Transformance (2012)

Transformance is a video-event-work that activates and documents a five-month performance. Over this period of time, Nina Kurtela establishes a daily practice of visiting and witnessing the changes at the building site of the Uferstudios, Wedding, Berlin - the warehouse for the repair of public trams and buses becomes a dance institution. She is spectator to the making of an institution, an art institution, the making of the theater stage. The camera acts as a witness to her performing/witnessing. The piece emerges as a case study of an individual subject's encounter with the radical transformations of social structures and operative models within the performing society. The artist is present at the birth of Berlin's new contemporary dance center, an institution that will certainly come to play a part in shaping and organizing the dynamic of the city's dance community. The work emerges in the force field of a commitment to the daily execution of presentness in relation to the specific context where this act takes place: the building site of the theater. What unfolds is a 8-minute work with multi-faceted implications. The body is rendered a statue through the changes of time. The screen becomes the performing skin.