Exhibition Text:

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96HIGH presents a series of new works delving into our cultural and social understanding of borders -
geographically, metaphorically and poetically. The exhibition is a collaboration between Bianca Hisse and Anton Benois.

In the 2-channel film ‘The New Theater of Operations’, we follow four dancers performing near militarized border areas in Northern Norway. The choreographed actions are based on exercises from the handbook ‘Rescue and Procedures in Theaters of Operations’ by the US Army, as well as movement-based games from the Theater of the Oppressed. The film blends and twists these two radically different techniques - while one rehearses for warfare, the other acts for conflict-resolution through the body.

The film develops through actions of signaling and hiding in these border spaces, appearance and
disappearance of the body. The choreographed actions in the landscape function as a reenactment of image references from real-life sources where the military and the performative intersect. The performers embody the ambiguity of the border: they are both the prey and the predator; the fugitive and the authority, and their movements oscillate between positions of power.
 

The film ´B-roll` takes place in Trandumskogen, a tank testing ground used by Germans in World War II outside Oslo. In this dramatic scenery, the same choreographed gestures are repeated in a methodic
manner. Here, the location is the primary actor, where its repetitive features - a series of walls blasted through by tankfire - are themselves a pattern of military language.

The exhibition title makes reference to the observation tower 96-høyden, which can be seen in the film, and is located at the border between Norway and Russia. The works explore the performance of control and discipline, the choreographed vocabulary of rigid forms and possible ways to circumvent these patterns
through the body.

Merging sculptural and performative expressions, 96HIGH presents a scenario where rules of rigid militarized spaces are turned around, twist and broken, looking at the construction of borders as the creation of a theatrical space, a political stage for the performance of control and dominance, a constructed set that produces a fabricated appearance of security.

Supported by OCA - Office for Contemporary Art Norway and Kulturdirektoratet.