Emily Roysdon's "Comedy of Margin Theatre": An Exhibition Exploring Performance and Resistance

Emily Roysdon's first solo exhibition in Austria, 'Comedy of Margin Theatre,' features a spatial installation that blurs the lines between installation, stage, and performance space. The exhibition explores themes of time, theater, performance, and resistance, based on the artist's text 'Uncounted.'

For her first solo exhibition in Austria, Emily Roysdon developed a spatial staging that deliberately remains open between installation and stage or performance space. The conceptual starting point for the exhibition is Roysdon's text 'Uncounted,' in which she developed a vocabulary of her ideas about performance and time. Divided into 23 short chapters, it describes her reflections on time, theater, performance, hierarchies, resistance, and emancipatory practices in an open form, using quotes, poetic thoughts, and philosophical considerations. Over time, the text became a kind of script for the artist. For the exhibition at Secession, she focused on three points from the text: 'Liveliness crosses borders, is unaware of its marginality,' 'performing as an unsolved problem,' and 'a structure in which life is possible.' The intensive engagement with the third thesis prompted Roysdon to turn to practices of experimental theater and theories of improvisation. It is the first time in an exhibition that she has brought the reflection on theater, which has always been implicitly considered in her work but kept in the background, to the foreground. At the same time, the connection between theater and exhibition raises new problems, as both forms fundamentally have different frameworks regarding time, processes, and subjects. The setting by Roysdon is characterized by the absence of acting persons. For the artist, this involves fundamental questions about movement and liveliness—in the case of her installation for Secession, she asks: Where is the place of movement when the body is absent? Colored walls, an installation of handmade clocks, costumes positioned in the space, and a walkable, graphically designed vinyl floor are the essential elements of the exhibition. The ceramic clocks, some hanging on the wall and some standing in the room, take up a symbol designed by Roysdon for 'other kinds of time': an inverted triangle with a wavy line as its upper edge. Hung close together in a line, the wave crest of the 20 clocks forms a new horizon. The tapestry produced for the exhibition, at 83 m², is the largest element in the exhibition and consists of two different parts: The first shows a photograph of two legs in strong magnification, as well as texts and handwritten notes referring to writings by Virginia Woolf, Charlie Parker, Richard Foreman, and Jack Smith. The second contains a text that can be read in both directions and repetitively introduces key terms for a discourse on theater, marginality, and improvisation. On both tapestries, there is a symbol that could originate from a choreographic notation system. This symbol O—O ('circle line circle') stands for Roysdon's concept of 'not being the thing itself,' a thought she explains in 'Uncounted' and which, for her, signifies an ethic of collaboration and improvisation. The floor design serves literally as a dramaturgical background and immediate context for live actions. The costumes, in turn, pick up on legendary costume designs by the Italian artist Giorgio de Chirico, which he created in 1929 for the Ballets Russes and which show architectural elements such as brick walls and columns. Roysdon's costumes are like facades that are hung in front of the body. Despite their architectural forms, they express fragility and vulnerability—as well as the contradiction between the mobility of the body and the immobility of architecture, between subject and object. Distributed in the room on movable metal stands, the costumes are transitional figures that deconstruct the dramaturgy of the gallery and/or the theater. The waves of the clocks meet the brick walls of the arms and legs: movement meets rigidity. Roysdon's methodologically and materially multi-layered installation examines structures of performance and invites visitors into a 'space of transition.' Is it a 'comedy of the marginal theater,' a 'theater of boundaries,' a 'theater of unsolved problems,' or simply a 'questionable theater?'

Visitors can purchase tickets for the Secession through the provided ticketing link. Further information on admission is available on their website.