basement21
Five Million Incidents

About the Actants

basement 21 is a platform that presents the ‘contemporary’ in art. It investigates contemporary thought and action by focusing not just on the artistic ‘product’ but the artistic process and surrounding discourse. In this way, it aims to provide and allow a necessary context to be reconstructed. basement 21 is run by practitioners, informed by practice, and therefore committed to enabling and strengthening the growth of contemporary arts practice.

For more information, visit the website or the Facebook page.

As actions, pause and play are associated with the choice of suspending a flow of activity to create a small rift in time. In this interim period, our experience of ourselves and things around us becomes magnified and immediate. Basement 21, a collective of contemporary practitioners, proposes a series of artistic interruptions in a playful, yet thought-provoking structure.

The activities proposed take the form of interactions, site-specific installations and performances - music, dance, theatre - all responding to the idea of interruption. Breaking or bursting in the middle of a flow in the routine running of various institutions and public spaces, these interruptions propose a heightened sense of awareness of the here and now.

As an act, interruption fragments the flow of the current, the present, before it becomes history. It assumes that totalising forces are at work in the very present itself. By proposing the idea of ‘interruption’, Basement 21 urges people to resist any complacent joining of dots that concern society, institution, culture or identity.