In her new project for If I Can’t Dance, Suchan Kinoshita will throw certain ‘roles’ of director, viewer and performer into play. Through staged choreographies she will think about the institutions’ role as an art centre and as a public space. A space in which visitors can enact different roles through ‘detours’ proposed by the artist. Within the spectrum of the roles of spectatorship, represented by the extremes of either distant inquiry or vital embodiment, Kinoshita aims to activate different ‘registers’.

‘Performance’ is a broadly defined concept, employed differently in various contexts. The term is related to acting and the stage, but also denotes a particular form of visual art in which body and space unite in a suitable space: a ‘white cube’, a public space, etc. Moreover, performance is connected to a capitalist vocabulary in the sense of functioning, as well as to a social and emancipatory terminology, in which it relates to ‘agency’ and ‘empowerment’. In her practice, Suchan Kinoshita unites the syntax of performance in the visual arts to the language of performance in everyday life.