In cooperation with: University of Music and Theatre “Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy”, Institutes of Theatre Research and Literary Studies at Leipzig University, Fotohof Salzburg, Edison Studio, Goethe Institute Rome and Vienna Poetry Academy.

>>> Participating Artists

>>> Exhibition

>>> Performances

>>> Video Programme

>>> Film

>>> Research

>>> Other Stations

>>> Thanks

>>> Project Website

Framework

Because gestures are neither formulated nor enacted in a void, but instead emerge only within a specific social and cultural fabric, we sought out a spatial framework for our exhibition project which is present within the cityscape as an architectural gesture. We wanted a location which implied gesture, one specialising in the artistic preoccupation with gesture, one in which the representation of human behaviour is achieved by means of gesture. We wanted a location that would burst the boundaries of the fine arts and would include a stage, would involve the utopian search for a “total work of art”, one where a variety of art forms could converge experimentally.

Our choice was Leipzig’s Opera House, which we were able to secure thanks to the open-mindedness of its General Manager and Director of Public Relations.

The square flanked by the Opera House constitutes the present day gate to the city’s inner consumerist core. Through its architectonic corpus, this building – a formerly Neoclassical structure that was substantially destroyed in World War II, demolished in the post‑war period, and re‑erected on the same site by the GDR in the 1950s – mirrors the traces of its history. Reflected in the new building – itself having in the meantime become historic – are the gestures of power politics exploited by the previous government, which eclectically appropriated aspects of classical art, integrating them into its own cultural policies.

Diana Wesser shifted the “stage” to one of the buffet rooms and choreographed a performance dedicated to the excessive and mythic gestures exchanged between worshipful public and stage artist.

Found on the staircases leading to the upper concert foyer were a series of video works which reflected on social and political themes related to migration and gender and in the second story, this field was broadened out: here, gestures related to sports and religion, existential to military gestures and those of human violence. Gender coded communication between people was interrogated for its feminine and masculine connotations; advertising gestures were converted into youthful poses and entered boundary areas where artistic gestures and those of the artist could assert themselves, all the way to demonstrative gestures of power as the contentual closing off of discourse, all of these intended to allude as a whole to the diffusive character of gesture, its connection to and effectiveness in all social fields. With her performative lecture and guided tour through the interior rooms of the Opera House, set amongst of the works of art, Helen Stratford succeeded in conveying research results, intuitive responses, and presentational practice in a way that was both informative and entertaining.

Since the exhibition project as a whole was conceived as a performative spatial event, we also attempted to integrate performances within the exhibition in the form of several parallel events staged by our partners from the research sector. Christina von Braun, for example, delivered a lecture in the concert foyer on the theme of “Das Weib als Klang. Oper, Text und Geschlecht” (Woman As Sound: Opera, Text and Gender), which was part of Barbara Büscher’s event “Gesten des Melodramatischen“ (Gestures of the Melodramatic). In one of the refreshment rooms, a part of the symposium “Verhaltene Beredsamkeit. Politik, Pathos und Politik der Geste“ (Restrained Eloquence: Politics, Pathos and the Politics of Gesture) was organized under the direction of Veronika Darian.