I find that, more than ordinary gallery visits, watching a performance awakens an awareness of my own body and state of mind. This often involves seeing other people’s bodies perform actions or movements, being present, sensing and wondering in the ‘now’. It prompts me to filter what the performers are doing through whatever parameters determine my physical self perception in the moment. As I watch French-British artist Paul Maheke’s performance The Origin of Death at the Astrup Fearnley Museum, those parameters are: tired, sweaty, mother of a young child.
The first of these parameters – the tiredness – turns out to be a pretty good starting point for seeing Maheke’s Oslo version of the performance, which has been shown previously at venues such as the venerable Rudolfinum in Prague. There is a sleepy sentiment to what unfolds here in a small space in front of the stairs opposite the museum entrance, temporarily acting as a grandstand for this occasion.
Maheke has set up a simple scenography on this warm June evening, consisting mainly of speakers, a microphone stand, and a music stand. The performance opens with the evening’s three performers coming up the stairs to the left of the ‘stage’: trumpeter Adrian Barstad Andresen at the front, Paul Maheke in the middle, and musician Ndobo-emma at the back. Barstad Andresen, barefoot and neutrally clad, plays a mournful and drawn-out melody on a bukkehorn – a traditional Norwegian billy goat horn. Maheke is dressed in shorts, hoodie, and trainers. His face is covered by a mask, which he pulls off after a short time and discards.
The next forty-five minutes or so plays out like a subdued musical, alternating between singing – mainly performed by the inventive vocals of Ndobo-emma – and readings of texts. Barstad Andresen tints it all with his bukkehorn, which taps into a kind of primeval tone, and a trumpet equipped with a dampening device that makes the sound more complex and metallic.
Maheke, either standing still at the music stand or walking around, mostly reads from a sheet of paper. On a couple of occasions, he also bursts into dance, and these few minutes of movement could have easily lasted longer for me. Where it sometimes gets a bit difficult for me to follow the text (tired, sweaty, mother of a young child), Maheke’s intercut sequences of movement make sense in their wordlessness and I want them to continue.
Thematically, Maheke’s texts revolve around repose, death, fear, and transition. Several appear to be legends, and the moon is a recurring character. It becomes a symbol of rising from the dead, changing from an almost invisible new moon to the full moon. I recognise some of the pieces from Maheke’s Instagram. One of them addresses the feeling of being marginalised while at the same time delivering what feels like the performance’s main claim: Death is everywhere: in the way we walk, in the way we move, in the way we coexist.
Nevertheless, “death” does not feel imminent or threatening in Maheke’s performance. The pace is too slow for that. Rather, the work is experienced more like a slow sweep, more like – if we’re lucky – death itself. Maheke’s death appears mostly as a symbol of otherness. This reflection is posited right in the midst of life, and the noise of the city presses in from the outside. A dull bass throbbing from one of the nearby nightclubs threatens to steal my attention as some children fish for crabs on the pier next to the museum. In the background, a service car speeds towards the museum entrance but is asked to turn around, which it does at an astonishing pace, only to be replaced by a woman in flip-flops trudging past with a huge transparent sack of bottles. Unknowingly cast as secondary characters, they are all incorporated into Maheke’s epic about slipping out of the world, and, for me, this aspect gives the performance added nerve.
The surrounding neighbourhood of Tjuvholmen comes across as an ordinary – if somewhat flashy – public space. But in fact the entire area is privately owned. And although Maheke presumably chose the location for practical reasons, the theme of the performance set against the surrounding capitalist landscape triggers the question: who owns death? Today, it is appropriate to think about what happens to our digital traces after we are gone. Do the tech giants continue to make money off us? At any rate, during the performance, a shadow slowly spreads from one side of the stairs we are sitting on, eventually covering the entire space. A metaphor for the darkness that will one day envelop the light for us all.
