May 26–June 16, 2019, at Q18
The Canadian artist and dancer Emma Waltraud Howes is presenting her solo exhibition Scores for Daily Living at Q 18, which links internalized and externalized concepts in the form of movements in space with chalk drawings as notations on the floor. They resonate with inner narratives, life stories inscribed individually into the body, as well as embodied norms and values and are translated into conscious structures of movement that in turn give rise to ephemeral chalk drawings with the aid of drawing tools created specifically for this purpose.
With her participative work, her performance, as well as an intensive workshop, Emma Waltraud Howes’ Scores for Daily Living invites recipients to actively take part in the exploration of their own body in the exhibition space. On the basis of eight open instructions on the wall, she initiates a performative potential for the recipients for their individual reflection by means of movement and drawing as artistic forms of expression. The chalk notations that accumulate on the floor over time overlap, become blurred, and in doing so constitute continuously new systems of signs and narratives in space and time.
Emma Waltraud Howes explores various modes in which bodies can relate to their spatial and social environment by overcoming internalized boundaries in ways that are as poetic as they are philosophical, as dancerly as they are artistic. Reciprocal translations between movement and drawing in process-oriented compositions feed Howes’ interdisciplinary works, which manifest as multiple reconfigurations between body and space in conceptual practices. In the process, the close observation of gestures, which results in an expanded choreographic practice, simultaneously culminates in graphic components. In Emma Waltraud Howes’ Scores for Daily Living, movement, drawing, notation, and social interaction intertwine to offer recipients a multilayered space of reflection for their active exploration.
Scores for Daily Living is being curated by Julia Katharina Thiemann within the scope of the exhibition series >de-situate?!< at Q18 in Cologne.