Self-Directed Guided Tour, Mary Szydlowska

Self-directed Guided Tour emerges from endless drifting in museum and gallery spaces, experienced and developed as a practice by Mary Szydlowska. A walking body led by scattered gaze and looped soundscapes,tours through exhibition halls and empty passages, until it stops in front of or next to a painting, electricity plug or a security guard. Watching art suddenly sinks out from the experience of a museum visit, and transforms into detailed attention given to peripheral and casual landscapes of museum infrastructure. These leaking experiences become an uncovered strategy of going back and forth between different elements, which the space has to offer, within and beyond its curation. Self-directed Guided Tour is a performance drawing on guided tours, where the unfamiliar and uncanny elements of the space become negotiated with exhibition context and institutional narratives. In collaboration with research performers: Stanley Ollivier, Estefanía Álvarez Ramírez, Martin Sieweke Project developed with support of the Studios programme at P.A.R.T.S.