS/Y is a research, curating and public engagement group exploring the interface of arts and health sciences. PS/Y develops interdisciplinary projects and dialogue with artists, scientists, arts organisations, academic institutions and communities. PS/Y aims to create new creative insights to engage diverse audiences for an interdisciplinary arts practice that explores the relationship between mind and body in Western culture. PS/Y has previously been involved in delivering Anxiety, London, 2014 and Acting Out, Nottingham, 2015 in partnership with institutions including Barbican, BFI, National Portrait Gallery, ICA, Freud Museum, Gasworks, South London Gallery, Nottingham Contemporary, University of the Arts, Kings College, and Wigmore Hall. For further information visit ps-y.org
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