Take Place II

Take Place is an event, an exhibition, an interactive artwork between theatre, live performance, and social experiment yet based on a solid gathering of artists as well as the audiences of the work as live participants. First performed by 160 artists in a duration of 5 days in 2019, the work will be shown again in the forms of video projections, live performance and photographs at the beginning of 2020 at Bar k Gallery.

The work, that consists of human interactions, has no fixed outcome. The performance is conduced in two phrases. Almost like a test of human solidarity, the artists who are convinced by the concept, come to the gallery space voluntarily. Instead of exhibiting their own works, they are physically presented in the empty space as part of the work, for the experience of participating in something unconventional and somehow unpredictable. In Take Place I, they stand, sit and chat in the white cube, and ready for the public to join them. Once the public enters the space, he/she becomes the performer. Without a distinction between the artists and the visitors, everyone is invited to participate in the artist’s point of view. When first performed in 2019, the work provoked a range of reactions including confusing visitors looking for the exhibition around the space, despite that they were already part of it. Soaked in this experience, Take Place challenges the general expectations the public has towards an exhibition, and also the way we experience it.

In Take Place II, the artists are sitting on the stadium seats inside the gallery window and watching the street. The second act plays with the ways of looking, by staring at viewers rather than the other way around. The silent but intensive eye contacts cause different responses from the public, where the potentials of the work lies in. Both phrases of Take Place raise the questions of the relationship between the artist and the public, and their roles and participations in an exhibition.

At Bar k Gallery, Take Place II will be performed at the opening night, while the stadium seats remain in the gallery until the end of show as an interactive option for the visitors. Echoing the content of the video projections, the visitors are invited to sit on it to become the observer, and to rethink themselves in a gallery context.

Project director: Ming Lu

Artists performing at the Opening:

Anitra Bohman-Penttinen, Daiane Rafaela, Gawie Joubert, Horia Savescu, Ivana Jecmenica, Jimmie James, Lyndsey Walsh, Rocio Garrido, Sean Derrick Cooper Marquardt, Silvestre Natalia, Violetta De Saga,