Johanna Billing, Each Moment Presents What Happens (Video Still), 2022. Image courtesy the Artist and Hollybush Gardens, London © Johanna Billing.
Johanna Billing, Each Moment Presents What Happens (Video Still), 2022. Image courtesy the Artist and Hollybush Gardens, London © Johanna Billing.
Johanna Billing, Each Moment Presents What Happens (Video Still), 2022. Image courtesy the Artist and Hollybush Gardens, London © Johanna Billing.
Free entry
11 Oct 2023 -14 Jan 2024
Gallery 2
| Monday | Closed |
| Tuesday | 11am–6pm |
| Wednesday | 11am–6pm |
| Thursday | 11am–9pm |
| Friday | 11am–6pm |
| Saturday | 11am–6pm |
| Sunday | 11am–6pm |
Please note on Tues 24 Oct and Sat 11 Nov 2023, Gallery 2 will be closed.
Whitechapel Gallery is committed to making all of our exhibitions as accessible as possible for every visitor. Please contact access@whitechapelgallery.org if you would like to discuss a particular request and we will gladly discuss with you the best way to accommodate it.
For complete access information about the gallery, please visit https://www.whitechapelgallery.org/visit/access/.
Please note, there is low lighting in the exhibition space.
Each Moment Presents What Happens (2022) is a film realised over several years by artist Johanna Billing (b.1973, Sweden) in collaboration with staff and students from several Bristol schools, as well as other invited guests. The work centres upon a reinterpretation of the American composer and music theorist John Cage’s 1952 performance piece Untitled Event (Theater Piece No. 1).
Untitled Event was uniquely staged at Black Mountain College, the renowned US experimental liberal arts school (1933–1957). The original performance featured artists from different disciplines, such as dancer Merce Cunningham and visual artist Robert Rauschenberg, each simultaneously improvising solos. It is widely regarded as the first artistic ‘happening’ and, despite being undocumented, inspired the emergence of new collective and multi-media art forms.
Given the impossibility of recreating Cage’s Untitled Event, the students in Bristol instead imagined what could have happened. Billing’s film shows them experimenting with various forms, including spoken word, dance, drawing and DJing, against the backdrop of daily school life. As in Cage’s original work, all experiences – on and off ‘stage’ – are equally valid.
By encouraging learning through process, chance and failure, the project raises important questions about artistic freedom, experimentation and imagination at a time when these seem under increasing pressure and scrutiny.
Commissioned by Bristol Grammar School to commemorate the opening of the 1532 Performing Arts Centre. Produced by Josephine Lanyon in association with Bristol City Council. Supported by the University of the West of England.
#EachMomentPresentsWhatHappens
Johanna Billing (b.1973, Jönköping, Sweden; lives and works in Stockholm) has been making video works since 1999 that weave together music, movement and rhythm. Merging the production modes of collective live events and workshops with a cinematic language, the films often focus on aspects of learning and how time plays a key role in that process. Billing in part directs the participants and in part activates a series of improvisations around the notion of performance and the possibility it holds to explore issues of the public and the private as well as the individual in the society as a whole. Billing often addresses political climates and cultural specificities. She transforms through a documentary method, her filmmaking in a fictive space to examine actual and contrived events and how that filmed compression illuminates their overlap. Billing’s videos often feature modified scores and music composed by the artist or in close dialogue with participants, using sound as an essential device for collaboration and communication.
