Janet Davidson-Hues

Janet Davidson-Hues focuses on image, object, movement, and sound to create performances and videos as well as mixed media paintings and installations that examine the representation of women in our society. Davidson-Hues, MFA graduate from the University of Kansas and former Assistant Professor of Art at Indiana State University, has exhibited her work nationally in over 75 exhibitions including 10 solo shows, 25 invitational exhibitions, and 40 group shows.

She has presented solo performances and she participates in a collaborative women’s performance group, a.k.a., which has performed, among other venues, at many festivals in the USA.

Barbara Rose Haum

Barbara Rose Haum is a German born artist who has been living and working in New York City since the 1980s. Her work emphasizes the performative aspect of language by examining how values are constructed through text, and more specifically through the ritualistic repetition of words. Barbara Haum attempts to transform traditional readings of biblical texts through the intertwining of contemporary narratives found in newspaper clippings and fairy tales. Integral to her research is the struggle to decentralize the authority of the text and to express a desire to bring »nourishment« to language in order to open up the text to gendered and cross-cultural experiences. Her installations are clusters of ordinary objects such as spoons, ink wells, goose feathers, soap dishes and spools of thread in combination with newspaper clippings, cookbooks, photographs or portions of the Torah. These elements coexist in an open field with no boundaries, thus inviting viewers to question their meaning and purpose and allowing for new meanings to emerge. Her piece Lunar Performances: Creating An Architecture Of Text In Time is an extension of her inquiry into the relationship between the mundane and the sacred, the public and private rituals through which we form our intimate and social sense of place. Audience members are encouraged to actively take a part in the forming of the piece throughout time. The interactive nature of this work has been captured on an web page that will allow the performances to continue through the use of digital and electronic media.
Barbara Rose Haum received her Doctorate in Studio Art in 1995 at the New York University, NYC. She has received numerous awards and has exhibited her work nationally and internationally. Barbara Rose Haum is currently teaching as an Assistant Professor at the New York University, NYC, in the Department of Culture and Communications.

Archeology of a narrative

This interactive Performance will travel through a fictitious collective narrative of the City of Darmstadt. This project, collaboration between Haum and Davidson-Hues will investigate disrupted and forgotten text as a vehicle of symbolic travel through a place of loss and reappearance. The Performance will take place at the Rosenplatz. At the center of the Rosenplatz will be an especially high chair. It will be surrounded by a large pile of crumbled book pages. A person will be sitting on top of the high chair, continuously ripping pages from an open book (in so doing destroying narrative and information), letting them drop into the already growing pile beneath.

The Rosenplatz will be divided into different narrative or informational spaces, marked much like small archeological sites, each being labeled as a different territory, such as: history, contemporary politics, personal narratives, fictional narratives, experiences of the artists traveling through the city, religious readings, and so on. Each designated area will contain particular items, such as empty books, suitcases, old silver. These will be available for inscription by the audience, thus enabling them to inscribe themselves into the living memory of the city. This interactive
performance will address the transitory experience of life and locate the personal narrative at its center.

A reader will be connecting the fragmented stories, thus creating a memory in progress. Language through performance and random connections will
therefore offer the possibility of a simultaneous reconstruction of the present, with the citizenry of the city emerging as authors of their own destinies and histories.

Performance auf dem Rosenplatz, Ecke Richard-Wagner-Weg/Heinrich-Rinck-Weg

Sonntag 7.9. um 18 Uhr