performance with D.J. Sven Drühl- The Arty, Show Window, Room for Art, Berlin, April 26, 2019

Nezaket Ekici is not a dancer and has no dance training, yet she loves to dance with all her heart and has done so her entire life. As a child, she wished to become a ballet dancer but was not permitted to. According to Ekici, her first "performance was in the disco" when she was only 18 years old. She was brave, confident and without shame. At that time, she already knew that her body would be the medium she would work with in the future. Movement and dance are her temperament and it is in her blood. Not least because of this she pursued fine arts and performance art in university. In “Wellspring”, Ekici recenters this cardinal belief in performance art as stemming from her earliest love of dance. The empty gallery space with its 4 large shop windows and 4 columns is the place where she will dance. Only a DJ who records live beats is with her in the room. During the performance, Ekici claims the whole room for herself. Absorbing and directing its energy and space through the movements of her body, Ekici dances until exhaustion. Guests who stand in front of the gallery watch her from outside through the shop window. However, the music can not only be heard inside the room, but is also broadcasted to the outside. The artist danced for 5 hours; 4 hours alone and the last hour together with viewers. In many ways, this ideal of the body in movement is the original fundamental artistic sacrosanct and guiding ethos behind Ekici’s opus. To her, it is the body’s actionability, fluidity, and physicality that makes it an existential medium for art—the art of performance only exists because the body may dance, may move, may alter itself and the places it inhabits. By these means, “Wellspring”, constitutes a return to Ekici’s very roots. It is the raw form through which all the experiences and enactments of her art take root; the body is simultaneously both canvas and painting; both the threshold from which all performances are introduced into vivacious being, and the art itself which brings forth new indelible delights. Being an artist and especially a performance artist is not a profession for Ekici, but rather a vocation. She is interested in the most existential matters of the body: that which is brought out through movement, joy, physical borders, passion, expression, and not in a technically perfect or conventional ‘dance.’ (Text Edited: Jono Wang Chu)

costumes, music, hi-fi sound boxes, empty gallery space

4 hours alone, 1 hour with audience

Camera and editing: Julian David Bolivar Music, Thanks: Curator and artist: Jan Kage alias Yaneq Artist: Sven Drühl Gallery Visitors