Jörn Burmester Wium

Works with Live Art Danmark
2009 “My Last Performance” for the launch of our book about the Berliner Luft festivals
2011 DIVA Artist in residence, “Performance Art is live, Theatre ist Death”
2011 “Random Rants”, Acts festival Roskilde
2011 “Rambo Revisionist” at Samtalekøkken
2014 “Teotwawki” and presentation of Performer Stammtisch at Hitparaden 2

Jörn is a permanent collaborator of Live Art Denmark as a consultant and writer.

My Last Performance
When we presented the book about our four Berliner Luft festivals at Warehouse 9 in November 2009, Jörn performed  “My Last Performance”. Reading from 200 index cards what “this, his last performance” should or should not contain, explore, deal with and address, he created a personal performance in the mind of each spectator. However, “My Last Performance” might have been his first, but it was not his last performance for Live Art Danmark.

Performance art is life. Theatre ist Death.
In 2011 we invited Jörn to stay in Copenhagen for a three month residency sponsored by the Danish International Visiting Artists program. He performed his piece “Performance art is life. Theater is death.” at one of our Samtalekøkken. In this piece, he goes back to the beginnings of his life as an artist, and to his mixed experiences, trying to become and be a theatre artist. Random samples form a collection of anecdotes, musings and ideas about theatre and performance art, combined with life actions, are performed according to the wishes and interests of the audience. Each text or action contains “links” to other parts of this automated biography, and the audience gets to decide which ones are chosen. Following this random dramaturgy makes sure that each audience gets to see their own, unique version of the performance.

Random Rants
During the residency, Jörn developed his piece “Randon Rants”, which became the basis for a series of performances. On each of the 100 days of the residency, he published a note about something that is wrong with the world on Facebook. Since Facebook decided to discontinue the charming notes feature, they are not online anymore. Printouts of all the notes and comments that accumulated in this archive of grievances and nuisances became the material of the first performance of the series, presented at the ACTS festival at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Roskilde in May 2011, which included plenty of live ranting and liberal use of a diverse collection of fluids. All the printed wrongness was fused into one large tapestry-object during this performance, which was re-used in several others.

During the residency, Matthias Borello wrote this article on kunsten.nu about Jörn and his work (sorry, in Danish only).

Rambo Revisionist
Jörn’s solo work began in 2001 with a series of performance lectures on the war in Afghanistan, the Rambo Lectures, which used Sylvester Stallone’s movie Rambo III as a guide towards new readings of the world situation after the attack on the World Trade Center and the ensuing war in Afghanistan in 2001. In some of the performances he was joined by Florian Feigl. Ten years later, they revisited the issue of war and politics in a completely different world, and the format of the performance lecture after massive shifts of their artistic interests with the collaborative duo performance “Rambo Revisionist”. Meanwhile two older men, they once again stir up the poisonous mix of violence, media and entertainment.

Teotwawki
Together with Florian Feigl and Mark Boombastik Jörn returned to Copenhagen for our Hitparaden 2 festival at Pumpehuset in September 2014. They presented Teotwawki, a piece about the prepper movement, a largely North American counterculture of people who prepare for the end of the world. It is a dark and loud vision of various versions of the end of civilisation and what they might do to people.

More
Jörn was a part of the Samtalekøkken we hosted at IETM in Copenhagen in 2012.

At Hitparaden 2 he and Florian Feigl presented “Performer Stammtisch”, a forum for the dissemination and discussion of performance art that they had founded and run between 2003 and 2013 in Berlin. Performer Stammtisch was a model that inspired our Samtalekøkken.

About the Artist
Jörn came to performance art through independent theatre and after pursuing a university degree in Applied Theatre Studies in Gießen/Germany and New York City.

Jörn was the founder and host of Performer Stammtisch, a Berlin network of performance artists, a member of the organising team of the Month of Performance Art – Berlin, a showcase of performance and life art, and is a founding member of APAB e.V., the Association for Performance Art in Berlin.

After moving to Copenhagen in 2018, he founded B&W Art and Support with his wife Dorte Burmester Wium to pursue common projects in the visual and the performing arts. In 2020, they initiated the “Teach Each Other Mondays”, a series of knowledge sharing events for anyone in the performing arts.

Find news and documentation about the projects with B&W are on this website. Jörn’s solo work is documented here.