* nun hosts

Love is not Art by Fransien van der Putt & Vera Sofia Mota 

30.07 - 20.08.17 
Ä . Sundays . 6pm - 1am

This Sunday nun is celebrating its opening with the video installation Love is not Art by Vera Sofia Mota and Fransien van der Putt in the Ä cellar. [Read More]

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Love is not Art (2017, video installation by Vera Sofia Mota, Fransien van der Putt)

`You wouldn`t have known her, you`d have seen her everywhere at once, in a hotel, in a street, in a train, in a bar, in a film, in yourself, your inmost self, when your sex grew erect in the night, seeking somewhere to put itself, somewhere to shed its loads of tears.` (Marguerite Duras, The Malady of Death, 1986)

A woman in front of a Skype camera having an intimate conversation with an invisible other. An endless stream of words that overlap. You try to grasp meaning, story, sense but it only holds on for a little while. Love is not Art is an immersion into an individual speaking her mind and a confrontation with the contemporary conditioning of art and life. It raises questions about performance and representation in an age of digital communication. Who is on the other side? Are you there? The silence of the other is a challenge we have to face time and again…

This artwork is a glimpse into the intimate friendship of two women and artistic partners. Fransien van der Putt and Vera Sofia Mota have been collaborating for almost ten years. In 2013, during a residency in Den Haag, The Netherlands, they worked on how associative speech could be intensified without falling into an empty collection of words and phrases. They explored how sense could be created out of a random input of words, names or concepts.

Love is not Art is like the noise of the world, the sound of society and discourse performed in a specific channel, a digital medium. We want to understand words, be articulate with them, as they produce meaning, create sense. This might not always be true, we might be frustrated with it.

Is she lonely or merely alone? Aren’t we all are in the end? Isn’t that a very boring fact? Who are we talking to? Can we stand the silence of the other? Art needs lack, gaps, the reality of post-human measurements, rhythm and size. Love is not art.

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Vera Sofia Mota (1982) is a Portuguese artist based in Berlin, working in the fields of choreography, video and visual art. She studied dance, choreography, philosophy and performance in Lisbon and Arnhem. Mota is interested in how `many things` ecologically relate in art and life and how these relations can be practiced. She wonders about the ethics and politics of this practice. www.verasofiamota.com

Fransien van der Putt (1965) is a dramaturge and critic from Amsterdam. She studied Theatre studies at UVA, mixed text and sound at Radio 100 for 15 years, and currently works with a.o. Vera Sofia Mota, Lana Coporda and Branka Zgonjanin. She has a special interest in the body in relation to archiving and historiography, one focus being the paradoxical relation to discourse, developed by dance practitioners in Holland. 

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​* Love is not Art (Video Still), 2017, Video-installation, Variable dimensions, 10’14’’
Concept: Fransien van der Putt & Vera Sofia Mota
Starring: Fransien van der Putt
Recording: Vera Sofia Mota, Den Haag (Skype), 2013
Editing: Helle Lyshøj

Thanks to: Ana Rita Manuel, Mario Hoetzel, Heinz Schwarzzenberger and Anna Chwialkowska.

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nun Ä Weserstrasse 40 12045 Berlin +49 (0) 1702217225 nunnachrichten@gmail.com http://www.ae-neukoelln.de/