La Durée workshop at the Nobel Museum

On March 17, Per Hüttner and Fatos Üstek held a talk and a workshop with the staff and educators at the Nobel Museum in Stockholm to prepare for the project they will present in 2014. In the internal memo to the museum they write

"The project that we bring to the Nobel museum is an attempt to relate slightly differently to the institution. We investigate where it is possible to slightly shift how people think about the museum and how the audiences interact with what is on display. We do so with the hope of making the daily working process a little bit more interesting for you, the audience and us. We try to bring out the innate curiosity that lives in all of us and at the same time re-activate the knowledge produced by eight laureates. In order to do this we are dependent on a series of dialogues and exchanges:

We are relatively ignorant about your audience therefore dependent on your expertise as educators and also to tap into your experiences and knowledge in mediating what you know about the museum and the laureates. The workshop will be an opportunity both talk about these questions and also to discuss the 7 briefcases that will play the central role in the project – so that we together can agree on how to create the briefcases in the best of ways."
 

Something there

Spiral, Wacoal Art Centre, June 25, 2013 – Fatos Ustek and Per Huttner
The performance was a part of Godzilla and the Phoenix, the 11th OuUnPo session in Tokyo and Yokohama.

Taking the starting point in Nobel Laureate, Samuel Beckett’s 1974 poem entitled "Something There", Ustek and Huttner together with 13 members of the Japanese audience carried out a sonar/mathematical investigation. Together they explored the potentiality of the poem by an activating it in space and time. The performance took place in the service staircase of the art centre where an Araki piece formed an important backdrop for the performance. The photographic installation in itself is a reflection on experience versus image (inside outside) and his relation to the other (subject/object), offered a perfect setting for the experiment.

Getting Ready for Japan - Something there

 -We are currently preparing two performances in Japan.


Project for OuUnPo Japan, Yokohama, 4-5pm, June 23, 2013 – Fatos Ustek and Per Huttner.
Background
Taking the starting point in Nobel Laureate, Samuel Beckett’s 1974 poem with the same title, Ustek and Huttner will be investigating how a poem is the opposite of stability and stasis and how it is informed by the outside world. The poem will be  recreated in three dimensions and focus on the senses beyond vision.

The performance is public and will be performed in the public space of Yokohama harbour. The poem will be divided into 28 different parts. Some of these will be presented in words, others by objects, smells, tastes and sounds.

La Durée Wins Grant to Develop Project in Stockholm

Vision Forum is proud to announce that Per Hüttner has won a grant from Längmanska kulturfonden to develop his collaboration with Fatos Üstek en Onur Gün in Stockholm. The project is planned to be shown to the public in summer 2014. Please follow it on this blog.

Preperatory Meetings in Berlin and Stockholm

In January 2013, the La Durée group are preparing for the upcoming project about the Nobel Prize in Mathematics. We met with Onur Gun, who is researching Interacting Random Systems at Weierstrass Institute in Berlin and came up with lots of exciting and interesting ideas. We will also meet our future partners in Stockholm at the end of the month. So, keep your eyes on this site - we will shortly post more and exciting news.

Time Machine at La Meridienne, the Observatory, Besançon, April 19, 2012

For the performance at the Observatory in Besançon groups of 12 people were guided on a journey from the present to the 19th century via a set of different trips that provoked reflection on time and temporality.

1. The journey started at the contemporary part of the observatory. Here the audience met the institute’s director François Vernotte who introduced the atomic clocks that allow them to measure time in the most precise way currently available.













2. The audience then moved into the garden where Per briefly introduced the project. After that we together walked to the ancient director’s villa, which is a beautiful 19th century building that has been disused for a long time. The was informed that the would embark on a journey to the 19th century. At that time, like today, Besançon was world-leading in time measuring. But at that time it was the stars that allowed them to measure time with the greatest of exactitude. In order to use the old time keeping machine it was very important to be able to count the passing seconds with great exactitude.

Her Sad Pardone - Miramar, Porto

Her Sad Pardone was performed by Per Hüttner and Fatos Üstek at Senhor da Pedra , chapel of the lord of stone at Miramar outside of Porto April 8, 2012.

1. The two performers met the audience in front of the chapel on the beach. The audience was given a short introduction about contemplation by Per who also asked them: what does it mean to contemplate the horizon, the size of the ocean and what is the difference between thinking and contemplating?

2. The two performers gave each member of the audience a piece of paper and a pen and asked them to describe the ideal space for contemplation by writing it on the piece of paper. What it looks like, what it smells like, what you can hear in it and what it contains. When they were finished they were asked to fold the paper in a special way and then give it to a selected member of the audience.

The distance to the Past

An early evening in Eleusina, at a site that has been used for rituals for thousands of years, by the sea, in front of an ethnographic museum, Per Huttner and Fatos Ustek conducted a survey how to measure the distance to the past. They both wore lab coats and started the short action by facing each other.

Nobelelmuseet in preparation

We have started preparing the first steps towards a presentation at Nobelelmuseet in Stockholm and hope to be able to do something in winter 2012.

A Clock That Runs on Mud

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Follow Fatos Ustek and Per Hüttner on A Clock That Runs on Mud - for the next five weeks!
curated by Jennifer Teets

click here

Everything Changes, Everywhere and All the Time (it always has and always will)

Space Matters, curated by Jean Matthee

April 2011 Tate Modern.
Per Hüttner and Fatos Üstek have been collaborating on a series of interventions at museums across Europe exploring notions of change, and temporality and how smell, taste, touch and sounds can play a more active role in the museum.


Posing questions by constructing situations Hüttner and Üstek trigger expansion of how we encounter reality. They interrogate outdated ideas about knowledge that are encapsulated in places of exhibiting significance and value, but also introduce a playful entry to moments of engagement that question basic Cartesian concepts. Our conception of familiar spaces will therefor change through minute changes in the conditions for something as mundane as a gallery tour.
Hüttner and Üstek will guide a group of students around the museum and revisit a series of artworks. The premise of the visit is to try and ‘refresh’ the work and to see how the artwork allowed their original audiences’ to see their reality differently. Hüttner will use smell, touch, hearing and taste to re-introduce seminal work to the group. Üstek will re-contextualize the work on display by look at the temporality of the work.

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Tesla Museum

Situation/Intervention

Realised at Nikola Tesla Museum, Belgrade

26 March, 2011

Per Hüttner and Fatos Üstek realizes a situation specific to Ouunpo group and the unexpected passer-bys at Tesla Museum, investigating beyond the visual, other sensory receptions and speculating on Nikola Tesla’s intriguing scientific and personal endeavours.

(Photos by Elena Nemkova)

Blago Bung - New York City 2010

Per Hüttner and Fatos Üstek performed at Blago Bung 5, Emily Harvey Foundation, New York City, October 23, 2010.

0K – A Play in Five Acts

This text was the first of three connected texts published in Nowiswere 7, 8 and 9. You can download your own copy here.

 

On Sunday May 16, 2010, artist Per Huttner and critic and curator Fatos Ustek presented a project that oscillated between a traditional talk and a performance at the Flat Time House, Peckham, London. The location is the former residence of conceptual artist John Latham, who has devised the idea of flat-time based on the theoretical physics of Event Structure. The house functions as an archive and research centre and hosts exhibitions and events.

Ustek and Huttner have been investigating the conditions of knowledge in non-ordinary realities, taking ab- solute boundaries of time, space and temperature into account. The play merged into investigations of notions such as travel, movement, time, volume while imagining zero Kelvin (absolute zero) as a point of reference and referring it back to their respective creative practices. This text, carrying the same title as the event, is an out- come of the discussions the two have undertaken over a year on theorems of abstract mathematics, quantum mechanics, subjectivity, temporality, timelessness and knowledge.
This piece is the first of a three-part contribution, and is composed at 122K. In October Huttner and Üstek will take a trip to Minnesota, U.S., to visit Robert Ettinger, the father of cryogenics and founder of Cryogenics Institute, Michigan. This trip will form the core of the two following ‘cold’ texts.

Act 1 -At the Flat-Time House 2
The door everyone has been staring at with anticipation opens and a small hurricane of cold air hits the audience. Two figures in space suits covered by layers of strange ice crystals enter. The high-tech space suits emit strange white smoke and as the two figures move, tiny chips of ice come off their suits and burn small holes in the carpet with a low ‘pffissching’ noise. Everyone in the audience is so still that you can reach out and poke at the silence. The strange astronauts take off their helmets revealing the head of a man and a woman. They both look tired. But more than anything, they smile with great satisfaction and joy. The room is filled with applause and they hug.