Rhythm is a dancer
Christina Werner

// Exhibition + Performance
26 Oct 2023 – 1 Apr 2024
Bauhaus Museum Dessau,
Spatial Stage and public space

A new, site-specific edition of the multi-phase work The Street: In Step with the Labour Force, which Werner realised in 2020, is being planned for Dessau. In it, Werner connects research into workers’ movements in Dessau and the Anhalt region with an interest in contemporary protest movements (Fridays for Future, Black Lives Matter). At the forefront of the artistic intention in both cases are collective ways of bringing political issues into the public sphere.

Werner refers to the so-called workers’ choruses, in which dancers or semi-professional amateurs performed in urban spaces in the spirit of an organised choral mass in order to bring visibility to their cause. Bodies and gestures were deployed as visible political signs of solidarity and resistance. Together with various actors, historic and contemporary poses and gestures evolve into a new collective photo-performance series. Through photographs, performance, video, and set pieces of political agitation, Werner recalls the social spirit of optimism of the 1920s and brings it back into the collective memory by way of physical re-enactment. In this way, the urban space, the performers, and the history of an emancipatory movement intermesh with the present day.

In cooperation with Bewegungskombinat and the Multikulturelles Zentrum Dessau e.V.