kozek hörlonski (Austria)
Wollblut
The Boxing Club, Limehouse Town Hall, Sunday 28 May 2006, 16.00 – 18.00
A slowly moving tableau vivant on a broad ledge in a stairwell, Wollblut was a performative installation involving repetitive actions: the adjusting of clocks, the knitting of endless skeins of red wool, clearly meant to evoke blood. It was a piece about states of mind and ways of being: and despite its underlying subject, hypnotically calm.
‘It’s a piece about waiting,’ they told us. As it turned out, waiting to be hanged: Wollblut was loosely adapted from their earlier project, ‘The Hanging Gardens – Still. Contemporary’, which was about two male teenagers hanged in Iran for the crime of having slept together. The quiet actions of the artists had as backdrop a paradise garden scene, above which was projected the image of a hanged man’s legs, swaying slowly. Wollblut’s clocks were set to international times coinciding with the hour of the two men’s execution.
‘kozek-hörlonski move along a rift between contrasting atmospheres … Trancelike, from inside a meditative exercise, they attempt to define a location of the soul.’ (Kunstraum Niederősterreich)
Wollblut was a new commission for Wild Gift, created specifically for Limehouse Town Hall. The performance lasted two hours.
In 2009 kozek-hörlonski won the Niederösterreich Preis fűr Performance (the Lower Austria Prize for Performance)
Thanks to
The Boxing Club, especially Peter Brownell
supported by
Delfina
Austrian Cultural Forum
