Lisa Premke

The exhibition also includes large-format stained glass paintings, adhesive film collages and sound sculptures: converted fitness equipment that can be activated by the audience.


For the Performance Tension Orchestra, resonance chambers with violin, guitar, viola and harp strings are attached to the bodies of four bodybuilders. The athletes hold their classical poses for as long as possible, briefly tuning the strings to the correct notes. For a fleeting moment, this creates a fragile situation in which four musicians can play a composition written especially for the occasion.

In this tableau vivant, athletes and musicians alike strive for technical precision – and together fail at the limits of what is possible. The constant tension of a string with exactly the same force can hardly be maintained for the duration required by the musicians. Everyone strives to do their job as best they can in this unusual situation: they play music, they hold their pose – they are not performing, they are working.

Both bodybuilders and musicians invest countless hours in perfecting their movements. And yet these movements are evaluated very differently by society: in terms of normative ideas, artistic recognition and presumed class affiliation – especially when it comes to bodies that are read as female.

In an attempt at joint creation and joint failure, Lisa Premke brings together two disciplines of aesthetic-functional physicality. Tension Orchestra thus also negotiates the social value of perfection, usefulness and productivity, calling it into question at the moment of exhaustion.


Curated by Nina Marlene Kraus

• Composer: Ioannis Loukos
  
• Musicians: Clara Baesecke, Noey Gvili, Julia Jolanta Czerniawska
  
• Bodybuilders: Almuth Jabs, Beate Edwards, Elisabeth Kammerer, Nicole Görs
  
• Instrument maker: Mohamed Khoudi