‘Ante Phylloxera’
Rochelle Goldberg, Veit Laurent Kurz, Stefan Tcherepnin, Hanna Törnudd and friends
Performance: Saturday 7 October 6.00pm to 8.00pm
South Street Arts Centre, 21 South St, Reading RG1 4QU, UK
Exhibition: Saturday 14 October to Saturday 11 November 2017
Opening times: Tuesday to Saturday 10.00am to 2.00pm
Jelly, Unit 53, Broad Street Mall, Reading RG1 7QE, UK
Reading International is proud to present ‘Ante Phylloxera’, a project by New York and Berlin based artists Rochelle Goldberg, Veit Laurent Kurz, Stefan Tcherepnin and Hanna Törnudd.
‘Ante Phylloxera’s title is taken from the name of a wine named after a 2010 vintage created from a 150-year old, un-grafted Cabernet Franc in Touraine that escaped phylloxera in the nineteenth century, and as a metaphor for unlikely ingredients, the project synthesises historical and contemporary cultural moments, this time in the local environment of the English town of Reading.
An initial installation will act as the setting for a performance by Kurz and Tcherepnin’s band Steit at South Street Arts Centre, with invited participants as part of a day of events to open Reading International’s autumn season.
This will be followed by an exhibition of work by Goldberg, Kurz, Tcherepnin and Törnudd in partnership with the local organisation Jelly, created in response to the multifarious international and local cultural environment of Reading. If the town is home to a recent rise in the digital economy within the unlikely context of rural life – the latter’s history includes Reading Abbey, one of the first international hubs (abbeys are often seen as the first global corporations) – as well as Berkshire’s traditional bucolic landscape, then the third element of the project links to historical trans-nationalism in other eccentric ways.
The release of a 10” gatefold vinyl record, for example – the first by the band Steit (Kurz and Tcherepnin), the cover of which will include photographs that depict participants in Reading dressed in feudal costumes made by Kurz’s mother in Frankfurt – is redolent of the medievalism of the Pre-Raphaelites, 1970s Kraut Rock, English Progressive Rock, Spinal Tap and the contemporary HBO series Game of Thrones.
Importantly, these outfits will be used in the artists’ performance and exhibition to present – much like the other projects in RI’s autumn series – a complex looping of historical and contemporary reference points in art and music, as well as new symbolic possibilities for contemporary art and culture in regional locations.
For further information and images, please contact Kirsten Cooke, Reading International Assistant Curator on kirsten@readinginternational.org / +44 (0)118 378 8050
This event is organised in collaboration with Ludlow 38’s 2017 curatorial resident Saim Demircan, following ‘Steit Night’, a concert by Steit, with special guests Jonathan Gean, Jonathan Haffner, Michael Pollard, Taketo Shimada and Sergei Tcherepnin, that took place in Brooklyn in April.