Performance by Wojciech Kosma
What emotional reality do you want to live in?

Wednesday, October 12, 2016

“What emotional reality do you want to live in?” is the question sparking the workshop and four-day performance by Wojciech Kosma prepared for the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw as part of the program At the Tip of the Tongue: Performance and the War of Words.

Kosma offers an event in a talk-show format aimed at creating an emotional reality - the one we need, or the one we desire. The device here will be a spontaneous exploration of the opinions of the invited audience, who together with the group of performers (leaders) jointly create the performance.

Divided into four parts (episodes), it will develop over time, touching on current pressing social issues, such as identity, sexuality, religion and migrations. The goal is to seek methods for expressing diverse and marginalized voices, and the method is to reach for abstract gestures and imagination as a source of new forms of political force. The action and the questions raised will examine how we show feelings (or how they guide us), how intimacy and emotions function in the social space (Sara Ahmed) and how they overlap with or change into political and social judgments and opinions.

Thanks to the involvement of performers, dancers and actors, the performance will move between fiction and reality, “authenticity” and artificiality, the private and public spheres, without giving primacy to either side. This deliberate “suspension” of the status of the happening event will be additionally problematized by the omnipresent eye of the camera as a metaphor for the public sphere which shapes and defines our views.

The entire event will be filmed, resulting in a video uploaded to YouTube. Participation in the performance will require consent to use of the participant’s image for purposes of the project.