David Weber-Krebs
David Weber-Krebs studied French literature and religious sciences in Fribourg and Berlin and graduated from the Mimeschool at the Theatershool in Amsterdam. His work is an effort to combine philosophical and political interrogations around metaphysics, romanticism or the sublime with reflections on the mechanisms and potential of a situation given in a theatre. His work cultivates ambiguity, between transcendence and immanence, between fascination and critical distance.
David develops ideas that find their realisation in performances, films and installations. His recent works are this performance (2004), Fade out (2005), Sacre (2006), the words Jonathan said (2007) and Among the Multitude (2009). His lecture performances include The Consequence of Infinite Endings (2005), Erschauern/Begreifen (2008), Performance (Robert Morris Revisited, 2010) and Among the Multitude (2010), Into the Big World (2011). David collaborates collaborates in his research project with Jan-Philipp Possmann. He also works regularly with visual artist Alexander Schellow, as in Miniatures (2009-2011) and Een Voorspel (2010). David was co-founder of LISA, a collective of makers based in Amsterdam.
Catalog of Situations
With CATALOG OF SITUATIONS Jan-Philipp Possmann and David Weber-Krebs want to investigate art history as a history of situations. They look at aesthetics from a perspective of social encounter. In this view an aesthetic experience becomes a characteristic way of experiencing a situation as structured space and time. In an aesthetic situation the subject separates a specific space and timespan from the continuum of experiences and distances himself from his surrounding. They investigate these situations in their social dimensions and develop strategies to denote and discuss the net of relations between beholder and surrounding.
Drawing from their practical experience as dramaturge and director having worked together on several theater creations as well as from an interest in aesthetic theory, Jan-Philipp and David have developed several modules: a series of lecture performances and performances to be presented in theaters and art institutions; an online discussion board and archive for theoretical research; a seminar on aesthetics of reception for academic institutions and art schools; collaborative public programs of artistic and scientific presentations and talks to which they invite artists and scientists. While the online platform is mainly their private work tool, the other modules aim at developing a language for communicating aesthetic situations in greater depth, drawing from the languages of academic discourse as well as performance, theater and visual arts. In the course of the research since 2008 David and Jan-Philipp Possmann created a body of four lecture performances that are available for presentation and have been performed in various venues in- and outside the Netherlands. In spring 2011 the research is the base for the seminar ‘Performing Presentation/Presenting Performance’ at the Dutch Art Institute, ArtEZ.
Selected publications
Spectacle, spectacular and a piece of wood, in: Minor gestures and their monstrous little brothers: the ‘spectatorship of the catastrophic, RTRSRCH Vol. 1 No. 1, Amsterdam 2009
archive
- Lecture performance Frascati CATALOG OF ENCOUNTERS
- Lecture performance 'The consequence of infinite endings'
- Seminar proposition CATALOG OF SITUATIONS
- Research proposal CATALOG OF SITUATIONS