For the ninth time the international arts exchange program Atelier Mondial and the Institute Art Gender Nature HGK Basel FHNW propose a joint project involving master’s students and international artists currently in residency at Atelier Mondial. The group exhibition DUENDE! engages with how movement and transformation are implicated in art. It attends to the challenges imposed to figuration of action in drawing, painting and sculpture; it considers the role that dance plays in cinematic narratives; and it looks at the ongoing exchanges between the choreographic, the performative and the theatrical.

The exhibition title DUENDE! is a tribute to artist Simone Forti, for whom this term is so important. In 1984 she defined dance behavior as a kind of “duende”: “a certain gear, a certain patterning of the neuro-chemical system among the many patternings of gears in the repertoire of the living being, as are the states of sleeping, or of concentrating on a problem or of sexual arousal”.

In addition, the exhibition project echoes and reverberates the topic of the Spring Symposium Fox Trot, Crab Step, Lame Duck, Roger Rabbit, Do the Pony: Animal Dancing as a Technology of Co-Evolving Bodies that will take place after the exhibition opening on 15 and 16 May 2024 at the Institute Art Gender Nature HGK Basel FHNW.