Taking place on Saturday 26 October from 10am to 5pm at O—Overgaden and hosted by Cally Spooner in collaboration with O—Overgaden’s director Rhea Dall, the symposium includes keynotes and live presentations by Pierre Bal-Blanc (curator and choreographer) represented by dancer Efthimios Moschopoulos, Maibritt Borgen (art historian and scholar), Marie de Brugerolle (art historian), Vincenzo Estremo (film scholar), Hendrik Folkerts (curator and Head of Exhibitions at Moderna Museet, Stockholm), Irena Haiduk (artist), Will Holder (typographer and publisher), Lea Porsager (artist), Jesper List Thomsen (artist), and Christopher Weickenmeier (curator and scholar).

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Deadtime asks the clear question: If contemporary society adheres to a “performance principle”—the 24/7 demand to competitively “perform” (well) at all times—might there be a way to resist this “principle”? Or, in other words, does there exist an unfolding of a visceral “culture” that is not filled with planned activity and incessant fecundity? And how to make space for that which is not storyboarded nor prescribed? That which is erratic, electric and does not have its “performance function” calculated or determined in advance, and hence, by certain institutional and industrial standards, might appear to be “dead”?

The term “dead” here is indebted to Anne Carson’s handling of the temp morts, a so-called “dead time”; a cinematographic “documentary” technique, which appears in a fiction film when the camera is left running on a scene too long, and on actors after they have made their exit, “as if for a while something might be still rustling around there in the empty doorway” (Anne Carson, Decreation, 2010). Error, spontaneity, silence, and slippage spill into the frame; unscheduled, typically overlooked, seemingly “dead” filmic moments arrive, and drain significance from the main event, allowing everyday life to enter and rustle around in the frame.

This symposium-like-gathering will ask where “deadtime” might emerge within a museum or cultural institutions more broadly: in collections, live programs, archives, and exhibitions, or events, via audiences. How might cultural practitioners and cultural institutions open our frame wider to let life—a kind of “true” history—spill in, knowing that, to do so, some of that will, in the Carson sense, appear and act “dead” or feel like “deadtime”. How might this amount to operating outside of the given, “performing” main event; how might this spur the becoming of resistant microhistories?

PROGRAM:

10.00

Rhea Dall

Introduction to the day:

Deadtime, A Hypothesis of Resistance

10.10

Cally Spooner

Deadtime, A Hypothesis of Resistance

(Introduction)

10.30

Hendrik Folkerts

Notes on Restlessness

10.50

Marie de Brugerolle

GOSSIP AS TRUE HISTORY AND SAFE SPACE

A lecture on the history of gossip in art history

11.25

Christopher Weickenmeier

Death Is Not Enough

Institutionality in Contemporary Art

12.10

Jesper List Thomsen

Re-Reading “FREEEee”

12.40

Lea Porsager

Rosy-fingered Dusk (2023)

** LUNCH BREAK **

13.40

Lea Porsager

Clockwork C.O.W. (2024)

13.45

Vincenzo Estremo

It’s Time I Do It Myself

Dehumanize and produce, but do so kindly

Work of Imagination

14.30

Irena Haiduk

Choir Practice

15.20

Will Holder

“Our Values Make Us Different” part 11 (song and dance): “If one were to judge

the possibility of emancipatory (or simply worthwhile) experience

based on whether or not certain elements of it were co-opted,

contaminated, backlashed, stripped of their radical import, marketed,

bought and sold, one’s entire life would pass by without any felt sense of

discovery, invention, expansion or escape,” Maggie Nelson (2021).

16.00

Pierre Bal-Blanc

All Criteria This Position Any Moment, 2020

Choreographed with Cally Spooner

Performed by Efthimios Moschopoulos

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Maibritt Borgen

Ode to Research Infrastructures in 3 Parts

Borgen will be presenting at three moments throughout the day

BIOGRAPHIES:

PIERRE BAL-BLANC is an independent curator and essayist based in Athens and Paris, whose long-term focus has been on liveness and indeterminacy into exhibitions that unfold over durations. His exhibition sequences include La monnaie vivante/Living Currency adapted from Pierre Klossowski’s essay and Draft Score for an Exhibition, both projects that negotiate the current and historical analysis of the body and strategies related to performance in visual arts. 

MAIBRITT BORGEN is Associate Professor of Art Theory at the Royal Danish Art Academy and head of the Laboratory for Arts Research. She is educated in Art History from University of Copenhagen and Yale University, from where she also holds a PhD. Borgen is a former Helena Rubinstein Critical Studies Fellow from the Whitney Independent Study Program and has worked at the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Yale Art Gallery.

MARIE DE BRUGEROLLE is an art historian, curator, author, and dramaturg. Since 2011, she has been developing an ongoing investigation about the impact and legacy of performativity upon visual art. Her Post-Performance Future. Method/e was published in 2023 (Delpire & co) and re-issued in 2024 (Printed Matter). In 2021 she published her first anticipation novel, Polyspherus (Éditions Ishtar). Her next exhibition is WORD IS ROUND, Nantes Frac Pays de Loire (2024-25). She prepares Transatlantique John Baldessari (2025) and Staging Poetry; Jack Spicer’s Shadows (2025).

RHEA DALL is Director of O—Overgaden and holds a PhD from the University of Copenhagen. Prior to this, she directed UKS (Young Artists’ Society) in Oslo, served as one of the Artistic Directors of Bergen Assembly 2016, and co-founded the independent institution PRAXES in Berlin. Dall has edited and contributed to numerous publications, including Bande à Part – On Independent Art Institutions (Mousse Publishing, 2022).

VINCENZO ESTREMO holds an international PhD in Media, Cinema and Communication Studies from the University of Udine and Kunstuniversität Linz. He is currently the head of the PhD program at Nuova Accademia di Belle Arti (NABA) in Milan and Rome where he teaches courses on exhibited cinema, aesthetics, and phenomenology. Estremo is a regular contributor to publications including Flash Art and Il Foglio. He has also authored and co-edited several works, including Extended Temporalities: Transient Visions in the Museum and in Art (2016).

HENDRIK FOLKERTS is an art historian and curator. In 2021 he was appointed Curator of International Contemporary Art and Head of Exhibitions at Moderna Museet in Stockholm. Prior to this, he worked in curatorial roles at the Art Institute of Chicago, Documenta 14 in Kassel and Athens, and the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam.

IRENA HAIDUK The first message from Cally Spooner arrived on 23 May 2017 at 11.07. The subject: “Re: Follow-up.” Since then, Cally Spooner has set up a room in Irena Haiduk’s mind, a comfortable study space, without chairs. Leather and seaweed carpets line the open balcony doors. The sun projects sharp rectangles masking the rest of the walls gray. The sea outside is green, braided by light, ruffled by a slight wind coating the salty air with sage and thyme. A dolphin floats near a large speckled gray rock where a black cormorant perches with open wings, drying in the sun. The bird joins the dolphin and they swim together for the rest of the day.

WILL HOLDER is a Brussels-based typographer—organizing language and narrative around cultural objects—through printed matter, live readings and dialogues with those whose work he reproduces. Besides working with Cally Spooner for the past few years, Will was editor of F.R.DAVID, a journal concerned with reading and writing in the arts (co-published by de Appel, Amsterdam 2007–16; KW, Berlin 2017–24).

EFTHIMIOS MOSCHOPOULOS is a dancer currently based in Athens. He studied dance at the Greek National School of Dance (KSOT, 2014) and has been performing and creating as a dance artist since 2017 in Greece and internationally, collaborating with, among many others, Christos Papadopoulos, Pierre Bal-Blanc, and Cally Spooner.

LEA PORSAGER is a visual artist whose work intertwines fabulation and speculation with a variety of expressive means, including film, sculpture, photography, and text. Her works embrace themes such as science, politics, feminism, and esotericism. Porsager holds a PhD from the Malmö Art Academy and Lund University (2021) and was awarded the Mads Øvlisen Postdoc Fellowship (2023-2024), which involves a collaboration with Arts at CERN.

CALLY SPOONER is a visual artist and scholar. The symposium and exhibition Deadtime, A Hypothesis of Resistance concludes Spooner’s practice-based PhD research associated with O—Overgaden as well as the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts and the University of Copenhagen, funded by the Novo Nordisk Foundation (2021–24). Spooner’s series of essays, A Hypothesis of Resistance, collected into the eponymous book, has partly been workshopped collectively at O—Overgaden over the course of recent years and is published by Mousse Publishing.

JESPER LIST THOMSEN is an artist and writer based in London and Torino. He works with text, painting, sculpture, and performance. Recent exhibitions and performances have taken place at Hot Wheels, London; Grazer Kunstverein, Graz; MACRO, Rome; and Kölnischer Kunstverein, Cologne. His book FREEEee was published by L’Esprit de l’Escalier in 2021.

CHRISTOPHER WEICKENMEIER is Curator and Research Assistant at the Kunstraum of Leuphana University Lüneburg. Besides teaching and organizing exhibitions, he is pursuing a PhD on institutionality and death in contemporary art. Between 2019 and 2022, he was Artistic Director of Klosterruine Berlin.