Playground 2024
Live Arts Festival
Playground, M Leuven & STUK
An Verstraete
Holly makes a museum
Performance / installation / première
An Verstraete/Holly’s Region occupies the liminal space between visual art and theatre. After earlier works such as Holly becomes CEO and Holly rehabilitates, she now introduces the collages for the first time in a museum setting. In M’s entrance hall, Verstraete will present a selection of collages: some will become a permanent collection while others will be activated by daily performances. Visitors can also enrich the collection. Verstraete explores a new way of looking at fine art, blurring the boundaries between art forms.
‘Fuckin’angel’, An Verstraete © Fred Debrock
Coraline Guilbeau
Viewing Room
Performance / première
In her work, Guilbeau explores the notions of fiction, reality, and feelings of déjà-vu. She takes you on a mystical stroll where you can feel time warp and bend, racing or lingering, to the rhythm of apparitions and disappearances. Viewing Room is a performance within a light and sound installation that transcends the museum walls, challenging your senses. Discover what lies beyond the visible, what is evoked, and what shapes the physical, intellectual, and sensory dimension of our experience.
‘Extérieur. Été.’ Coraline Guilbeau, 2021 © Lola Pertsowsky, beeldrechten: Coraline Guilbeau
DD Dorvillier
COS it’s in the cards
Performance / installation
A catalogue of steps (COS) consists of: over 300 choreographic fragments drawn from Dorvillier’s early works, classified on reference cards by way of an accompanying taxonomy; 13 flags representing the works in the catalogue; and live visits to collections of fragments where they are re-danced. In COS it’s in the cards, visitors can access this collection through live readings of the reference cards, then experience the corresponding fragments danced in real-time or through the screening of the original video fragments.
‘COS Cards’, DD Dorvillier. Courtesy of the artist
Jean-Charles de Quillacq
The Stand-In
Performance / installation / Belgian premiere
The sculptures and performances of Jean-Charles de Quillacq question our relationship with the body as an instrument of exchange, drawing connections to mechanisms of merchandising and exploitation. In the encounter The Stand-In, the artist offers himself, masked at the service of the visitor. Upon request, he shares his secrets or performs actions. In exchange for his availability, visitors give him a plaster cast of their nose. These casts or sculptures become part of his collection of encounters, exhibited at M.
View of the performance 'The Stand-In', Jean-Charles de Quillacq, Frac Bretagne, 2018 © Valentin Merz | Biennale de Rennes
Linda Jasmin Mayer
Dove fermarsi?
Video / installation / performance
Linda Jasmin Mayer explores the metamorphosis of human and animal in Dove fermarsi? (Where to stop?). Seven hybrid bird-human figures wander across Europe through a wide variety of landscapes. Wearing bird masks and human clothing, they demonstrate how merging perspectives offer fresh insights into our place in the world. As beings of the in-between, these creatures find themselves in a difficult situation, as they belong neither to one world nor to the other.
Film still uit ‘Dove fermarsi’, Linda Jasmin Mayer, 2023, beeldrechten: Lina Jasmin Mayer
Peter Morrens, Lionel Marchetti & Jérôme Noetinger
Contretemps
Performance / installation / premiere
Morrens’ body of work sharpens our perception, and plays with disciplines, rhythm, sound, and confusion. For his solo exhibition at M, he invites pioneering improvisors and composers Lionel Marchetti and Jérôme Noetinger for an extensive live set within the exhibition. These sound artists use tape recorders, analogue synthesizers, and electronics to create an improvised, immersive dialogue with Morrens’ work, weaving sounds into the visual and conceptual elements of the pieces. Twenty-five years after their first collaboration in Vienna, the three will join forces once more.
‘PRTXT’, Peter Morrens, 2022, Playground (STUK & M Leuven) © Robin Zenner
Reyhan Lál
The Stranger
Performance / installation / video / premiere
Reyhan Lál’s works center on the enduring themes of the human condition and attempt to interfere with established orders. The Stranger presents four scripted and improvisational compositions titled The Familiar Chamber, You, Samuel and The Fall. Involving drama, irony and choreography, each piece features mysterious characters, who are sometimes the artist herself and sometimes a shadow or a marionette. By asserting and reclaiming authority, Lál engages both her performers and the audience in the development process, consistently reshaping the conceptual landscape of the stage.
‘Samuel’, Reyhan Lál, 2024. Courtesy of the artist
