What a body is: an afternoon of performances, screenings, and readings with Caitlin Berrigan, Cia Rinne, Rike Scheffler and Sophie Seita

For this evening of performances and screenings, four artists will present some recent works that reflect their ongoing preoccupation with language as sonic, embodied, relational and interdependent matter. In their respective pieces, they ask how we can think about bodies — politically, ecologically and sensorially. Each artist is also interested in publishing practices that emerge out of a wider ecology of performance, installation, and an engaged and playful dialogue with other voices.
The event is curated by Sophie Seita. 

Cia Rinne born in Gothenburg and based in Berlin, writes minimalist, conceptual and translingual poetry that also take shape as performances, exhibitions and sound installations. Cia is the laureate of the Prix littéraire Bernard Heidsieck-Centre Pompidou 2019. Her most recent publication is sentences, shortlisted for the Prix du livre d’artiste Bob Calle. 

 Caitlin Berrigan works as a visual artist and writer across video, sculpture, and text. Her early works address viruses and spatial choreographies of contagion. Recent works explore poetics and queer science fiction as world-making practices through instruments and moving image. Her work has been commissioned by the Whitney Museum, Berlinale, Art in General, Henry Art Gallery, Harvard Carpenter Center, and her writings are published by e-flux, Georgia, MARCH, Duke UP and Broken Dimanche Press. 

Rike Scheffler is a poet, performer and sound artist creating work at the intersection of language and music. Recent work includes the imaginative exhibition Your Exhibition at Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Copenhagen (2016) sound performances at the Festival of Future Nows at Hamburger Bahnhof Berlin (2017), and the binaural sound installation Becoming Water at Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2019). Her poetry collection der rest ist resonanz (kookbooks, 2014) won the Orphil Debut Prize for political and avant-garde writing. She will be publishing a new collection Lava. Rituale this winter. Produced alongside the surround sound video installation of the same name, and exhibited as part of the Poesiefestival Berlin’s exhibition AI Ancestors - Making Kin in the Future, which she also curated, the work consists of rituals of transition, haunting, and sensual poems from a possible future. 

Sophie Seita is an artist whose practice explores language as material and takes the form of performances, books, sound pieces, videos, and installations. Recent commissions, exhibitions, and collaborations include Queer Art Projects, Canada Council for the Arts, [ SPACE ], Rupert (Vilnius), The Hunterian (Glasgow) and The Roberts Institute of Art, Printed Matter (NYC), UP Projects, and Flat Time House (London). She and her long-term collaborator Naomi Woo continue to play in active role in the revival of The Hildegard von Bingen Society for Gardening Companions, a queer community-oriented art and archive project. Currently, she is a Dorothea Schlegel Artist in Residence at FU Berlin, where she is developing a new body of work including a series of experimental essays, Lessons of Decal (forthcoming from the 87Press in 2023).