In Eat Your Enemy #4 I don’t want to want, Janine Eisenaecher appropriates John Cage’s lecture “Composition as Process“ (1958) in order to discuss the at times invisible work of artists and the need for solidarity and care within a highly competitive field. In the performance, Eisenaecher juxtaposes Cage’s philosophy of being in the world through listening, and his aesthetic concept of performance with the politics, economies, and discourses of the field of contemporary art, and with the notion of artistic labour in our current, turbo-capitalist era asking: What work is necessary to actually reach the state Cage talks about?

Dealing with the material conditions of artists’ work (and life), Eisenaecher openly and honestly talks about herself – her identity, her social status, her own experiences, her feelings, her personal economic situation, her privileges as well as her precarity. In doing so, she aim, primarily, to analyse and making visible the invisible processes and aspects of artists’ work that are often undetected or ignored.

Janine Eisenaecher was a founder member of the Berlin-based performance collectives Berlin n@work, (e)at_work, and Eisenaecher/Harder CLAIMS (all 2005/06-2011). She was a co-curator of the monthly performance art event Performer Stammtisch (2007-2011) and of the Platform Young Performance Artists (2010 and 2011) in Berlin. She is a board member of the self-organised art association Flutgraben e.V. in Berlin (since 2008) and part of the artist group and collective institution-critical practice Inverse Institution (since 2011). Since 2006, Janine presented her works in various, mostly self-organised performance art-related events and festivals across Europe and North America. She studied Theatre, Comparative Literature, and Philosophy at Freie Universitaet, Berlin, and holds an M.A. degree in Theatre Studies. Janine is the 2017 Goethe-Institut New Zealand Artist in Residence and currently based in Wellington.

Saturday 25 March @ Audio Foundation, doors open 5.00pm
koha