H13 LOWER AUSTRIA PRIZE FOR PERFORMANCE 2024
Katharina Ernst metrics Kunstraum Niederoesterreich presents the 2024 H13 Lower Austria Prize for Performance to the artist, performer, and drummer Katharina Ernst.
In the 18 years of its existence, the H13 Prize has become a widely recognized instrument for the promotion, research, and visibility of performance at the intersection to visual arts. It is the only prize for performance in Austria.
Katharina Ernst Austrian-Malaysian artist Katharina Ernst, born 1987 in Korneuburg, started at an early age to focus on polymetric, odd, and chaotic rhythms and structures. Parallel to her studies in abstract painting at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, she already began touring worldwide with projects in the music and performance context. In her work, Ernst puts decisive emphasis on transgressing the fields of music, fine arts, and choreography, celebrating a hybrid notion of the term “composition” while allowing herself various forms of expression and translation. She has collaborated with and received commissions from artists such as Florentina Holzinger, Christina Kubisch, the Black Page Orchestra, or Kate McIntosh, to name but a few. Her performances, compositions and artworks have received international recognition at the following venues: Arsenale (Venice), Ars Electronica (Linz), Burgtheater (Vienna), Deutsches Theater (Berlin), IF Festival organized by iMAL, Center for Digital Cultures and Technology (Brussels), Jazz em Agosto (Lisbon), Kunstenfestivaldesarts (Brussels), Mattatoio (Rome), Museum of Modern Art (Zagreb), Musikverein Wien (Vienna), PACT Zollverein (Essen), Ruhrtriennale, Schinkel Pavillon (Berlin), Sophiensæle (Berlin), Théâtre de la Ville (Paris), TQW (Vienna), Wiener Festwochen (Vienna), ZKM (Karlsruhe), Zodiak Festival, HAU Hebbel am Ufer (Berlin).
With the stated goal to intensify support for the local performance scene, Kunstraum Niederoesterreich once again awards the H13 Prize in cooperation with a renowned international institution, this year Mudam Luxembourg – Musée d’Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean. In addition to the prize money and the realization of both the award-winning performance project and the accompanying exhibition at the Kunstraum, Katharina Ernst is invited to a personalized tutoring program at Mudam. With Katharina Ernst, the distinction goes to an artist whose practice systematically challenges disciplinary categories. Her award-winning project metrics transposes methods of music, polyrhythmics in particular, into an acoustic, choreographic, and spatial setting, which can be experienced as a live performance on the evening of the award ceremony and thereafter in the form of an installation.
As the jury explains in their statement: “In her post-minimalist performance concept metrics, Katharina Ernst opens up extraordinary complexity through a set of clear gestures and formal language: at the core is a percussion instrument that she uses to explore variants of polyrhythm and acoustic chaos. In collaboration with other performers, Ernst translates these musical structures into a choreography and spatial concept as if based on a score. With these translation processes, between disciplines such as music, choreography, and architecture, the artist unravels the question of how an abstract composition could be a mirror or even a model for social togetherness. In this respect, metrics not only underlines the importance of listening in a time of increasing social polarization, but also makes a substantial contribution to the discourse on the role of live arts in the exhibition context.” Jury 2024 Tom Engels (artistic director of Grazer Kunstverein and curator of the 15th Baltic Triennial) Clémentine Proby (assistant curator at Mudam Luxembourg) Frederike Sperling (artistic director of Kunstraum Niederoesterreich) Miriam Stoney (artist, author, translator)
metrics Reading the title of Katharina Ernst’s work metrics inevitably brings to mind the history of the metric, which goes back further than the definition of the meter as a standard measure of length, as it was instituted at the end of the eighteenth century in the spirit of the Enlightenment to replace previous units of measurement such as the “cubit” or “foot” based on the human body. The metric, however, is not only linked to the topic of standard gauges but also the question of measuring itself and the predominance of the “right” gauge. How big is the space and how long is the time perceived? And which gauge is appropriate to represent and perhaps even communicate these variables for someone else to imagine the space or time who has not experienced them? In this light, the metric resides somewhere between the perceptible and the imaginable – it is at once dependent on and independent of what it measures. The abstraction it extracts from the concrete becomes the subject of perception. Seconds and
Acoustic measurements are taken many times and in different ways, generating a soundscape that reveals the multi-perspectives and deviations from an untenable ideal and brings the bodies displaced from the metric back into play. Ultimately, it is the bodies themselves that produce a rhythm with the help of instruments while already carrying another within as a heartbeat or breathing. Aligning with a rhythm also entails exposing your own rhythm polyrhythmically to another – to speed it up or slow it down, to crystallize a moment of calm in the rhythmic movement, to experience the temporal movement within repetition as a pause in time. Synchronously and asynchronously to the other’s experience of time. And then there is the ambiguity of spatial confines: the axes of walls, floors, and ceilings, which Katharina Ernst measures performatively but also creatively – with paint and drawings that confront the space with its own floorplan, with spatial imagery and extensions that transcend the architectural boundaries, play with them, and enter into a polyphonic dialogue, a “polylogue” that the audience also participates in. Depending on the respective standpoints they adopt and then change, the visitors cast different perspectives on and into one another, influencing the performance itself. Their own vantage points become instrumental in defining the subject of their perception.
meters are very concrete, yet they only stand for what they measure; they are as concrete as they are abstract. If the task were to measure the metric itself and to discover that, depending on the gauge, there are completely different variables for the same space and the same time – measurements that differ, overlap, and contradict each other – how inappropriate would be the claim to define the one and only correct gauge? And how do we gauge the different views and perspectives on what we call the world or reality? What if the only “well-measured” answer to this question was the diversity of gauges? As an artist, performer, and drummer, Katharina Ernst often works with rhythm as a gauge and material for an artistic-musical measurement of the space-time experience. In metrics, she uses shakers as a rhythm instrument, played at the same time by multiple performers with alternating and different rhythms in a three-part composition. In this measuring and traversing of distance, a dancing exploration of paths through space and time, various musical rhythms diverge and converge, cross and interfere, accelerando and decelerando, to meet and contradict each other chaotically and orderly in a “polyrhythmic” structure. Discrete rhythms overlap in this polyrhythm like they do in each individual shaker: the grains or beads strike several rhythms simultaneously, dispersing time into the incalculable with each movement.
But there is no ideal point of view, no ideal or objective gauge. What seems appropriate is inseparable from the act of measuring or from the share that our lives and bodies contribute to the measures. Typically, the gauge conceals its origin, its dependency on space and time, on history and politics. The normative gauge confronts them with its authority – as an immoderate lens that claims to be independent, supposedly apolitical and neutral towards human or cultural diversity. Katharina Ernst’s performances intervene in these inappropriate gauges and take their own measurements of the inappropriate measure. Rhythm – the gauge for repetition, for beat and interval – does not stand for order and cyclical return. Rather, for a possible order that can be replaced or disrupted by another, by the polyrhythmic beat of everyday life, as it were, with its different and sometimes contradictory rhythms: a simultaneous accelerando and decelerando attempting to embrace the different demands and perspectives as diversity and portray them as the only realistic representation of coexistence with others. This is where the performance taps into the primordial domain of the performative, which goes beyond the genre turned discipline. It is at once music, fine art, performing art, and dance, and none of them alone. Just as no single gauge can suffice to measure the world in all its cultural richness, no genre or term can adequately describe Katharina Ernst’s artistic
practice. Many terms and all of them uttered at once on the margins of words and language would be needed to convey the performative moment in and through an expression. Performances by Katharina Ernst “expressly” push the artistic concept of a work to its limits. The composition is clearly structured with its three parts that specify which rhythms alternate or change in which order, how axes of movement and spatial figures merge or diverge. And yet: the polyrhythmic performance thrives on the overlaps and shifts, each of them emerging anew and only seemingly in a paradoxical singularity, planned and composed but never the same. As such, the sketchiness underlying the scores and compositions returns as an openness, leaving it to the performers to measure the space and time of the performance and the performativity of the space itself. The paradox or aesthetic of the performative resides in the fact that it can only be performed anew, but never repeated in the exact same way. In metrics, the metric returns, as it were, to or the point before the “original meter” – to the original question of gauges and their appropriateness: to a search that can only be answered performatively but never conclusively. Andreas Spiegl Art Theory and Cultural Studies, Academy of Fine Arts Vienna
Katharina Ernst metrics H13 Niederösterreich Preis für Performance 2024 H13 Lower Austria Prize for Performance 2024 Performance und Preisverleihung /Performance and award ceremony: Fr, 22.11.2024 Ausstellung /Exhibition: 23.11. – 07.12.2024 Der H13 2024 wird vergeben in Kooperation mit /is awarded in cooperation with Mudam Luxembourg – Musée d’Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean.
Konzept, Performance, Choreografie, Sound /Concept, performance, choreography, sound: Katharina Ernst Performer*innen: Hyeji Nam und /and David Schweighart Fotos /Photos: Michael Breyer Texte /Texts: Frederike Sperling, Andreas Spiegl Lektorat /Copyediting: Else Rieger Sensitivity Reading: Persson Perry Baumgartinger Übersetzung /Translation: Peter Blakeney & Christine Schöffler Grafische Gestaltung /Graphic design: Wolfgang Gosch Druck /Printer: Gerin Druck GmbH, Wolkersdorf Papier /Paper: Munken Polar, 170 g/m2 Auflage /Print run: 600 Medieninhaber /Media owner: NÖ Festival und Kino GmbH, Minoritenplatz 4, A-3500 Krems Herausgeber /Publisher: Kunstraum Niederoesterreich, Wien
Kunstraum Niederoesterreich Herrengasse 13, A-1010 Wien, www.kunstraum.net
© 2024 NÖ Festival und Kino GmbH, Kunstraum Niederoesterreich ISBN 978-3-9505011-9-3