The poem that jumps the fence features weekly performances on the public part of Abu Dhabi Beach and a workshop series connecting words and sand as real and symbolic material that binds our world together.
Every Sunday, 2.30 pm at Abu Dhabi public beach, a performer writes a short poem on the sand, only for it to inevitably fade away. The ritual, repeated weekly, turns the beach into a blank page where poetry continuously unfolds. During collective workshops in collaboration with local poets and writers, participants generate text for the performances. The cyclical process depends on sand, the third most-used natural resource after water and air, critical to modern civilization yet rapidly depleting.
performance location
playlist of weekly performances

Workshops led by Robert Deguzman and Trixie Balangao (November 23), Deepak Unnikrishan (November 24), Fatima Al Jarman (January 11), Shamma Al Bastaki (February 9), Rawad Raidan (February 22)
Performances by Carlos Páez González, Jamal Mahmoud Hussin, Mary Chase, Stephanie Tadros, Ayah Mokhalalati, Kangying Cen
Coordination by Yoonsik Chico Park

This is what we did during the covid years: a lot of in-depth reading as site-specific research, into the pile of circa 50 Mosaic Magazines, from the first Issue (October 1967) to now. Mosaic issue 54.2 is the first result: a special archival issue developed as the first part of a collaborative project between us, the magazine and Shep Steiner. Shifting through fifty years of old issues and forty times as many published essays, we collectively selected twelve texts to republish.
The second part of the project is developed as a series of lectures, published in subsequent issues: ( Mosaic 55.1 (with texts by Erin Manning, Paul Huebener, Jonas Staal, Denise Ferreira da Silva, Anna-Sophie Springer and Etienne Turpin, and Steven Duval and Marina McDougall), and Mosaic 55.2: Relative Time/Little Time Proceedings, Part 2.
introduction about our work and collaboration with Mosaic, by Shepherd Steiner and Karalyn Dokurno.

Many recent works of contemporary art, performance, and film turn a spotlight on sleep, wresting it from the hidden, private spaces to which it is commonly relegated. At the Edges of Sleep considers sleep in film and moving image art as both a subject matter to explore onscreen and a state to induce in the audience.

Far from negating action or meaning, sleep extends into new territories as it designates ways of existing in the world, in relation to people, places, and the past. Sleep also expands our understanding of reception beyond the binary of concentration and distraction. Jean Ma brings together an array of interlocutors—from Freud to Proust, George Méliès to Tsai Ming-liang, Weegee to Warhol—to rethink moving images through the lens of sleep. Ma exposes an affinity between cinema, spectatorship, and sleep that dates to the earliest years of filmmaking, and sheds light upon the shifting cultural valences of sleep in the present moment.

Our text Speechless: Some Notes About Birds, in this beautiful 436 pages thick book. Order here. Edited by Anna-Sophie Springer & Etienne Turpin, published by K.Verlag and HKW

These Birds of Temptation. Edited by Anna-Sophie Springer & Etienne Turpin. With contributions by Eddie Bartley, Ari Bayuaji, Bik Van der Pol, David Bonter, Xavi Bou, Tiffany Bozic, Lêna Bùi, Bertolt Brecht, Wallace Craig, Mark Dion, Andreas Doepke, Jimmie Durham, Anne Geene, Sophia Gräfe, Mary Ellen Hannibal, Nina Katchadourian, Bernie & Kat Krause, Barbara Marcel, Anaïs Nin, Arjan de Nooy, Megan Prelinger, John Paul Ricco, David Rothenberg, Juliana Spahr, Bruno Schulz, Anna-Sophie Springer, Frank Steinheimer, Yoko Tawada, Anna Tsing, Etienne Turpin, and Francesca Woodman. Design in collaboration with Katharina Tauer.
English
436 pages
ISBN 978-3-9818635-4-3
K. Verlag and the Haus der Kulturen der Welt, 2021

For Living as Form, organized by Creative Time, Bik Van der Pol made a work in 3 parts: a site-specific public text piece on the empty parking lots adjacent to the Essex Street Market to be incorporated in Google Earth, daily walking tours in collaboration with NY citizens open to visitors, and a publication.
The phrase of the text piece, As Above, So Below, points towards the contentious (re)valuation of space in the neighborhood, including vertical development and the issue of air rights, which apply to owning the space above plots of land and buildings. The text, read as abstractions from the ground, is completely legible from above. While looking into the void, one may realize that this empty space - now a parking lot - also allows us a glimpse of the future, to what will be. A look at the empty sky that at some point will crystallize and capitalize. In collaboration with Google Earth the text piece is now stored in Google's archive to immediately become part of the public (?) sphere while this empty site will be developing in time.
Zoom in
on parking place between Norfolk, Delancey, Clinton, and Broome Street