Vrijdagavonden: Anna Schlooz: Tafelen / Maagmoeder

• The bar is open from 19:00
• Program starts at 20:00
• Entrance: Pay What You Can
• Language: Dutch

The nuclear family is the family as we know it: father, mother and one or more children. This family is good for the growth of today's economy, contributing to capitalism and patriarchy. Anna Schlooz is curious about other forms of family formation and care. Inspired by maintenance art and experiences in both the queer community and youth care, she explores other forms of care with and for each other.

Because this is a long-term project, it also takes different forms each time. Before the summer, the research culminated in Tafelen, a performance dinner where stories, rituals and pancakes are shared. After summer 2023, there was a need for personal and theatrical research. From a working period at The Forest, the performance Stomach Mother thus emerged. A physical and textual exploration of the functions and feelings of the stomach and uterus, and how we care for them.

Anna Schlooz (she/her, 1997) is an artist and theatre maker living and working in Ghent. She graduated as a theatre teacher in the Netherlands and also completed bachelor and master Performance Art in Ghent.

Her work consists mainly of multimedia performances and participatory projects that play with the role of the spectator. In her work, she explores ways of being together, thinking together and caring for each other. As a queer person, she always invites the audience, the people she works with and herself to rethink our norms and structures. What if we stopped taking everything for granted and started our utopia now?

She often starts from the personal and looks for (abstract) translations of queerness and intersectional feminism. She does this by shaping moments located between performances, social encounters and philosophical gatherings. In creating these moments, she prefers to collaborate with people outside the art world. So far, this has resulted in projects such as developing a performative board game about the future together with elderly people, and organising a performance dinner in which guests are invited to reflect on our family structures and the way we care for each other.

With her projects, she wants to entice you to look at our world with a curious eye. This is therefore what is at the forefront of all her work: being, and staying, curious about everything around us.

Website: https://annaschlooz.hotglue.me

Supported by: the coalition of care - partners Monty, wp zimmer, Beursschouwburg, Workspace Brussels, Buda, Kunsthal Gent

This autumn, we will present a programme around one or more artists, a collective or organisation for 10 weeks during the Friday Evenings. We offer local partners a platform. And we put artists with whom Kunsthal Gent currently collaborates in the spotlight. Every Friday evening is different: from performance, artist talk and book presentation to conversation, dinner or film screening.