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DANCE PLATFORM

02.11 / 20:00

NU Performance Festival II:
MARTIN CREED /UK/
´Variety Performance ´

Concept and Realization: Martin Creed
Band: Martin Creed, Keiko Owada, Karen Hutt
Duration approximately 1 h
Ticket: 100/150
NB! The Performance is in English

"When I'm doing music work I want to do visual work, and when I'm doing visual work I want to do music work. For me they are more or less the same, in both being things I try to do. I like them both. I like listening to music when I'm making things, and I like looking at things when I'm playing music." – Martin Creed
The variety show, an old-style theatrical genre, is predictably unpredictable and all-inclusive, offering Creed a place to combine words, music and the visual—a fittingly open-ended platform for his constantly inquisitive and imaginative expression, and a chance, as he says, "to try to put everything in it." The show's format is fluid—improvised around a basic structure—and much of Creed's performance will be determined in the days leading up to the event.
Best known as a visual artist, Martin Creed's wide-ranging art is characterized by its inimitable blend of pop, absurdity, deadpan humor and pathos. His engaging artworks are at once modest and provocative, slipping into our awareness just enough so that we become conscious of ourselves. Their straightforward appeal and unassuming nature is perhaps best summed up by a text piece, first exhibited in 2000, which reads "the whole world + the work = the whole world." His gallery installations and events often upend the traditional formality of viewing art, using the simplest of means. In one his best known installations, Work no. 200: half the air in a given space (1998), a gallery was filled with party balloons containing exactly half the air in the room, enveloping the viewer with festive surroundings that contrasted with the work's spare title. His works often incorporate mechanical and human sounds, like amplified metronomes beating time or a grand piano banging its lid open and shut.
Creed's songwriting, musical compositions, performances and lectures have run parallel to his visual work, and have been a major aspect of his creative output since the beginning of his career in the late 1980s. He has noted that he first began performing for the same reason he began making sculpture: out of "the desire to say hello, to try to communicate somehow." Creed's sculptures, installations and drawings come from the objects, words, and sounds of everyday life; his music, similarly, maximizes basic building blocks to make songs and compositions that are stripped-down yet upbeat and playful, their lyrics elemental and entertaining.

Martin Creed was born in 1968 in Wakefield, England. From the age of three he lived in Glasgow, Scotland. Between 1986 and 1990 he studied at the Slade School of Fine Art, London. After art school he lived and worked in London until 2001, when he moved to Alicudi, Italy. He currently lives and works in London. In 2001, he was awarded the prestigious Turner Prize for his Tate Gallery, London installation, Work No. 227: The lights going on and off (2001), in which a room was thrown in and out of darkness every few seconds. Recent solo exhibitions include, "I Like Things," Fondazione Nicola Trussardi, Milan, Italy (2006); Gavin Brown's Enterprise (2005); The Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne, Australia (2005); Centre for Contemporary Art, Ujazdowski Castle, Warsaw, Poland (2004); and Kunsthalle Bern, Switzerland (2003). In 2000, the Public Art Fund presented his neon work Everything is Going to Be Alright in Times Square.

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