COLLABORATION (101)

The exhibition features 10 original drawings and a new performance piece exploring collaboration as an artistic strategy and performance as a means to initiate collective action. COLLABORATION is constructed as a workshop where the audience, through a series of exercises, builds an understanding of collaboration, allowing them, under guidance, to develop a performance based on their own desires and ideas.The performance script Is based on a series of experiments conducted by Falsnaes with his students at the University for Art and Design in Bolzano and was performed for the first time at Andersen's in collaboration with an invited audience.The displayed video serves as reference for future performances, emphasizing the distribution of the performance piece itself, rather than a video work, hereby allowing different audiences in different contexts to collectively engage in this process and develop and perform pieces related to their own situations. Apart from offering a broader audience insight into the process, the idea is for the video documentation, along with the script, to serve as a guide for future performances of the piece. COLLABORATION thus functions as a tool that can initiate discussions about collaboration and community, regardless of where it is performed.The artist further probes collaboration as an artistic strategy ina series of original graphite drawings titled WRITERS UNITED AGAINST THE GREY, all depicting graffiti in Berlin. Based on the idea of graffiti as a collective endeavor, the drawings show the accumulation of tags, throw-ups and pieces in urban public space. The drawings show surfaces where different graffiti writers have added layer after layer of paint, often over years, to create complex large scale collaborations. Over the past two decades, Christian Falsnaes has worked with performance and participation. By implementing group dynamics and rituals, he has examined how a defined group like an art audience can conform to a framework or a set of established rules. In his confrontation with authority, hierarchies, group dynamics and collective compulsion, Falsnaes situates himself outside the group and manipulates its actions. Thus, voluntary participation in a collective process ultimately becomes the participation in a directed energy aimed at provoking certain social behaviors in contexts where it is less at home. In COLLABORATION, Falsnaes is not the sole creator of the work. Instead, he attempts to delegate his authority as an artist to the audience, making room for the emergence of new collective ideas and expressions.