17 – 21.10.2016
Workshop with Deborah Bowmann
‘You say yes I say no you say stop I say go go go’ workshop, led by Deborah Bowmann, develops around the ideas of elaborating and working with and for fictional identities.
The workshop aims to concentrate on the poetic that lies in the articulation of an identity, a practice and a specific context; in the interference of these parameters. On the perspective of ‘branding’, where the notion the identity of the person selling is key, one of the core idea is to extend the thinking of the notion of creativity beyond the production itself but as just one of the factors of what really matters: how, why, where, to whom and by whom it is made for.
‘You say yes I say no, You say stop I say Go go go’ is not only a workshop but also a collaboration of the Dirty art students to a Deborah Bowmann show taking place by the end of the week, inviting them through the form of 4 new artists that the students are to build, which practices and personalities are to be pertinent, challenging, surprising and coherent.
The week can be thought in term of four main moments: our presentation and a general discussion around the ideas expressed above, the elaboration of the practice and the personality of a series of fictional artistic identities by groups of students, the production of a selection of works by these same groups and the elaboration and the setting up of the exhibition.
Deborah Bowmann is a project situated at the crossroads of an exhibition space, a corporation and a fictional
identity. Created in Amsterdam, December 2014, by French artists Amaury Daurel and Victor Delestre, it is
now located in Brussels. It is a means for these artists to think about ‘the shop’ not just as an exhibition context,
but also as a medium – as a space, an ideology and an economy to be modelled and redefined constantly.
Deborah Bowmann generates an experimental artistic economy, which functions in both a practical and theoretical
sense. It is through the production of exhibitions, that a model of this economy is activated, in which parody
and a unique aesthetic genre collide.
The subversive nature of Deborah Bowmann is materialized from both the appropriation and the fusion of
art gallery and shop, as norms and codes belonging to each of these commercial spaces become subjects of
artworks. Making performance melt into reality, Deborah Bowmann’s representatives perform and parody the
figures of the businessman, gallery owner and artist. They create scenes peopled by mannequins and air stewardesses,
and hand out invitations to their show wearing suits, roller-skating through the streets of Amsterdam.
The fictional character of ‘Deborah Bowmann’ herself signs artworks for each of the exhibitions. The price list
is an artwork that one may buy, the music accompanying the shows is commissioned to the artists and financial
accounting is turned into a performance.
Deborah Bowmann establishes a new organizational model in which artist-run space and the department store
meet, which bears both discursive and practical functions. This is characterised by constant dialogue and exchange
between aesthetics and economics, their associating ideologies and the appropriation and subversion of
their codes – the mise en oeuvre of an economic system.