E-WERK Luckenwalde to present the largest scale solo show to date by Berlin-based artist and choreographer Melanie Jame Wolf. The Creep is an exhibition that includes a new film installation, ceramic works, textile sculptures, and performance. It is a continuation of the visual artist and choreographer’s ongoing ‘creep studies’.
In Walter Benjamin’s concept of ‘mythic violence,’ oppressive power is understood as being accumulated and maintained by disingenuously performing itself as natural law. As an exhibition, The Creep enacts a poetic meditation on the dynamic between violence, desire, and performativity – ostensibly in the form of a duet between an outlaw figure and a mountain. Wolf plays these tensions by orchestrating a conversation between the moving image and the sculptural textures.
Mountains creep at glacial speed, as The Outlaw creeps through the complicated fantasies he symbolizes and subverts. What is explored are the covert choreographies of how power moves. Forced silences, double meanings and omissions, invisible actions, performances of reputation, and what Alison M. Jaggar terms ‘Outlaw Emotions’ wind through a mythic landscape.
Melanie Jame Wolf, The Creep, E-WERK Luckenwalde, October 21st 2023 until 10th February 2024.
A preview 21th October 2023, 2pm – 6pm (no reservation needed)and Performance- Ballads of Outlaw Feelings: a text, a song, a dance By/With: Melanie Jame Wolf & friends Duration: 30 minutes Start: 3pm Reservation for performance via events@kunststrom.com
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About the artist
Melanie Jame Wolf is a visual artist and choreographer. She works solo and with friends, making interdisciplinary pieces about power, flows of capital, and the pervasive phenomenon of ‘show business’ in theatrical, political and everyday contexts. Coming from a background in contemporary performance, Melanie Jame works with text, sound, moving image, choreography, and sculpture. Her work often focuses on specific performance techniques, like impersonation, rehearsal, or stand up, understanding the body as an unruly political riddle. Leaning into a hyper-stylised pop aesthetic, she is invested in humour as a strategy for critical possibility, and in working with language in subliminal and surprising ways.
Spaces that have presented her work include Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Kunstmuseum Basel – Gegenwart, KW – Institute of Contemporary Art, HAU – Hebbel am Ufer, Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art, nGbK, The National 2019: New Australian Art biennial, VAEFF – Film Festival NYC, Arts Santa Monica, Schwules Museum, Sophiensaele, Münchner Kammerspiele, Arts House Melbourne, Kasseler Dokfest, Bärenwzinger Berlin, SOPHIE TAPPEINER, and Institute of Modern Art Brisbane. Melanie Jame was one of 8 nominees for the 2022 Berlin Art Prize.
The exhibition is curated by Adriana Tranca. Adriana Tranca is an independent curator, researcher and writer. She holds a Bachelor’s degree in Linguistics and one in Art History from the University of Bucharest and a Master of Fine Arts in Curating from Goldsmiths, University of London. Currently Adriana works as a freelance curator at E-WERK Luckenwalde, where she is involved in several projects. Notably, she has co-founded CURRENTS, an electronic music festival that combines contemporary art and live electronic music, showcasing both established and emerging artists. Adriana’s curatorial practice is socially engaged, as evidenced by her involvement in organizing Speculative Properties (2023), a protest exhibition against real estate speculation in Berlin-Kreuzberg that forced artists out of their studios – a project that attracted the attention of the Berlin Senate. She has recently contributed to an artist book by Šejla Kameri?, published by Distanz Verlag.
