SUPERHOST 2021 – Contact Mood Share by HANNE LIPPARD
Superhost is a programme investing in a yearlong relationship between an artist or a collective practice, the museum and its participating communities, and supporting the production of artworks, performative or discursive creations.
Every year, one artist or collective is invited to be M HKA’s Superhost.
By embracing the ambiguous and interrelated dynamics of hospitality in which the host is always a guest and simultaneously the guest is always a host, M HKA affirms a longing for increased institutional transformation, permeability and exchange.
The commission materialises freely in the museum’s top floor gallery spaces and as programmes of discursive and performative events. Within the larger scale of the institution, Superhost offers an intimate space for conversation with specific artistic positions, discourses and scenes.
M HKA’s Superhost series offers a focused and shared terrain of investigation for and around a guest’s practice. Each edition is an opportunity to explore the core interests, language and expertise of our guest(s) whilst also contributing to the dissemination and further development of the work itself. The open nature of the programme welcomes various forms for exchanging and producing knowledge ranging from site-specific installations and displays of works and exhibitions, to performances, lectures, reading groups, screenings, interviews, workshops or publications.
Superhost is jointly curated by Anne-Claire Schmitz and Joanna Zielińska.
Contact Mood Share is a three-part programme focusing on language, especially the vocabulary and semiology that comes with particular social changes and developments. In a similar manner to how a word loses its meaning when repeated often enough, moving closer to sound, or sense, rather than significance, the same might be said for words that become popular due to current events. Once a word reappears with frequency through news media, political decisions, social media, and everyday speech, we tend to (often unknowingly) parrot its frequent appearance and in turn take it in our own mouths. Language has its own contagious nature, somewhat closer to a physical substance that moves between human touch and its surrounding surfaces, albeit through logic and larynx rather than fingerprints.
The words ‘contact’, ‘mood’ and ‘share’ represent imagined seasons, replacing the existing four and their weatherly changes, seeing the original seasons themselves have lost much of their relevance through both industrialisation and climate change, especially within an urban setting. The past year has made it even harder to relate to an idea of time and the use of a calendar, to make plans, expectations, events.
-Hanne Lippard, January 2021
Hanne Lippard’s project Contact Mood Share materialises through a display of artworks and a programme of events, which will vary under the specific scope of three planned seasons.
The exhibitions will feature a combination of existing works, adaptations of past projects and new productions by Lippard, forming the most generous articulation of works by the artist to date. The three displays take place in M HKA’s top floor galleries with extensions throughout further spaces of the museum traditionally dedicated to so-called hosting functions.
A programme of events consisting of discursive and performative contributions such as lectures, workshops, performances, conversations, audio and film programmes is planned through the year, while expressing a different focus per season. It is conceived collaboratively by M HKA’s Superhost, curators and guests.
Together the two parts form the seasonal conditions for research processes, rehearsals, discussions and creations.
Learn more about the first season Contact here. The Contact season dedicates its time and space to what might touch or connect one body to another, virtually as well as physically. As part of the Contact season, Hanne Lippard has prepared a programme of audio works titled A CONSTANT OF FEELINGS related to the notion of ‘contact’. The season will conclude on Saturday 12 June 2021 with an afternoon of live contributions by invited guests, taking place both physically at M HKA and via online streaming.
Contact Mood Share by Hanne Lippard is the inaugural project of M HKA’s Superhost series.
Contact Mood Share is generously supported by the Office for Contemporary Art Norway (OCA), with additional support from the Royal Norwegian Embassy in Brussels.