We are thrilled to welcome the renowned New York-based artist Barnett Cohen, who will be hosting his workshop GARBAGE TEXTS at Kunsthall Trondheim—perfect for the language curious!
Get your tickets here.
GARBAGE TEXTS is a text-centered sound and movement workshop by New York-based artist Barnett Cohen. The workshop engages the intuitive, the poetic, and the prolific. Participants will explore text as material for movement by generating their own writing, embodying vowels, and sounding out consonants. During the workshop, participants will transcribe the details of their days, turn these days into poems, and then turn the poems into sounds and movements. Through a structured set of prompts, participants will dip below surface meaning and dig into their individual undergrounds. They will exchange words with each other, listening to their inside voices made outside. As participants let go of legibility and punctuation, their words will morph into pure acoustical presence. From there, they will trawl the formless space between sound and movement and make some shapes.
This workshop is for everyone and especially the language-curious. Everyone of all abilities and experience is encouraged to attend.
About:
Barnett Cohen shapeshifts between poet, performance maker, object fabricator, and political activist. Born in South Africa, Cohen now lives in New York. Throughout their anti-disciplinary practice, Cohen proposes a kaleidoscopic queer surrealism of futuristic theoretical concepts, engaging bodily shapes, and calls for subversive action. Frequently collapsing borders between genres and mediums, Cohen documents and synthesizes our current reality of ruined meaning, anxious forces, and unremitting violence within dominant ideologies. Their work mirrors a frenetic sense of ever-present discord. Cohen has staged performances, exhibited, and held readings at Canal Projects as part of Performa 2023, Movement Research at Judson Church, Center For Performance Research, The Exponential Festival, International Objects, The International Center of Photography, JDJ, The Institute of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, JOAN, LAXART, Human Resources, The Box, and REDCAT, City Limits, Rupert, and The Onassis Foundation. In 2021, Open Space/SFMOMA published a collection of their poems alongside those of artist and collaborator Simone Forti. Cohen has been in-residence at Skowhegan, MacDowell, NARS, Rupert, and Denniston Hill. They are a grant recipient from The Foundation For Contemporary Arts. Their work has been reviewed and featured in BOMB, The New Yorker, The New York Times, T Magazine, Artforum, hyperallergic, Cultured, The Financial Times, and Riting among others. In 2017, Cohen founded and still operates the Mutual Aid Immigration Network (MAIN), a trilingual free assistance hotline for people detained in immigration detention centers across the United States. MAIN connects people who call with bond funds and legal services that can accelerate their freedom from incarceration.
Important information:
Kunsthall Trondheim has a stair-free entrance from street level, is wheelchair accessible and has a lift. Public disability parking is available right outside our entrance. Upon arrival, you will be greeted by our host at the reception. At street level, there is an accessible restroom, and another restroom is located on our lower floor.
If you have any special requirements, please send us an email to office@kunsthalltrondheim.no or call us at (+47) 485 00 100, and we will be more than happy to help make your visit as easy and rewarding as possible.