The Modern Body platform examines the nature of our current existence through thematic events that curate experiences – physical, visceral, immersive and intimate.
We seek the modern body within the new worlds that emerge when different artforms intersect, collide, and modulate each other.
Akasha – Rosa Ensemble (2016) Imagine a sea, an endless sea with ships crossing it. Each wake, every wave stirred up by a ship tells us something about the past, about that ship, when and where it sailed and in what direction it went. The waves contain information, like a memory. “All goes onward and…
How do you read – Sharon Houkema (2020) Video work by Sharon Houkema (8’29”) “How do you read” poetically evokes the spirit of the former NATO bunker 5VEP in Arnhem, NL. During the Cold War 5VEP functioned as a booster station to control the pressure on a secret network of fuel pipelines, spanning from the…
Intelligent Artifacts & Breathing Spaces is the second Modern Body Laboratory edition. In this series we explore emerging themes and ideas in preparation for our next biennial festival edition, and invite you, our public, to brainstorm, experiment and experience with us! Exhibition & performance program at Broedplaats WD4X from Thursday to Saturday, 8-10 February 2018,…
Music by Daniel Cross, Florian de Backere, Jeroen Kimman, Stephanie Pan, Floris van Bergeijk and more
Modern Body Festival invited Stichting ARTEk to present an evening symposium on Alan Turing. Turing is considered the father of computer science and a pioneer in Artificial Intelligence and encryption. A panel of experts investigate his immense influence on our way of life, and speculate on the more obscure motivations behind his work and how…
During the performance ‘Tessels Oogh’, by Sarah van Lamsweerde, the audience is sensorily transported back to 1566, the year in which the Oude Kerk fell victim to the iconoclastic fury. As the Oude Kerk gradually falls dark in the evening, memories of these times are reawakened. Objects that were destroyed and stories that have fallen…
Working to fight off cold as well as the loneliness of solitary listening, Stelios Manousakis’ and Stephanie Pan’s Hot Listening Booth is a venue for intimate listening under high temperatures: a 3-person dry sauna heated by infrared light.
What exactly is the ‘modern body’? We are inclined to think of our bodies as limited to what is contained within our own skin, but technology, philosophy, spirituality, religion, and science all challenge this idea. Modern Body Festival, an initiative organized in The Hague by artists / makers / performers Stephanie Pan and Stelios Manousakis,…
Space Media Festival is an initiative by Modern Body Festival and DEZACT architectural platform. The festival took place in 2016 in Taiwan, Taipei and consisted of multiple small- to large-scale activities focusing on avant-garde experimentations traversing fields of art, architecture and urbanism. The festival took the form of a 9-day workshop-festival, where 4 invited artist-architect teams led participants in creating new works,…