SIGNA

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Hal på Margretheholm

Margretheholmsvej 2
1432 København K

http://www.signa.dk/

SIGNA is an artistic partnership formed by Danish performance-installation artist Signa Sørensen and Austrian performer and media artist Arthur Köstler.

The performance installations of SIGNA are widely regarded as some of the most extraordinary on the Scandinavian performance scene in the recent years. Critically acclaimed as highly daring, puzzling, challenging and epistemologically new the projects of SIGNA have been succesfully presented internationally.

The work defies easy categorization as it intersects with a diverse spectrum of pop-cultural entertainment forms such as melodrama, music hall and whorehouse, mixing stereotypical cinematic clichés with bleak realism. The performance installations of SIGNA seek to explore structures of power and degradation, fate, identity and desire.

The basis of SIGNA´s performance work is installation art. The duo mostly work site-specific, redifining and staging abandoned buildings and camp sites creating enigmatic timeless environments for the audience to explore and to live in.

Performers - as well as the audience - inhabit these rooms or spaces. The barrier between the spectator and the installation, the audience and the performers is non-existent. The presence of the visitors in the room is as real - or unreal - as the piece of fiction that takes place around them. The works are not performance art pieces in the comtemporary sense. The aim of including performers in the installations is to guide or trick the viewer into the flux of the densely detailed set-ups.

The performers relate to the spectators, but on the terms of the fiction. They interpret the presence of the audience and its reactions in accordance with the logic of the fictitious stories. It is up to the audience to insinuate themselves into the performance installation. That is why no two spectators will have the same experience. Stories unfold in different places and over a long period of time - usually several days on end - so it will not be possible to see or hear what goes on everywhere all at once. The audience has to move through the spaces, study the numerous little artefacts of the installation - letters, photographs, personal items - talk to or listen to the performers in order to pick up as many fragments as possible. Thus, the narrative flow is not chronologically progressive. It is possible to dive into the past of any of the characters as well as witnessing and being part of their common present in the installation space. The narratives are non-linear and often self-contradictable.

The inhabitants of the installation harbor the fiction's reality as well as their own personal reality, and this flicker between reality and fiction challenges the spectator's own anchoring in reality. The artists´ question is: What if I decided to be someone else - redefined my identity, my past - and met the audience on these terms? And what if I defined the audience according to me - decided who they are in relation to me? In this sudden unexpected intimacy and familiarity with the performers of the installation, the visitors' expectations for the work are challenged, and more importantly - they have to ask themselves: Who am I now, who am I here? SIGNA sees identity as something more than an immutable entity - as something which we ourselves can define and redefine indefinitely. The same goes for reality.

What, then, do these concepts of reality and identity imply? Are they merely cultural frames protecting us from an existential chaos by enabling us to deny that which falls outside - the inexplicable, the incomprehensible, the inscrutable? Or does everything move in fixed patterns - more elaborate than those which we ourselves have created and understand? Also, if we stop sorting and categorizing, then what remains? Is it only that of which we have concepts that exists? Do we only exist if we define how?

SIGNA´s works are unpredictable and open to coincidence. The frames that keep the works together are there for reality and fiction to jar with them, just as they jar with each other - so that they can be expanded, moved or transcended through the improvisations of the performers and the participation of the audience.