ANDRÉ ROMÃO
THE VERTICAL STAGE
KUNSTLERHAUS BETHANIEN
opening the 22th of July at 7 pm
Kottbusse strasse 10 , Berlin
23.07 to 08.08.2010, tue. to sun., 2pm to 7 pm
+info
www.bethanien.de
ANDRÉ ROMÃO’s works usually develop from his research into a specific historical or literary situation. He expands its levels of meaning by working on the widest possible spectrum of sources and references and re-assembling them in a fresh way in the context of his work. Thus Romão’s works are always collages – in the direct or figurative sense. Romão’s preferred themes range from ethics to aesthetics, politics to poetry, and history-writing to myth, but a recurrent interest is motifs from antiquity.
His latest work The Vertical Stage offers a fresh way of reading authentic events that took place in
Mexico City – both the murder of peaceful demonstrators by the Bataillon Olímpia in October 1968, which became known as the “Night of Tlatelolco”, and the Olympic Summer Games that were realised according to plan shortly afterwards.
Romão develops this alternative interpretation by combining documentary material of the Mexican events with cleverly chosen elements from Homer’s Iliad and Antonin Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty and leading attention away from the historic reporting to the human aspect; to the exemplary individual in the collective process of history. Thus, the Olympic Games are interpreted in the sense of a collective, symbolic but unconscious act of performance: an historical “re-enactment”, a drama, acting out a specific event in the nature of a format for the stage.
The Vertical Stage encompasses texts, a series of collages, a sculpture and a slide projection.
A catalogue will be appearing for the exhibition (German/English/Portuguese) with texts by Ellen Blumenstein and André Romão.
