Julidans Extended: Us Swerve
Alex Baczynski-Jenkins’s Us Swerve (2014) is a choreographic score for performers on rollerblades who orbit one another while reciting, remixing and reformulating fragmented lines of poetry that meditate desire.
A game of attraction and repulsion in a poetry performance on roller skates.
Performed in public spaces within the Stedelijk Musesum Amsterdam, this contingent, polyphonic script circulates among the performers and is perpetually altered by their movements, attitudes and affects. Through their continued speech, the performers begin to channel a queer archive of verses and inflections, including lines from writers such as Essex Hemphill, Eileen Myles and Langston Hughes. The rollerbladers both move through, and are set in motion by, these articulations of desire and the sensuality of repetition.
Alex Baczynski-Jenkins (born 1987, London) lives and works in Warsaw and London. Previous and forthcoming solo exhibitions include: Kunsthalle Basel, Switzerland (Sep-Oct, 2019); Foksal Gallery Foundation, Warsaw (2018); and Chisenhale Gallery, London (2017). Baczynski-Jenkins has also presented work at: Migros Museum of Contemporary Art, Zurich (2018); Palais de Tokyo, Paris; Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw (both 2017); Swiss Institute Contemporary Art, New York; Muzeum Sztuki, Łódź (both 2016); and Basel Liste (2014). He is co-founder of feminist and queer project space Kem in Warsaw. Kem have recently realised projects at the Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw (Kem Care, 2017) and are currently on a one-year residency at the Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art (Three Springs, 2018-2019). He was a fellow at the Home Workspace Program, Beirut between 2012-2013. In 2018, he was the recipient of the Arts Foundation Award and the Frieze Artist Award.
The presentation of Baczynski-Jenkins’s Us Swerve is part of an ongoing collaboration between Julidans and the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam. In 2017, the two organizations collaboratively presented choreographer Ligia Lewis’s minor matter (2016).
