Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker: Work/Travail/Arbeid

The starting point for Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker’s Work/Travail/Arbeid is a simple question: Can choreography be performed in the form of an exhibition? To answer that question, she reinterpreted her dance performance Vortex Temporum (2013), which was originally performed in a theater, for the radically different temporal and physical circumstances of a museum; the original length of the work was expanded into cycles of nine hours, and it was adapted to the specific characteristics of the space. The original version of the exhibition, at the WIELS centre for contemporary art, Brussels, lasted nine weeks in 2015. An abridged travel version of the exhibition will be re-choreographed and re-created for the unique space of MoMA’s Donald B. and Catherine C. Marron Atrium for nine consecutive days. 

Credit: Exhibition overview from museum website.

Whether you go or not,  Work / Travail / Arbeid: Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, features newly commissioned essays. This multi-volume boxed catalogue mirrors the temporal structure of the exhibition, documenting the full duration of De Keersmaeker’s ambitious project and parsing out its unique construction.