Rotterdam, April 2007
TRIS VONNA-MICHELL EXHIBITION 20 May – 19 August 2007 Saturday 19 May, 1 p.m: Opening Tris Vonna-Michell will give a performance during the opening.
With his energetic performances, Tris Vonna-Michell (born 1982, Rochford, UK) adds a whole new chapter to the ageold tradition of storytelling. Developing in parallel and occasionally intertwining, his performances function as episodes within an over-arching, non-linear story. Vonna-Michell tells his tales inside installations that he has created, interweaving projections, texts and objects as theatrical props. During these performances, he takes his audience with him on a mental and physical journey, through which the objects in the gallery space acquire additional layers of meaning. With his tales, he tries to unravel and articulate various real and fictional histories. His practice is at once structured and spontaneous. Working with a premeditated scenario, Vonna-Michell’s performance is influenced by the situation in which he finds himself, and new stories, images and associations come into being. The incredible rapidity with which he speaks changes the words and sentences in to a baffling rhythmic and abstract composition. His artistic practice shows traces of vocal experiments from the early 1920s, such as Kurt Schwitters’ sound poem Ursonata. The post-war Spoken Word compositions of Allen Ginsberg or William S. Burroughs are also recognizable in Vonna-Michell’s work. He ingeniously combines personal facts and fiction in a style reminiscent of an MC's verbal freedom. At Witte de With, Vonna-Michell presents a new work that uses aspects of earlier performance series such as hahn/huhn (2003-2006), a wartime conspiracy story about mysterious disappearances in the tunnels beneath Berlin’s Anhalter Bahnhof and Down the Rabbit Hole (2003-2006), where he feigns amnesia and travels to Paris to offer quail’s eggs in exchange for information about his own identity, to avant-garde poet and musician Henri Chopin (b. 1922, Paris). The latter story also exists in another version, entitled Finding Chopin: In Search of Holy Quail. For this exhibition, Vonna-Michell returns to the place where the work began: England’s Lake District, where both Schwitters and Chopin once lived and worked. Vonna-Michell will render this research visible and add the reconstruction of this quest to his body of work. Accompanying the exhibition, Witte de With releases a limited edition 7” vinyl Tall Tales and Short Stories, with excerpts from the performance Finding Chopin and samples of original recordings by Henri Chopin. The idea for the recording was born after the theft of several performance objects from an exhibition in late 2006. It is conceived as a means to reconstruct the original piece. (Graphic concept: Tine Melzer. Price: 10 euro) Tris Vonna-Michell will be present at Witte de With to perform at the opening and on the following dates: May 20 & 22, June 1, 2 & 3 and June 16, 17 & 19 coinciding with the Poetry International Festival. Dates of performances during July and August will be announced soon. Curated by Renske Janssen & Nicolaus Schafhausen, with support from The British Council and ifa. For more information or to request an interview with the artist, please contact Zoë Gray on press@wdw.nl . Details and images are also available on: www.wdw.nl