David Bernstein & Audrey CottinLecture: 'It's in the Air'

“But what is the difference between thinking and thinging? Thinking is just the thin king.”

David Bernstein combines performance, sculpture, and writing to tell stories through objects. He practices thinging, a back-and-forth process of thinking and making things. When exhibiting or performing, he tries to create an intimate space of hospitality. Bernstein is driven by obsessions such as spatulas and Fiat Multiplas. Some other themes he explores are: imaginative play, stars, language games, air, transcendental joy, rituals, abstraction, absurdism, simultiplaneous phenomena, zenwacky, loopholes, having fun and being together with others.

About the coming performance at the KABK: “I am not addressing directly the idea of good or bad in humanity, but am interested in togetherness. How can we find ways of being together when we don’t agree, when we have different interests, or even when we are violent to each other? What new situations of togetherness can we create and how can we recognize togetherness when we don’t realize it’s already present? How can language and playing with language open up a space to think differently about these issues? The performance is made by a transcendental Texas cosmic cowboy named Slim Denken (Smart Thinking).”

Bio - David Bernstein, (San Antonio, 1988) moved to Amsterdam in 2011 to pursue his masters at the Sandberg institute and after that he started a residency at the Jan van Eyck academy. He had a solo exhibition at Gallery van Gelder in Amsterdam in 2015 under the title Zenwacky. Earlier, in 2014, he did the performance There are always at least two ways of looking through a loophole at Walden affairs in The Hague.
http://www.yesyesdavid.com

Bio - Audrey Cottin (b. 1984, Saint-Mandé, France) lives in Brussels, Belgium. Cottin is a French (magician facing the wheel of fortune under the sun) artist based in Brussels. Her appearance is colourful, sculptural and spinning. She shares comfort and uneasiness of being in the company of people who don’t stop keeping this world as a continuous creative experiment. Inspired by Robert Filliou’s belief that “everybody is perfect”, Cottin has been searching for a perfect collaboration with people she encounters. This search may include experts of various knowledges, skills and perspectives. The methods of co-working are often defined by what kind of resonance is created between those people (writers, sculptors, scientists and all kinds of impressarios) and Cottin herself. She is represented by Galerie Tatjana Pieters, Ghent, Belgium