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 They interrogate outdated ideas about knowledge that are encapsulated in places of exhibiting significance and value, but also introduce a playful entry to moments of engagement that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.