Multi-disciplinary artists Eva Meyer-Keller and Ilya Noé started their shared dialogue in summer 2018, and since then have been slowly and consistently interweaving their practices and storylines with pointed intensity, intent and intimacy. In their lecture performance, which draws its title from a quote by Donna Haraway paraphrasing Lynn Margulis about how new life comes into being, Eva and Ilya will reflect on their present shared research located along the blurry boundary between scientific and artistic knowledge production. In addition, they will put a selection of their past works on stage and in conversation with each other as an attempt to share with the audience the unexpected effects and affects of their co-laborings, and to allow for new (re)readings, (re)phrasings, and symbiotic connections to continue to emerge.
Biographies
Eva Meyer-Keller works at the interface of performance and visual art. Before graduating from the School for New Dance Development (SNDO) in Amsterdam she studied photography and visual art in Berlin (HdK) and London (Central St. Martins and Kings College). Her artwork is distinctive due to its meticulous attention to detail. Eva often uses everyday objects from her immediate surroundings, things that she finds at home, in the supermarket or in the tool shed. This inevitably lends the work an obsessive, domestic aesthetic. Her working method is marked by a constructive disregard for the imposition of any boundary between visual and performing arts. Her works include the performances DEATH IS CERTAIN (from 2002 and performed in more than 200 venues around the world since), PULLING STRINGS (KunstenFestivaldesArts, Brussels, 2013), the installations VOLKSBALLONS (2004 Palast der Republik, 2013 Centre Pompidou-Metz) und HANDMADE (NGBK Berlin, Bonniers Konsthall Stockholm, Palais de Tokyo Paris). Currently she is working on a trilogy of performance works in dialogue with natural scientists focusing on how models do not just describe reality, but rather they create their own. The first part titled SOME SIGNIFICANCE premiered in November 2017, while LIVING MATTERS, the second part, will open in November 2019 in Pact Zollverein in Essen. Eva develops projects alone and in collaboration with other artists, such as Uta Eisenreich, Sybille Müller Kate McIntosh and Ilya Noé. She also lends herself as a devisor and performer to other choreographers and works as a dramaturgical advisor/mentor. She has worked with Baktruppen, Jérôme Bel, Christine De Smedt/ les Ballets C de la B (9x9), Juan Dominguez and Agnes Meyer-Brandis. Since 2010 she has ongoing teaching positions at several degree programs across Europe amongst others at the HZT/UdK and Bard College in Berlin, DOCH and the MA course 'The Autonomous Actor' in Stockholm, ZHdk in Zürich and the University of Hildesheim.
Ilya Noé is a former gymnast turned visual/performance artist-researcher, eager collaborator, sporadic curator, compulsive walker, and fan of deer, trees, fungi, foxes, interspecies entanglements, mutualistic processes, slow research, messy theory, intellectual promiscuity, epistemological uncertainty, taoist dialectics, open-ended storytellings, ellipses... Born and mostly assembled in Mexico City, she moved to New York to study at the School of Visual Arts when she was still a teen, and has since expanded her zone of propagation by popping up on all sides of the Atlantic and the Pacific to trace lines and build spaces by hand, on foot, and in co- creation with both humans and non-humans alike. Ilya now lives and loves in Berlin where she was one of the organizers the Month of Performance and is one of the founders of the city’s Association for Performance Art. She often teaches and mentors BA and MA students while engaged in an increasingly erratic and awkward dance with her own (PhD) thesis, which takes its core cue from the non-metaphoric intimacy between roots and rhizomes: the mycorrhizal. The somewhat recently discovered joint tissue produced by the synergetic relationship between plants and fungi, along with her practiced concepts of the sporadic, the sporous, and the eco-particular, keep pushing her subjectivity and relations into more distributed, vulnerable, and co-extensive pathways. Ilya recently showed her work at the 12th Biennale of Shanghai, represented her country in Venice’s OPEN2000, became a UNESCO-Aschberg Laureate, and was recipient of Mexico’s National Young Art Award. A special guest at both the European Landscape Biennial (Spain) and the International Biennial of Cerveira (Portugal), she has also shown at the Boston Center for the Arts (USA), Centre d’Art Santa Mónica (Barcelona), Centro Nacional de las Artes (Mexico City), AC Institute (New York), TRAFO (Poland), CAS Osaka (Japan), Excentricités Festival (France), Visions_V (Greece), and PerforMensk (Belarus), among others. She has been artist-in- residence at prestigious institutions such as the Banff Centre for the Arts (Canada), Zentrum für Kunst und Urbanistik (Berlin), Campo Arqueológico de Mértola (Portugal), Museu de Sant Pol (Barcelona), and MacLaughljn Natural Reserve (USA). Her work is represented in European, Asian, and North American public collections.