PW LIVE: In Living Daylight
A Performance Day Curated by PW-Magazine

The summer solstice on 21 June marks not only the start of summer in the Northern Hemisphere, but also the longest – and therefore brightest – day of the year. Throughout PW LIVE: In Living Daylight, a programme of performances lasting several hours, curated by PW-Magazine, will unfold as the light changes. From morning until early evening, gestures, texts and sounds by Vienna-based artists of different generations will take shape between Karlsplatz and the Museumsquartier.

At the heart of the event lies the question of what it means to move through time together – on a day when attention wanders, intensifies and then disperses once more. In Living Daylight refers to life itself – the totality of what a body perceives, absorbs and carries: sound, movement, language, silence. The programme conceives of the day as a shared space of experience that can be entered and traversed.

11:00 Kunsthalle Wien Karlsplatz

The programme opens with a series of compositions by the artist Paul Ebhart, created as part of an ongoing collaboration with Viennese performance artists. This is followed by a dialogue between choreography and selected piano works, in which Alix Eynaudi and Han-Gyeol Lie transform the Kunsthalle Wien Karlsplatz into a resonant space, exploring a poetics of defiance. Subsequently, Frank Wasser presents a new performance that employs methods of method acting to question the construction of national identity, whilst critically engaging with stereotypes of Irish culture and his own entanglement within them.

16:00 Kunsthalle Wien Museumsquartier 

The afternoon begins with a concert by the painter and musician Evelyn Plaschg whose soundscapes are woven from voice, flute, synthesisers and field recordings. The duo Maria Mercedes (Julia Maria Müllner & Camilla Mercedes Schielin) offers a glimpse into new material, with their pop-culture-inspired choreographies playfully navigating between extravagant gestures and abstraction. Bryony Dawson’s five-person performance Reader explores the reading body as a site of contradictory desires, where diverse texts converge and notions of the individual self dissolve. Finally, the artist Sainkho Namtchylak will perform vocal improvisations across the spaces of Kunsthalle Wien’s Museumsquartier building. In her Tuvan throat singing, she weaves this traditional technique with experimental artistic practices, thus bringing the PW LIVE: In Living Daylight programme to a close.

Curated by Luca Büchler, Lewon Heublein, Paula Thomaka (PW-Magazine)

Artists

• Bryony Dawson
• Paul Ebhart
• Alix Eynaudi
• Han-Gyeol Lie
• Maria Mercedes (Julia Maria Müllner & Camilla Schielin)
• Sainkho Namtchylak
• Evelyn Plaschg
• Frank Wasser