LONDON.- Whitechapel Gallery is now exhibiting Each Moment Presents What Happens (2022), a new moving image work from artist Johanna Billing (b. 1973, Sweden) which continues her interest in improvisation, collaboration and education. Billing’s work explores the idea of performance and the possibility it holds to impact the public and the private, as well as the individual and the collective.

Realised over several years, the project was commissioned by Bristol Grammar School where Billing spent time working with staff and invited guests and students from schools around Bristol. Collaboratively, the group developed a new work inspired by the American composer and music theorist John Cage’s radical 1952 performance piece Untitled Event (Theater Piece No. 1). Billing’s film shows the process of students engaging with Untitled Event and Cage’s methodology, as well as wider ideas around educational practices.

The project sets up a connection between the Bristol school and Black Mountain College, the experimental liberal arts school in North Carolina USA (1933-1957) where Untitled Event was uniquely performed. Cage’s work was the first of its kind; a performance consisting of simultaneous improvised solos by artists from different disciplines such as dancer Merce Cunningham, visual artist Robert Rauschenberg, and poet and potter MC Richards. It is widely regarded as the first artistic event known as a ‘happening’ and paved the way for the emergence of new, collective, multimedia art forms.

Despite its cultural significance, Untitled Event was not recorded and is documented only through the inconsistent memories of the participants and the audience who were present. The lack of material evidence adds to the work’s mythical status but also means that it is impossible to recreate. Instead, Billing’s film shows the students imagining what could have happened, re-interpreting the event to make it their own, and experimenting with various methods and media, including spoken word, dance, drawing and DJing.

These activities are shown against the backdrop of daily school life. As in Cage’s original work, all experiences - on and off stage - are considered a vital part of making art. To reflect this, Billing filmed using a camera on a circular track. The track has a central role in structuring the film and provides the audience with a 360-degree viewpoint, capturing the peripheral alongside performance.

Each Moment Presents What Happens encourages learning through process, chance and failure. This is further exemplified by the students’ engagement with Cage’s Prepared Piano Pieces (1938-1954). Here, they performed collectively, attaching objects found around the school to a piano, thereby changing the instrument’s sound. The incorporation of Cage’s exercise into the project provides a poignant message following its recent removal from the A-level music syllabus.

This presentation marks the film’s first showing in a public gallery space and raises important questions about artistic freedom, experimentation and imagination at a time when these seem under increasing pressure and scrutiny. By giving the students agency, and by focusing on the process rather than the outcome, Billing highlights the issues facing education today and asks what’s at stake within a climate of cuts. Each Moment Presents What Happens reminds us of the necessity of cultivating creative learning and collective action within schools.

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 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 ‘fictive’ filmmaking through a documentary method to examine actual and contrived events, illuminating 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.

Whitechapel Gallery
Johanna Billing: Each Moment Presents What Happens
October 11th, 2023 - January 28th, 2024
Curated by Whitechapel Gallery Director Gilane Tawadros with support from Hannah Woods, Assistant Curator, Whitechapel Gallery