Julian Weber (DE)

Julian Weber - Broke (2022) video Dorothée Meddens

Julian Weber - Broke (2022) photography Gert Jan van Rooij

Choreographer, dancer and visual artist Julian Weber (1986) makes sculptural, scenographic performances in which their own body, music and materials such as clay and aluminium play an important role. The stage and the exhibition space flow seamlessly together in the work of Weber, whose performances are often created in collaboration with other artists from different disciplines.

At De Oude Warande, the public is taken on an excursion through the park. Their guide constantly changes roles, professions and gender, transforming from human into animal, from hunter into prey, from dominant into submissive and from rational thinker into intuitive doer.
At various locations in the park the tour stops, where Weber is dancing, interacting with the environment, while introducing potential histories of the site - blurring facts and fiction.

On their tour through the park, Weber is accompanied by a musician, a drummer on a mobile stage, which Weber drags behind them. In equine terminology, ‘broke’ refers to a horse that has been trained to be ridden or to pull a vehicle. The musician drums at the various stopping points and also while moving. With the mobile stage, Weber is referring to the globalised (art) world, in which people and things are constantly dragged around the world. It is at the same time a symbolic reference to the need to stretch the boundaries of sculpture.

Weber deals with philosophical movements, which deny the privilege of human existence over non-human entities. They play with these concepts in order to blur the boundaries between object and subject, as well as the inherent stereotypical hierarchies, in order to establish a more horizontal and reciprocal exchange between human and non-human bodies.
Further Weber is interested in the way in which artistic productions represent people and their social and gender identities. The work questions what our society considers as normal and abnormal and how concepts of natural and artificial are constructed. Anything that deviates from the so called norm is often seen as incomprehensible or even threatening and must be kept at a distance. With their fluid character, Weber undermines this unnatural, rigid categorisations.