FOCUS ON: CHRONIC TROUBLES AND DILUTED HOURS - basis of our counterpowers
During the FOCUS ON residency, Ar Utke Ács and Martin Bas will open a research space exploring chronic illness as an embodied site of artistic production.
15.9.26
15.9.26
10.00-11.30
HAUT, Studio, Thoravej 29
The artistic research
During a two-week residency, Ar Utke Ács and Martin Bas will open a research space exploring chronic illness as an embodied site of artistic production.
They will pursue the fluctuating and multifaceted aspects of the term BODY both artists present a BODY OF WORK in which the body resonates with various forms and concepts of bodies as social, POLITICAL and poetic sites.
Departing from their respective experiences of living with auto-immune illnesses (inflammatory bowel disorder), they independently developed practices investigating the body as a political, SOCIAL and imaginative territory. This common ground allows them to investigate how the ‘sick body’ intertwines, merges and collapses with these broader interpretations of what a 'body' is, encompasses, and physically holds. The research considers the chronically ill body as a producer of situated knowledge, expanding the medical and diagnostic approach with somatic, self-explored and community-led knowledge. EXPERIENCES of fatigue, uncertainty, pain, adaptation, dependency and care serve as starting points for this common artistic enquiry.
During the FOCUS ON residency they will invite peers whose bodies and minds are affected by the limitations of CHRONIC ILLNESS Mas well as potential accomplices. They will seek to expand the dominant narratives of disability by unfolding perspectives from the disabled and queer communities that view bodily differences as vehicles of invention, resistance, intimacy and alternative ways of inhabiting the world. This way, the artists intend to expand the boundaries of how the DISABLED, the crippled and the constrained organism inhabit artistic production, within these constraints in order to build worlds, whose non-normative rules appear to foster proud, alternative postures through “positive self-sabotage, self-exploration and self-eroticism”.
Through the encounters and means facilitated by the FOCUS ON residency such as conversations, reading, movement practices, writing and gatherings, the fluctuating group will test how chronic illness shapes PERCEPTION, temporality, attention and forms of relation. We want to transform notions of productivity, presence, participation and collective life.
We aim for this temporary community to generate artistic tools, vocabularies and forms of SOLIDARITY emerging from their lived experiences of chronic illness within the performing arts and beyond.
The artists
For this residency, Ar and Martin invite practitioners living with experience of chronic illness in the Copenhagen scene to join them for their first physical meet-up. Both artists living with a chronic conditions will unfold how they both explore their limits and desires towards collaborative practices that work both in confrontation and sympoesis with their bodies.
Ar Utke Acs
Ar Utke Ács (b. 1993) works as an artist within contemporary dance and expanded choreography. They work with the poetics and politics of the body in the seams of performance, dramaturgy, text, installation, the social and the imaginary. Ar Utke Ács is busy with counterhegemonic strategies from queer and crip writing and lived experience. Collaborative and collective processes builds the core of their body of work and Ar Utke Ács often works across fields and mediums of art and research.
Ar Utke Ács is in the process of unfolding the unapparent trilogy that investigates world- and character building departing from chronically ill body-minds. The first part shivr works with claiming the monstrous body through body horror and somatics. It was created in collaboration with visual artists Fryd Frydendahl and Sofie Winther as well as a larger working group. It was co-produced with Dansehallerne (DK) and MDT (SE) and this year as a part of the Toaster Performance Biennale. The second part trembl worked with crip time, cycles and the unseen. It was created in collaboration with composer Mayara Baptista, light designers Sofia Stål and Will Zawistowski and more. trembl premiered as a part of Kselekt at The Royal Playhouse and will be presented as a part of MDT's anniversary program in 2027. Ar is currently researching for the third part rashs that will work with the euphoria and frictions of sympoesis, co-creation, through movement and voice. It will premiere as a site-responsive piece in co-production with Dansehallerne in 2028. Ar Utke Ács holds a BA in Dance Performance from Stockholm University of the Arts. They are a part of the Copenhagen-based Dance Cooperative.
Martin Bas
Martin Bas (b. 1996, Les Lilas, France) is an artist and curator working across video, performance, installation, graphic design, and publishing. Their practice explores fragmentation, care, and the intersections of art, politics, and digital mediation. Through layered video works, experimental cinema and performative gestures, they investigate power dynamics, the imprint of technology on consciousness, and the body’s negotiation with institutional structures. Their work engages with fragmented film as an expanded dispositif, intertwining moving images, live interventions, and editorial elements, which serve both as tools to explore forms of radicalized and grassroots “pedagogies”, and as tools of emotional experiences.
They hold a BA in Digital Graphic Design from the École Nationale Supérieure des Arts Appliqués et des Métiers d’Arts, as well as a BA and an MA in Fine Arts from the Haute École des Arts du Rhin. They also hold a postgraduate diploma in curation and exhibition-related professions from the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Paris. They are part of the Entropies Collective, which focuses on shaping various instances of collective practices in art and science. They are also members of Collectif Jeune Cinéma, which focuses on developing and promoting international experimental cinema in France.
Between 2024 and 2025, they reperformed several of Marina Abramovic's pieces during her retrospective exhibition at Kunsthaus Zürich. This experience deepened their engagement with meditative and somatic practices in their daily artistic and illness labour
The format
The residency serves as a framework for this first encounter of methodologies between their performance, choreography, video, installation, writing, and curatorial practices, all tied to their experience of the crip body, which they want to serve as a basis for a group conversation.