INGRID HORA
Ingrid Hora
Bien
Vernissage, Saturday, 27th July 2019
July 28 – October 05 2019
Press release
comunicato stampa
Pressetext
In her first one-woman show at the gallery, Ingrid Hora will fill its spaces with an interactive performance on the evening of the inauguration. Traces of it will subsequently remain in the form of a sound installation.
The show celebrates the different characteristics of a bee colony replicated by the groups of participants through guided actions. Participants will receive a brief sheet of instructions and form groups to perform a variety of actions side by side, then, at the end, will join together in a single grand action.
Ingrid Hora has adapted the performance from the research of the famous behaviourist Thomas D. Seeley, who has been carrying out meticulous studies on the life of bees for decades, publishing the results in Honeybee Democracy (2014). His discoveries are regarded in various social and economic contexts as promising and farsighted approaches to anti-hierarchical and intelligent action for the development of a democracy of consent. The queen bee is not an absolute sovereign: on the contrary, the bees decide together as a swarm, explore a fact collectively and have an animated discussion to come to a final agreement for the common good.
With this performance, Hora is inaugurating a brand new set of works in which she will stage experiments on socio-political conditions. Much like the sculptures she has produced in the last few years to examine the common action of a collective in an altered context, this performance investigates how people interact as soon as they find themselves in an unusual context. The purpose of the action is for a group of individuals to experience possible swarm-like behaviours. In Ingrid Hora’s performance, the participants become part of a larger community whose sole aim is to work together to ensure the continuity and future of the group.
At the same time, it poses the question of the extent to which acting in constantly reshaping interconnected, interactive networks is a fundamental and integral part of the human being, or whether in our age of individualism we have already forgotten the ability to act flexibly together.