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 |
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/.
This autumn season we present Each Moment Presents What Happens (2022), a new moving image work from artist Johanna Billing (b. 1973, Sweden). Realised over several years, the project was commissioned by Bristol Grammar School in 2017. Billing worked in collaboration with students, staff and invited guests to reimagine the American composer and music theorist John Cage’s radical 1952 performance piece Untitled Event (Theater Piece No. 1).
Featuring artists from different disciplines, improvising and simultaneously performing solos, Untitled Event was uniquely staged at Black Mountain College, the renowned US experimental liberal arts school (1933-1957). It is widely regarded as the first art ‘happening’ and despite being undocumented paved the way for the emergence of new collective multi-media art forms.
Billing’s film shows the students going through the process of reinterpreting Cage’s work, engaging with his methodology as well as wider ideas around educational practices. We see them playing 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. The project encourages learning through process, chance and failure and 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.
