Any other Business was a 6 hour performance piece structured as an ordinary conference and set in a commercial convention centre. Each of the items on the conference program was scripted and staged live by actors, who appeared both on stage and in the audience. The script for Any other Business was based on recordings of public debates and speeches, ranging from community meetings to the farewell adresses of US presidents. In each, the speakers struggle to suppress their urge to walk away or to start a physical fight.

A video work with the same title was made from prerecordings and live recordings of the conference.

An overview of the conference program and video scenes can be downloaded here.

Any other Business

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2009-11, Installation view Newtopia, Mechelen, photograph by Kristof Vranken

Performa 11, New York
Stedelijk Museum Buro Amsterdam
Centro Pecci, Prato
Newtopia, Mechelen
Spinozamanifestatie, Amsterdam

For this piece, linguists, artists, politicians, language teachers and NGO workers in Romania were interviewed about the way the English language has influenced their particular field. From the transcribed conversations a script was formed for a discussion between a curator and an artist, subsequently performed by actor Daniel Popa, a native Romanian speaker, and Nicoline van Harskamp, a non-Romanian speaker. Because the English script was to be performed in Romanian, van Harskamp memorized her text line by line. On the opening night of the 4th Bucharest Biennial, New Latin was performed for a mixed-language audience. Recordings of the live event were subtitled in English and now make up a video work with the same title.

New Latin

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2010, live performance, production photograph by the Bucharest Biennial

Bucharest Biennial
Silent University at Tate Modern
Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam
NOA Language School, Amsterdam
Yapi Kredi Cultural Centre, Istanbul
Jackman Humanities Institute, University of Toronto

What happens to people when they listen to public speakers? Do the things they hear add up to a collective field of knowledge? And if so, is such a field instrumental in politics? In a public meeting, a group of experts addressed these questions, using material on Youtube and Power Point to 
illustrate their theories. In the week after the event, all members of their audience were interviewed by telephone about their recollections of the meeting. On the basis of their statements, a reconstruction was written and then performed in the same venue by a group of actors. Words are put in the 
mouths of the wrong speakers, crucial information is missing, and one panel member doesn’t seem to exist any more.

The Power of Listening was presented as a video installation where recordings of the telephone interviews are superimposed over the words of the actors.

The Power of Listening

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2009, poster voor live performances, design by Sam de Groot

Witte de With, Rotterdam
Theater Frascati, Amsterdam
Prix de Rome

In preparation of this online commission, conversations were recorded with English speakers of all levels of proficiency and expertise, about their expectations for the future of
the English language. From the recordings, an audio montage was composed, divided over 4 tracks for the actors Ariane Barnes, Walles Hamonde, Sakuntala Ramanee and Chris Rochester. In the live performance they expressed a diversity of opinions as a single voice, as varieties of English varied sentence by sentence. After each chapter in the text, they paused and repeated words and phonemes and invited the audience to say them out loud. The performance was streamed from the Performance Room in Tate Modern to live audiences around the world. It was subtitled in International Phonetic Alphabet.

English Forecast

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2013, 
production photograph by Ana Escobar voor Tate Photography

Tate Modern
BMW Tate Live: Performance Room promo
Tapies Foundation, Barcelona
Frac Lorraine, France
Sogn og Fjordane Kunstmuseum, Førde
Museo Arte Contemporánea, Vigo

Character Witness is a speech based on the autobiographies of Benazir Bhutto, Nelson Mandela, Malcolm X, Fidel Castro, Hillary Clinton, Kwame Nkrumah, Margaret Thatcher, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Barack Obama, Frederik Willem de Klerk and Ariel Sharon.

From each of their books, a passage was selected that describes a childhood event and one that describes a political event. In each case, the former passage includes an excuse for the latter. A professional speech writer brought the passages together as a speech for a single person. Actors from the UK, France and the USA, Catherine Lord, Daniel Rovai and David Cameron subsequently, then helped to shape it in further detail. In 3 consecutive live events at the Kaaitheater in Brussels, they performed the speech adapted to their own interpretation of a states person. The process of writing and adaptation was documented in a small book, made available on the performance nights.

A series of 7 collages of the actual book passages together spell out the entire script.

Character Witness

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2011, live performane, set photographs by Nicoline van Harskamp

Kaaitheater, Brussels

Kadist Foundation, Paris

To Live Outside the Law You Must be Honest is comprised of 3 scripted video works, each performed by the same actor, Ian Burns, in different roles. The main video is recorded in Christiania, a free town in the centre of Copenhagen that was created in the early 1970’s. Under increasing outside pressure, it manages to operate without private ownership and 
through a system of consensus democracy, up to today. Informed by interviews with Christiania’s residents, the video addresses issues of self-government and self-policing. The other 2 videos were filmed in London, and are based on interviews with self-pronounced libertarians on the left and right in the political spectrum. In all 3 works the issues of 
freedom and participatory democracy are addresssed, but very different conclusions are drawn. This work was produced with the Christiania Researcher in Residence Program.

To Live Outside the Law You Must be Honest


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2007, 
installation at the Taipei Biennial 2008, photograph by the Taipei Biennial

Insa Art Space, Seoul
Casco Projects, Utrecht
Taipei Biennial
Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam
Nikolaj CCA, Copenhagen
Arsenale Art, Poznan
ADN Gallery, Barcelona
24th Youth Salon, Zagreb