Communal Words: How can the art institution support non-normative art writing?
Adam Nasser Benmakhlouf (they/them/theirs) is an artist, researcher and writer based across Dundee and Glasgow. At the basis of Benmakhlouf’s showcase is a performance developed during their PhD, titled Magenta Velour Glove. Benmakhlouf uses the format to draw out the interpersonal, psychic and social dynamics of working together within lateral power structures and using anarchic methods.
Magenta Velour Glove is an experimental performance work that includes a new original script and slideshow of drawings by Adam Benmakhlouf, and a music suite by George Kypridemos and Taner Kemirtlek. The twenty-minute single scene tracks the lowkey vicious power plays between two queer art workers who are the sole attendees of a political meeting of S.A.W.S. (Scottish Art Worker Solidarity), and their curdling attempt to do community organising without a boss.
The one act play follows in real time their interactions, and particularly the pernicious power dynamics that can occur in nonhierarchical working structures. Ultimately, the tyranny of structurelesness causes a series of ruptures. The meeting crumbles. The pessimism of the scripted dialogue is countered by the tender warmth of the collaboration that is unfolding between Adam, George and Taner before and during the performance, as they sensitively support one another throughout this multimedia experiment.
This writing develops Benmakhlouf’s primary research thematics, which consider the productive possibilities and the challenges of informalised work practices within environments of cultural production. This research spans both the institutional and the para-institutional settings. Benmakhlouf looks in particular to the traditions and lineages of queer collectivity, seeing the intersectional relevance of these methods to decolonial and class struggles.
The one act play follows in real time their interactions, and particularly the pernicious power dynamics that can occur in nonhierarchical working structures. Ultimately, the tyranny of structurelesness causes a series of ruptures. The meeting crumbles.
George Kypridemos (they/them/theirs) is an improviser, pianist and researcher. Their research-practice revolves around the study of free improvisation as a domain of de-colonial work. Influenced by noise music and feminist practices in free improvisation, they approach the art-form as a fertile space for examining spatial power relations, and awakening embodied modes of ‘knowing’ that have become silenced by and within the systems of capitalism and colonialism.
Taner Kemirtlek (he/him/his) is a pianist, composer, improviser, transcriber and teacher. He continues to draw interest from sound as a form of healing and therapy and deriving inspiration from ancient sources to reflect humanity’s eternal themes of Love and Death, vulnerability, loss and immortality through a queer spiritual lens.
Adam is working on their research at the University of Dundee.
CONNECT WITH ADAM
E-mail: 2474411@dundee.ac.uk
Instagram: @adambenmakhlouf
Twitter: @adambenmakhlouf