About the exhibition:
The exhibition title “Pre-formance” relates to a largely unrepresented visual aspect of Anton Kats’s practice, solely focusing on drawings initially utilized by the artist to give form to project processes, purposes, and ideas. The six drawings selected for the exhibition derive from Kats’s radio practice which is rooted in the notion of concrete listening and collective development of the radio sound systems and mobile radio stations. These drawings equally provide space for already realized projects and for the work in progress.
About the artist:
Anton Kats is an artist and musician. Kats’s practice derives from informal everyday relationships within a vibrant neighborhood in Kherson, Ukraine, and is complemented by the necessity and pragmatics of self-legalization in Europe via the entering into formal institutions of education. While developing practice-driven research projects, Kats explores the ambiguity of art practice as a question of agency and intentionality and develops site-specific work engaging with structures of self-organization, self-education, marginalized people, and the non-normative. Kats’s work takes the form of installations, performances, sound and radio interventions, and learning sites located in the interplay between the pragmatic and aesthetic dimensions of his practice.
Anton Kats’s works have been exhibited and performed in the Serpentine Galleries, Tate Modern, The Showroom, all in London; Bergen Kunsthall; 10th Berlin Biennale; Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin; and documenta 14, Athens and Kassel. He is currently an artist-in-residence at ISCP.