Vienna, October 4, 2016

21er Haus Museum of Contemporary Art

Quartier Belvedere Arsenalstraße 1 1030 ,

Museum Hours: Tu: 11 am – 6 pm We: 11 am – 9 pm Th – Su: 11 am – 6 pm open on public holidays

Press Downloads: 21erHaus.at/21h_en/press

Contact: Press 21er Haus +43 1 795 57-338 [email protected]

Edgar Arceneaux, Until, Until, Until…, 2015. Performance view, Three-Legged Dog, New York, November, 2015. Frank Lawson. Photo: Paula Court.

Edgar Arceneaux LIVE N' ACTION with live soundtrack by Ray 7 (Underground Resistance) & Rupert Huber (TOSCA)

October 25 & 26, 2016 University of Applied Arts Vienna & 21er Haus SCREENING AND PERFORMANCE

October 26, 2016 | 5 pm Until, Until, Until… A Performa Commission Filmscreening with Q&A by Claudia Slanar (in English) Blickle Kino at 21er Haus | Screening: 5 Euro

October 26, 2016 | 8 pm A Time to Break Silence Performance with live soundtrack by Ray 7 (Underground Resistance) & Rupert Huber (TOSCA). With a guest appearance by Renée von Herzen. 21er Haus | Performance admission free with valid ticket | Combined ticket: 10 Euro

October 26, 2016 | 10 pm Afterparty with DJ-Set by Ray 7 (UR) FLUC | Ticket: 7 Euro or 5 Euro with 21er Haus ticket

On October 26 the 21er Haus will be celebrating American artist Edgar Arceneaux’s Europe film premiere of Until, Until, Until…, which was produced from footage of his first live performance with the same title. The play was commissioned by Performa, New York City’s performance biennial, in November 2015 and won the biennial’s Malcolm McLaren-Price.

Until, Until, Until… investigates the infamous 1981 performance of Broadway legend Ben Vereen, televised nationally as part of Ronald Reagan's inaugural celebration. Intended as an homage to vaudevillian Bert Williams—America’s first mainstream black entertainer—the final 5 minutes of the performance were censored for the television audience, causing Vereen’s biting commentary on the history of segregation and racist stereotypes in performance to be lost on viewers at home. Until, Until, Until… is based on the footage that never aired that night. Arceneaux’s commission, a mise-en-scène of the inaugural party, foregrounds the past, illuminating the enduring presence and impact of history in the present. The piece questions the truth of past narratives, and creates an opportunity to reconsider our collective understanding of historic events. The performance immersed the audience in the scenery of the presidential celebration, where the relationship between past and present, experience and memory, and fantasy and reality are blurred as they are filtered through time and the television screen.

After the hour-long screening in the Blickle Kino, Claudia Slanar, Curator of the Ursula Blickle Video Archive, will converse on questions concerning topics such as historiography, censorship, black culture, and its representation in the media.

Following the screening, Arceneaux’s performance A Time To Break Silence will be re- enacted within the exhibition AI WEIWEI translocation – transformation with a live soundtrack by the Detroit DJ Ray 7 from Underground Resistance and the Austrian composer Rupert Huber from TOSCA. In the feature-length film A Time To Break Silence, Arceneaux specifically links two events from the 1960s as a means to ruminate on their legacies and implications for the future of American cities. The work is titled after Martin Luther King’s last major speech Beyond Vietnam: A Time To Break Silence from 1967, in which he decries U.S. involvement in the war as an “enemy of the poor.” Dr. King was killed exactly one year later, two days before Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey premiered in Washington, D.C.

In Arceneaux’s film, Dr. King reprises his speech in Detroit’s Saint Anne’s church, which figures as a timeless ruin, while a prehistoric man named Stargazer aimlessly explores his alien environment. Both 2001 and Dr. King’s speech address technology in dual terms, as tool and weapon, a link amplified by Arceneaux’s collaboration with Underground Resistance, Detroit techno music innovators, who produced the musical elements for the film. With these intertextual references, Arceneaux’s work stages how the technologies we use are produced by the same evolutionary forces that produced us.

October 25, 2016 | 7 pm Beyond Time and Race: Edgar Arceneaux Rap Session with Dr. Renée Gadsden Presentation of films and conversation (in English) University of Applied Arts Vienna | free admission

The day before Live N’ Action at the 21er Haus, Dr. Renée Gadsden will converse with Edgar Arceneaux on his artistic practice and topics such as racial discrimination, black culture, and memory.

In collaboration with Performa New York, University of Applied Arts Vienna and the Ursula Blickle Video Archive. With the kind support of the US-Embassy and the U.S. Mission to the OSCE. Medienpartner: Superfly

Further Information about the participants

Born in 1972, Los Angeles-based artist Edgar Arceneaux received a BFA from the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena and a MFA from the California Institute of the Arts in Valencia. He is internationally renowned for his drawings and multi-media installations, with which he questions and re-interprets social and political structures and historical events. He had solo exhibitions at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, the Kitchen, NY, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects, LENTOS Kunstmuseum, Linz, Secession, Vienna and The Studio Museum of Harlem, New York. His work has been included in the 2008 Whitney Biennial and in the 2014Shanghai Biennial. Opening in October 2016, his solo-exhibition Written in Smoke and Fire will be on view at MIT Visual Art Center in Boston, USA.

Ray 7 is part of Underground Resistance (UR), a musical collective from Detroit (USA) that began in the late 1980s. UR related the aesthetics of early Detroit Techno to the complex social, political, and economic circumstances which followed on from Reagan-era inner-city economic recession, producing uncompromising music geared toward promoting awareness and facilitating political change. Their concept follows a strictly anti-mainstream business strategy, with which UR has exerted its portion of Detroit Techno's cultural influence towards promoting political activism.

Rupert Huber’s music integrates the sonification of given data such as airport soundscapes and includes telematic performances, events, and concerts as well as combined live/radio/webprojects. Huber’s written music explores the architecture of sound by describing a process and a space. He connects this approach of generating scores to his technique of creating objects (paintings, sculptures), distilling the essence of written music into tangible form. TOSCA is the collaboration between him and Richard Dorfmeister, who have released 14 albums over the last 20 years.

With a special guest appearance by Renée von Herzen.

Dr. Renée Gadsden (A.B. Hon., Brown University; M.F.A. and Ph.D. University of Applied Arts Vienna) is an author and educator, trained in art history, art, and cultural and intellectual history. She is currently a lecturer on Gender Studies at the Department of Art Theory of the University of Applied Arts Vienna.