presence (Un) presence (2020-23)
‘presence (Un) presence’ is a durational performance installation evolving over 7 - 14 days. The work is concerned with developing a critical and poetic stance on technologically mediated contemporaneity. Fusing site, sustained movement, video telematics, open form composition, and the human senses, the piece stages a radically slowed-down choreographic construct between 2 - 4 individual performers who silently scan our fundamental postures —standing, walking, sitting, lying down— as the means to negotiate surrounding medialisation processes. Ceaselessly observed and registered by a digital camera system, the performed postures become increasingly displaced and rearranged through non-linear video feeds and image transmission appearing on large-size canvases mounted in the space.
The emerging intermedial composition imbricates continuously shifting physical and virtual tactilities of space and presence, interspersed with instruction-like texts and shapes. Offering ongoing speculation on its consistency and chronology with diffused temporal instances contingently colliding within the ongoing present moment. While subject of perpetual broadcast, the postures begin to function as embodied interruptions as well, quietly protesting the ambiguity of the never-ceasing scrambling of their time and location, proposing still acts of resistance to return to the lived experience of place and present.
still documentation of V2_lab for the unstable media (Rotterdam) exhibition, 13 - 19 November 2023, performers: Astarti Athanasiadou, Tiia Veneranta, Antti Uimonen and Amit Palgi. Supported by V2_. And D-Light Studios (Dublin) exhibition, 05 - 11 October, performers: Claire Keating, Francis Fay, Ben Sullivan, Isabella Oberländer. Supported by Mondriaan Fonds, the Irish Arts Council and D-Light Studios.
'Martijn Tellinga’s "presence (Un) presence" uses a constructed, carefully arranged spatial encounter to recognise a fundamental disjunct between the perceptual, conceptual and lived strands of contemporary spatiality . . . It employs forms of slow encounter to engage with extended structures of temporality, with strategies of hesitation, delay and deceleration, in an effort to make us pause and experience a passing present in all its heterogeneity and difference . . . This work acts and reacts, calls and responds, it folds time upon itself, it persists, it continues. It reminds us that we are affective bodies, constantly pulsing with waves, evolving and creating new energies as we react and interact with other bodies'
—from Mark Garry's written response
