Grace Schwindt:
Your Movement
For the exhibition Your Movement Grace Schwindt worked together with several female participants to create a Movement and Sound Archive, based on shared memories of significant or traumatic events around migration. Instead of using words, the body served as a mediator for sharing these memories, using movements and sounds. Collaborating with filmmaker Sahar Khosravi, the resulting movements were performed for the camera. The medium of film invites the viewer to be close to the movement and to the person making it and is intended to be an intimate and equal encounter with a body on the screen.
From the open call for female participants: “With this project I want to propose and insist on the necessity for direct touch between individuals, a touch that invites closeness without the need to explain oneself and to allow being affected by each other. (…)”
During the workshops, Grace Schwindt and the participants shared experiences through movement exercises that are based on different movement therapy techniques. In the next step, they "translated" the shared movement into a sort of alphabet or a "movement archive", developing a specific formula for this translation that can be applied to any shared movement. This alphabet can be used as a material to write a musical score or a movement choreography, becoming a source material from which new "sentences" can be formed.
In response to the movement workshops, Schwindt also created several sculptures in ceramics and bronze. The sculptures pick up movements and body positions that were shared during the workshops, but also developed from Schwindt’s own emotional response to the workshops and include recurring elements from her sculptural work.
The exhibition is closely intertwined with Schwindts current long term project researching trauma, memory and movement, for which she collaborates with institutions in the UK (Performing Community Engagement at Kingston University in London), Belgium (Kunsthal Gent), Cyprus (The Chamber of Fine Arts - E.KA.TE.), Spain (Goethe Institut Madrid) and New York (Hessian Cultural Foundation & Leo Baeck Institute) and others.
Your Movement – Grace Schwindt
27 May – 28 August 2022
Kunsthal Gent, Pavillion KHG#03
Opening: 27 May 2022, 20.00 (doors: 19.30)
20.00 Video performance in cinema, with conversation afterwards
Video performance, 20 minutes
Participants: Hanan, Anna, Eleni
Video: Sahar Khosravi
Sculptures in bronze and ceramics
With the assistance of Sara De Groeve (bronze foundry De Groeve, Merelbeke), Neeltje van der Vlugt, Hannah Hoebeke, Charlotte Daniëlse, Veerle Van Nuffelen
Your Movement is the result of a work period in the Development Programme of Kunsthal Gent. With the assistance of interns Justine McKenna and Marianne Schapmans and the support of the Kunsthal Gent team
Grace Schwindt (b. 1979, Germany) works with film, live performance, sculpture and drawing. Through her work she unfolds visual narratives exploring the effects of capitalist culture upon the body and psyche of the individual. She analyses the role that bodies, language and objects play in the construction of history and memory. Her process often originates from specific research and conversations with a wide range of people including activists, artists, musicians, politicians, refugees or her own family members. Many of her works examine aspects of historical events with an emphasis on social relations. The different media employed are connected and intertwined, shapes from costumes reappear in drawings while sculptures echo performative gestures.
Schwindt's works have been presented in museums and galleries as well as in theatres and other performance contexts. Solo exhibitions include Five Surfaces All White at the Centre for Contemporary Arts in Glasgow and In Silence at Rozenstraat - a rose is a rose is a rose in Amsterdam in 2019, Silent Dance at Zeno X Gallery in Antwerp in 2018, Tiffany Vase at Rose Lejeune Gallery in London in 2017. Live performances have been presented at Volksbühne in Berlin and Kunstmuseum in St. Gallen in 2019, David Robert Arts Foundation in London and Frascati Theatre in Amsterdam in 2018, Kaaitheatre in Brussels in 2017, Royal Academy of Arts as part of Block Universe Performance Festival in London in 2016, Museum M in Leuven in 2013 and South London Gallery in London in 2011. Recent group exhibitions include Breaking the Mould -- Sculpture by Women since 1945, Arts Council Collection touring exhibition, Refugees: Forced to Flee at the Imperial War Museum in London in 2020-2021.
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Grace Schwindt:
Your Movement
