Nathaniel(le) Hendrickson

Inspired by similar fairytales from different origins related to the Black Goat myth in Finnish culture, this project performance and cinema project arose out of an organic collective effort. In the end, the result was several short films that were then intertwined in a synthesis of divergent vectors. The goal, in the coming months will be to combine the initial seeds into one long film project. After the initial residency, a series of live performances were conducted inspired by the film in Pärnu, Estonia in conjunction with PrintMaking-In, and Diverse Universe/Body Paint Festival 2018, two small screenings were also held at Kunstnike Maja, Pärnu and The Mental Hospital, Helsinki. Photos by Alar Raudoja, Caroline Sada and Jun Yong Lee

Link to film

Link to film

Link to Press

Link to Gian Luigi’s Dissertation

What I discovered, by going too far, is that the very real, very tangible need that we all have is to be true to one’s self. We all have desires that shape who we are, although sometimes we fail to acknowledge them or suppress them for the sense of duty, discipline, or pride. But desires are more fundamental than the forces that we use to suppress them, and one must take care or else they could be crushed forever under the swell of social and cultural pressure to please and become more successful than everyone else. I repeat, these delicate impulses (or funky and freaky desires), are very simple. They are as boundless as the wrath of the gods, as Klossowski would say. To begin to let them flow freely as they would like to do, we need only to allow them to be what they are, and nurture them as they pass, like a mother duck with her ducklings. Embrace them with all our heart and you’ll grow and heal from the inside out. It is from this very simple set of desires (i.e. inner peace, communion with another body, the desire for wholeness, to love and be loved) upon which we build every aspect of ourselves. The stories our bodies tell are not always easy to hear, we drug them, fuck them, and sometimes destroy them before coming to terms with the most fundamental parts of ourselves that we are crushing… What is it that you are crushing? The thaumatope spins, the ouroboros is never full.

Photos by

Renee Regan (Queens Museum, Itinerant 2018)

Matt Adams (FSU Museum of Fine Art)

link to press

link to performance documentation

password: browser

2018

Blindfolded and taken somewhere in Estonia. With no sense of time or location. No food. In isolation. With only the breath and existence as a frame of reference. This 48 hour performance began with Huisi He performing without performing for the first 24 hours. The following day, Nathan Hendrickson remained blindfolded for the entire 24 hours. It started on August 8, 2018.

Live streaming 24/7: www.gallerywindow.com

Abandoned House Gallery was a secret gallery located somewhere in Estonia. With the exception of its curators, no one knew where it was. Without phones and internet, artists were blindfolded and taken to the space.

I Can't Promise You the Ride of Your Life, 2018. Performance, 621 Gallery Annex Florida. Collaboration with Huisi He.

A performance that wrestles with intersectional politics, intentional travel, and the increasing precariousness, flexibility, and uncertainty of migrant populations in the U.S.

Video Edit by Your Uncle Richard: link

Militant Mimetics is an ongoing series of interventional performances and installations that grapple with notions of call and response, nationalism, state violence, and the appropriation and adaptation of vernacular practices and sacred ritual for military and institutional use. This hyperactive drill sergeant performs a symbolic ethnic cleansing, “shooting” everyone in the classroom with a selfie-stick, marching in a fools procession to the beat of reject narcissism of selfie-culture only to participate in the ritual himself. This walking political and social contradiction is antagonistic as much as it is parodical, highlighting not only the violence of the state and its algorithmic tentacles, but also the recent mass shootings in schools, the role of technology in muting action, and the subjugation of empathy pathways by the libidinal media machine; rendering us impotent as actors on the political stage and transforming our convivial attractors into perpetual labyrinthine reflections of consumer experience. The deflector responds to the call of our times by standing at attention, marching to the cadence of capitalist imperialism, and reading a hyper-quotational academic paper that devolves into poetry, obscure declamation, foolish procession, and existential fragmentation. 

link to performance lecture

The preverbal expression of infants in the west is so often cut short and hijacked by the instrumental expressions of consumer culture and the bells and whistles of the spectacle. The omnipotent, wholistic being of a child is dissociated and divided into bifurcated modules, digitized applications; its freeform ability to act out in the world is replaced by the surrogate expression of disciplined puissance and browsing enhancement. Social media becomes the virtual expression of civil disobedience and renders the commons as a hologram, feeding the attention and retention span with an amnesiac unfolding stream of simulations. In the hyperreal, superstitious age of the digital, true conviviality is subsumed by the facsimile of the social. The cries for individual and communal sovereignty are reduced to inaudible coos of perpetual childhood. What was once the total action of the chaosmic hermetic body is thus disciplined into a symmetrically divided assemblage of transitional object-bodies designed to undermine the marginal, the unique, and the horizon of the possible. The rush to normal, reinforced by perpetual precarity, is underwritten by the auspicious tentacles of control that tap out the standardized tempo-rhythm of the capitalist state, pulverizing the vernacular.

BABYFACE is an autonomous performance entity designed to interrupt the normative flow and point out the preverbal expression of ideology, habitus, and indoctrination of the capitalist state. Its dissociated expression and disgruntled visage is meant to draw attention to the ever-increasing meme-plexes that target younger and younger audiences, short circuiting the life-giving breast and ensnaring the wholeness of infantile expression with the script of techno-pathocratic discipline, reinforced by the spectacular feed of fiction. BABYFACE was a featured artist in the group performance organized by NON GRATA titled "End of Tyranny / Culture Wars" and premiered at Grace Space, New York in the fall of 2017.

Photos by Miao Jiaxin

press

In June 2017, the Anartist group, formed by Nathaniel Hendrickson (USA), Huisi He (China), and Gianluigi Biagini (Italy), climbed the walls of the Chinese Biennale with a long MADE IN CHINA cardboard box - realizing a non-authorized performance in the public space of the Biennale.

The performance was conceived as a ritual to manifested against Chinese worker slavery. Especially Huisi, the Chinese woman in the box, felt the impelling necessity to protest for the condition of the labour in China. She presented herself as a naked doll of a Chinese worker. In this way she wanted represent a product and the worker at the same time.

The people were looking at Huisi. They did not know if she was a doll or a woman. At the same time me and Nathan were hammering Chinese chopsticks over papers with Chinese characters. 

The guy with the red shirt was one of the Venice Biennale’s staff. He wanted to make sense of our action, if someone had given us an authorization. I told him that we had the authorization of the Chinese pavillon but he insisted we should show the authorization. We continued our performance…

Soon after the military police arrived with guns pointed over us and we were forced to show our faces and to stop our performance…

We were forced to cover Huisi and to give the military police our passports. We were interrogated for hours by military police, normal police and special police. We were explaining that we wanted to protest against Chinese labour condition and the commodification of life and art.

At the end we were fined almost 4.000 euro for act of indecency against the public decor. Is it normal to be fined inside the Biennale of art for an act of indecency because a naked woman is in a box? Beside, we were also protesting against the condition of the workers in China. It was a political issue concerning human rights but the police did not care. Is it also disconcerting that we did not find any newspaper or magazine willing to publish our intervention and sustain our protest. An american professor who was in the board of a magazine of critique wrote us that our position did not respect the parity of gender and me and Nathan, as white males, were exploiting the naked body of a Chinese woman. I do not want to comment these words that sounds like inverted sexism and racism. The reality is that no one in the art world has the balls (sorry for this gendered expression) to sustain a cause against a powerful institution.

Once outside the gate of the Biennale we started a theatrical kabuki-like protest to show that we were fined for having just performed an artwork in what is mistakenly considered by tourists the temple of contemporary art. In reality is a disgusting show up of a kitsch art without blood and life. It’s a piece of the luxury kitsch of the global jet set.

Text by Gianluigi Biagini

Photos by Emanuela Bianconi

Nacho Property is a site-specific performance set in the parking lot of Mariehamn Kultur: Äland, Finland’s main library and cultural center. The piece utilized Nacho Cheese Balls, which are manufactured in Äland, as a medium to decorate a single parking space, the space represents a strange cross between a mandala, demilitarized zone, advertisement and commentary on Åland's status as an autonomous region precariously presiding between two nations and cultures in the Baltic Sea. The performance took place first around the parking spot as the artist, posing as a chivalrous guardian of a sacred domain, marched around the perimeter shouting “MINE!” Allowing this action to reach a crescendo, the marching dissolved into an improvised polyrhythmic dance over the cheese balls, creating a pleasing sound, and satiating the desire of the audience. The noble guardian proceeded to roll over the cheese balls and proceeded to stuff them in his mouth and down his pants. The performance was organized in conjunction with Åland Action Art and Non Grata's Scandanavian Performance Summer Festival. 

link to press

A series of Anartist interventions performed in venice (I like to think of these as “Post-Card Terrorism”) in collaboration with Gianluigi Biagini.

Performance collaborations with Huisi He and Non Grata from the 2017 Diverse Universe Scandinavian Performance Summer. Åland, Finland and Noblessneri sadamalinnak, Tallin, Estonia.

Photos by Al Padrok

link to video interview

non grata video

Collaboration with Huisi He for her solo exhibition at The Gallery at University of Texas at Arlington. 

1. Just Like a Normal Relationship, II. Collaboration with Huisi He.

2. Collectivism. Collaboration with Huisi He and UTA Students. video

3. Translating the Global City (Saskia Sassen). Collaboration with Huisi He. video

Surrogate Surface is in ongoing series of material, sensorial and situational explorations based on memory, sense perception, and humor.

interview

"Dr. Dissident Drinks the Kapitalist Koolaid," Performance, 2017

ITINERANT Performance Art Festival, May 21 2017
Curated by Hector Canonge
FLUSHING MEADOWS PARK
Queens, New York City

Participating Artists:
Annabele Guérédrat and Henri Tauliaut (Martinique), Nathaniel Hendrickson (United States), Eliu Almonte (Dominican Republic), Tingying Ma (China), Mina Büker (Turkey), Sylva Dean (United States), Sahily Tamayo and Gregorio Alvarez (Cuba / Dominican Republic), Camila Cañeque (Spain), Rossella Matamoros (Costa Rica) and Autumn Kioti (United States).

A duet, a video chat, and a performance score performed in collaboration with Mikaila Ware. Velcro straps, custom cell-phone masks.

Video

Featured in the 2017 New Horizon's Festival for new original works in theatre, the performance features a solo investigation of entropy, excruciating silence and virtual intimacy in response to T.S. Eliot's masterpiece, The Wasteland.

Collaborative multi-media performance with Christopher Steven Watkins for Soup Experimental.

video link

Behind the Skin. 2017. Collaboration with Hyunji Park. Pärnu, Estonia.

press

(aka: Drawing_Me_Drawing_You)

Viewers are invited to draw on a magic device that moves a fully grown man at the touch of pencil to paper. The piece plays on the psychological affects of blurring virtual and tangible outcomes and the physical consequences.

video link