stre!fen performance art festival 2026
3. – 11. 07. 2026
Kunsthalle Görlitz – Wilhelmsplatz 15
ARTISTS
aliveduo (Alena Starostina & Ivan Nikolaev), RU
Manuela Büchting, DE
Lena Czerniawska, PL
Emrah Gökdemir, DE/TR
Sebastian Hänel, DE
Vladimir Havlik, CZ
Josef Ka, FI
Lila Kalinowska, PL
Gerd Kempe, DE
Paweł Korbus, PL
Natasha Maslacak, RS
Hans Narva, DE
Susanne Pomerance, DE
Lothar Quinkenstein, DE
Sascha Röhricht, DE
Christian Schmidt, DE
Stefanie Trojan, DE
Melissa Wagner, DE
Ewa Zarzycka, PL
Igor Zenzerović, HR
TEMPOTEMPO
curatorial text by Emrah Gökdemir
Human life unfolds within a temporal condition it can never fully inhabit.
Time exceeds the body, escapes control, and accumulates unevenly. It stretches, collapses, accelerates, and suspends itself. Some lives are organised through urgency and continuous responsiveness, while others unfold within waiting, delay, and interrupted temporalities. A song once asks: “How is it that while time never seems to pass, years and lives disappear?*”Perhaps time is composed of contradictory rhythms.
With this year’s theme, TEMPOTEMPO, Streifen Performance Festival approaches time not as a neutral continuum, but as a field of tension—political, affective, and embodied. The festival departs from the unstable intersections of acceleration and deceleration, continuity and rupture, presence and disappearance.
Contemporary life is shaped by accelerated temporal regimes. Bodies are expected to remain productive, available, and adaptable within continuous flows of demand. Attention fragments; response becomes immediate; delay is rendered obsolete. Speed no longer describes movement alone, but defines a dominant condition of existence.
Alongside acceleration, other temporalities persist—less visible, yet no less insistent. Lives unfold through waiting, postponement, suspension, and forms of time that resist linear progression. At the same time, systems of automation and digital circulation generate paradoxical states: overstimulation and exhaustion, hyper-connectivity and withdrawal, excess and emptiness coexisting within the same temporal field.
Within such conditions, rest becomes unstable. Silence loses its ease. Slowness withdraws from experience even as it remains a form of longing. The possibility of stopping is no longer given, but continuously negotiated.
TEMPOTEMPO listens to these uneven temporalities. It asks how time is distributed across bodies, how it is unevenly felt, and how rhythms are imposed, absorbed, or resisted. Time is approached not as something shared equally, but as something constantly negotiated—between geographies, bodies, and systems of value.
Rather than continuity, the festival turns toward interruption, repetition, pause, and endurance as ways of unsettling dominant temporal orders. It asks what forms of perception emerge when rhythm is disrupted, when linearity fails, when time no longer behaves as expected. It considers how bodies carry historical, political, and affective tempos that are neither synchronous nor aligned.
In this context, performance becomes a site where time is not represented but enacted—where it thickens, folds, hesitates, and transforms. A practice through which time is not only measured, but sensed, shared, and redistributed.
Bringing together international and local artists, TEMPOTEMPO opens a space for performative, sonic, spatial, and embodied inquiries into time. Rather than offering resolution, it sustains a condition of tension—between speed and suspension, exhaustion and desire, disappearance and presence.
Perhaps the festival itself can momentarily interrupt the temporal logic it inhabits—
becoming a fragile interval in which time does not advance, but resonates.
* Teoman / Paramparca