Nicolaus Schafhausen
Nicolaus Schafhausen

Tris Vonna-Michell

2007   WITTE DE WITH, CENTER FOR CONTEMPORARY ART  EXHIBITION

Nicolaus Schafhausen

Courtesy of the artist

May 20 to Aug 19, 2007

With his energetic performances, Tris Vonna-Michell (born 1982, Rochford, UK) adds a whole new chapter to the age-old tradition of storytelling. Developing in parallel and occasionally intertwining, his performances function as episodes within an over-arching, non-linear story.

Vonna-Michell tells his tales inside installations that he has created, interweaving projections, texts and objects as theatrical props. During these performances, he takes his audience with him on a mental and physical journey, through which the objects in the gallery space acquire additional layers of meaning. With his tales, he tries to unravel and articulate various real and fictional histories. His practice is at once structured and spontaneous. Working with a premeditated scenario, Vonna-Michell’s performance is influenced by the situation in which he finds himself, and new stories, images and associations come into being. 

The incredible rapidity with which he speaks changes the words and sentences in to a baffling rhythmic and abstract composition. His artistic practice shows traces of vocal experiments from the early 1920s, such as Kurt Schwitters’ sound poem Ursonata. The post-war Spoken Word compositions of Allen Ginsberg or William S. Burroughs are also recognizable in Vonna-Michell’s work. He ingeniously combines personal facts and fiction in a style reminiscent of an MC's verbal freedom. 

At Witte de With, Vonna-Michell presents a new work that uses aspects of earlier performance series such as hahn/huhn (2003-2006), a wartime conspiracy story about mysterious disappearances in the tunnels beneath Berlin’s Anhalter Bahnhof and Down the Rabbit Hole (2003-2006), where he feigns amnesia and travels to Paris to offer quail’s eggs in exchange for information about his own identity, to avant-garde poet and musician Henri Chopin (b. 1922, Paris). The latter story also exists in another version, entitled Finding Chopin: In Search of Holy Quail. For this exhibition, Vonna-Michell returns to the place where the work began: England’s Lake District, where both Schwitters and Chopin once lived and worked. Vonna-Michell rendered this research visible and add the reconstruction of this quest to his body of work. 

Courtesy of the artist

Courtesy of the artist

Courtesy of the artist

Courtesy of the artist

Courtesy of the artist

Courtesy of the artist

Courtesy of the artist

Courtesy of the artist

Courtesy of the artist

Curators: Renske Janssen, Nicolaus Schafhausen

Artist: Biography Tris Vonna-Michell
(born 1982 in Rochford, UK) lives and works in Stockholm. He stages installations and performs narrative structures, using spoken word, sound compositions, film and photography. Through live performances and installations, Vonna-Michell creates circuitous, multilayered narratives, characterized by fragments of information, detours, and repetitions.

In 2010 together with Diana Kaur he founded Mount Analogue, a publishing space, curatorial and editorial agency and analogue studio.

Supported by: The British Council and ifa

Accompanying the exhibition, Witte de With releases a limited edition 7” vinyl Tall Tales and Short Stories, with excerpts from the performance Finding Chopin and samples of original recordings by Henri Chopin. The idea for the recording was born after the theft of several performance objects from an exhibition in late 2006. It is conceived as a means to reconstruct the original piece.

Nicolaus Schafhausen

The foregoing texts and images are provided and copyrighted by: https://www.fkawdw.nl/en/