Happiness, within and without

“Happiness, within and without” is the theme of this 19th edition of Europe's preeminent international performance art festival, Live Action, curated by Jonas Stampe, Senior Curator & Senior Researcher at the Red Brick Art Museum in Beijing. For 19 years the festival has explored contemporary art's ability to meet and engage with the citizens on the street in a unique exhibition model that presents art both within the safe walls of the art institution for an intimate articulation and experience. As well as in the common ground of public space, offering unexpected aesthetic and conceptual experiences to its inhabitants. In this, Live Action stands out in the field as an event that never compromises with its two main characteristics: to be avant-garde and popular, placing art on the street, among the inhabitants. Articulating humour, joy and commitment, but of course also the seriousness with which contemporary art can apprehend the world. This year is no different.

Yet each edition is special because of the individual artists invited, their original work and their personal backgrounds. Each comes with a story, narrative or not, but a story about life with art embodied in an action. They do not play or act, they do not represent anything or anyone, but articulate their ideas and emotions through their own being. It is this persistent continuity and annual renewal that makes Live Action such an outstanding experience, presenting artists for the first time and revisiting others who have developed new work. In a programme that seeks human excellence rather than artistic failure, in other words, art that dares to be itself and nothing else.

Over the years, Live Action has experimented with different formats of presentation, responding to questions of time and presence, working with the ephemeral in the context of contemporary art, where the object is king. But also in the conscious use of different contexts of public space and in collaborations with different art institutions. After almost two decades of existence, we think we have found our own model and structure. At the very least, we have found a home in working together with an appreciative and stable art institution, 3e Våningen, which shares similar values promoting an attitude of art as experiment and poetic knowledge. To have found three public spaces in the city of Gothenburg, each with a very distinct human character. With the City Library as a symbol of popular learning, attracting users with similar cultural and intellectual interests. Or Bältesspännarparken as a beautiful urban environment of mindful tranquillity and natural framing, and in contrast, Brunnsparken with its noisy, crowded, popular, multicultural atmosphere in a hub of buses and trams connecting the city to the suburbs, but also as a meeting place and true forum for democracy and freedom of speech.

"No experiment! No experience!" Yu Hata, a famous Japanese entrepreneur and developer of hologram technology, wrote to me a few months ago, a simple but powerful motto that combines science and art, and you could say life. We need mix these spices ingredients to know how the food taste. The same is true for technology and art: if I don't write this sentence, perform this action or create this object, I won't know anything more. New experiences and new technologies emerge from new experiments, despite methodological differences. This banal truth must be understood in its most profound sense. If we don't try, we won't know. It is as simple as that.

It is a motto that Live Action reflects upon in an age dominated by chatGPT and genocide, by AI and 1360 kg bombs that wipe out entire civilian populations. In such a time, it is our social duty to give humanity a voice that is neither spectacular nor a spectacle, but utterly human. To give the artist who wants to speak her or his freedom of expression without fear of reprisal or censorship. It is everybody’s choice to talk about the atrocities that are taking place, but no one has the choice to ignore them either. Live Action is a symbol of this open artistic freedom, where the only forbidden speech is that of hate, the enemy of freedom and democracy. If art is the science of freedom, as Joseph Beuys put it, then art is also the enemy of hatred and any dehumanisation of the other.