‘full stop slightly high’ is Nicole Bachmann’s first project with the gallery. Bachmann will be producing a new durational performance within VITRINE London, on Bermondsey Square, with the dancers Noa Genazzano and Aurore Vigneron. The performance will be staged through a series of acts opening on Tuesday 10 March, with the last being realised for VITRINE’s 10th Anniversary event ’Sounding Off 2.0’.

Bachmann explores VITRINE’s unique space and its confined form which limits the movement of bodies, as a metaphor for the social constraints we may experience in our lives. These constraints manifest themselves socially, physically and economically in our bodies and our minds, creating multifaceted limitations on our lives. Bachmann is interested in how these constraints become rules and normalities, entering our lives and becoming negative parameters through which we exist.

As a narrow aisle, with not much space for maneuver, the space could be considered a physical representation of this restraint. Structural elements and platforms of varying heights will be built into the space. Performers will have to negotiate these through movement and interaction between each other inside VITRINE, leaving marks on the white walls. When there is no performance, these marks become traces of their bodies’ movements.

There will also be an audio work playing quietly when the space is empty through speakers attached to the windows. The work will only be heard by those closer to the gallery to implicate the audience through their proximity to the space. The audio piece will use voice and sound extending the performances corporeality, standing in relation to the performance, but not a remnant of it. This facet of Bachmann’s practice imagines the body and movement through hearing. The audio shares the space with the site of the performance and explores its absence.

Representation of Nicole Bachmann and her solo exhibition furthers VITRINE’s commitment to creating a sustainable, supportive and focused gallery structure for artists working primarily with performance and ephemeral works.

The legacy and potential acquisition of the work ‘full stop slightly high’ will be an important aspect of the project, developing concurrently to VITRINE’s growing wider experience in this field and involvement as a Founding Gallery of “Performance Exchange” (a dispersed performance programme presented in commercial galleries around London over three days in July 2020).

Nicole Bachmann (b. 1973 Zurich, CH) works and lives between Zurich, CH and London, UK. She holds a Diploma in Fine Art from Zurich University of the Arts (2007) and an MFA in Fine Art from Goldsmiths, University of London (2010). Bachmann has been exhibited internationally at galleries, institutions, biennials and fairs, including: Manifesta 11, Zurich, CH; Whitechapel Gallery, London, UK; ICA, London, UK; Kunsthalle St.Gallen, St. Gallen, CH; Eastside Projects, Birmingham, UK; Darling Foundation, Montreal, CA; Zabludowicz Collection, London, UK; Tenderpixel, London, UK; Block Universe, Performance Art Festival, London, UK; Helmhaus Museum, Zurich, CH; Turner Contemporary, Margate, UK; Haus der Kunst Uri, Altdorf, CH; LUX Artists’ Moving Image, London, UK; Art Hall Tallinn, Tallinn, EE; New York Art Book Fair, MoMA PS1, USA; Modern Art Oxford, Oxford, UK; Kunsthalle Basel, Basel, CH; Videotank, Zurich, CH; Cabinett in Kallio Kunsthalle, Helsinki, FI; Centre Culturel Suisse, Paris, FR; Mimosa House, London, UK.