On Sunday 3 July 2016, If I Can’t Dance will present a performance by Snejanka Mihaylova, as part of the Performance Biennial—a self-organised initiative unfolding at various locations in Athens and the island Cythera. For the occasion Mihaylova will perform a reading of Acoustic Thought in a church in the village of Mylopotamos on Cythera. The performance will be followed by a talk with If I Can’t Dance, I Don’t Want To Be Part Of Your Revolution curator Susan Gibb.

Acoustic Thought is a poetic exegesis of the Gospel of Thomas: an apocryphal gospel found at Nag Hammadi in Upper Egypt in 1945, containing 114 sayings of Jesus. According to Mihaylova, the Gospel of Thomas “is a poem that listens, where the written is not simply the record of a voice but a radically different dimension of cognition that emerges as an acoustic realm in the formation of thoughts.”

The publication was made alongside her commission for If I Can’t Dance within Edition V – Appropriation and Dedication (2013–2014). Full details of the book can be found here. 

The Performance Biennial takes place from the 23 June to 4 July 2016. It begins in the occupied cultural space of Green Park, Athens, and then opens out to embrace the park Pedion tou Areos, before departing via boat from Piraeus to Cythera on the 1 July. Under the title No Future this guerrilla biennial will bring together forms of artistic, political and theoretical practice and discourse questioning the potential of a collective refusal to a referred futurity. The Performance Biennial is initiated and organised by Gigi Argyropoulou, Vassilis Noulas and Kostas Tzimoulis. Further information and the full programme is available here.

The book is made possible with support from the Creative Industries Fund NL and the Mondriaan Fund.