INHABIT #5 // Murat Adash
Foto: Carlotta Luke
September – November 2021
Murat Adash is a Turkish-German performance artist and choreographer whose work involves the possibilities and uses of movement for engaging social and ecological relations.
In the context of an expanded repertoire of media (video, photography, installation, text), his performance practice investigates relations and frictions between corporeality and spatiality. Since 2017, he has been developing a project that involves a novel conception of “camouflage” as a field of research and choreographic inquiry. Beyond the idea of animal or insect mimicry, Adash is interested in rethinking camouflage as a spatial act, a process through which the self is negotiated in and through space and which – like choreography – involves a transformation of the embodied self in relation to an environment.
Adash’s residency in the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics will explore this mimetic act as an inquiry into a (potential) alternate mode of dwelling in and understanding the world. His project will be developed together with local dancers as a work of “expanded cinema” involving video and live performance. Informed by the practice of contact improvisation, the work will explore the concept of camouflage as a dynamic process between dancers – a choreographic investigation that deconstructs and expands the idea of a self-contained subject.
Biography
Murat Adash received an MFA in Visual Arts from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and is currently pursuing a PhD in Art at Goldsmiths, University of London. He has held residencies at the Delfina Foundation (London, 2018), Utopiana (Geneva, 2017), Mountain School of Arts (Los Angeles, 2017), and during a one-year Istanbul Studio Grant (2016–2017) from the Cultural Foundation of Hessen (Hessische Kulturstiftung) he pursued research into social choreography. Adash’s works and performances have been exhibited internationally in such spaces as the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA), Somerset House, Mimosa House, and the Barbican, all London; Le Commun, Geneva; Mumok ,Vienn); Het Nieuwe Instituut, Rotterdam; SALT and Alt Art Space, Istanbul; Manifesta 11, Zurich; EXPO Chicago and Iceberg Projects, Chicago; Grimmuseum, Berlin, and Motorenhalle, Dresden.
