Autumn equinox celebration

Abstract

PS/Y’s Hysteria programme and LUX hosts an outdoor celebration of autumn equinox led by Danish artist Marie Kølbæk Iversen and accompanied by Diana Policarpo. The evening will be centred around the performance of magical songs inherited by the artist from her great-great-great-great-grandparents, who in 1873 were the ethnographic subjects of folklore collector Evald Tang Christensen. The songs relate to the Southern Scandinavian shamanist culture Sejd and springs from a very different cultural source than the Protestant Christianity time of their collection: They are largely (and in places explicitly) feminist, apocalyptic, anti-Christian, anti-nationalist and anti-Danish. In the Northern hemisphere autumn equinox marks the threshold into winter darkness – and symbolically into the dreams of an extended night. It therefore celebrates the power of dreaming to unsettle the fabric of reality by rendering weird—Wyrd—and contingent, the waking life of our troubled modernity. Marie Kølbæk Iversen’s Autumn equinox celebration is part of PS/Y’s Hysteria – a combined arts programme that explores health and illness in contemporary society, focusing on issues of gender, race and cultural identity. Hysteria is curated by Mette Kjærgaard Præst and takes place in partnership with organisations and institutions across London from August 2017 until April 2018.