Miriam Kongstad: Free-Fall

Performance presented in the courtyard in front of the Kunstraum , Tue, 16.09.2025, 7pm 

This event is free of charge, and no registration is required.

The performance is part of the group exhibition On a tongue's tip, at a world’s lip.

Miriam Kongstad’s Free-Fall (2023) is a choreographic exploration of falling. Through movement and voice, her performance guides us through iconic stories of political and historical breakdown and falls in the private sphere: “The Fall” in the Garden of Eden, Alice in Wonderland who stumbles down the rabbit hole, the collapse of the Berlin Wall, or Ana Mendieta’s fall out of a window in New York in the 1980s that drew attention to domestic violence. On this journey, Kongstad positions falling as an aperture into complex layers of cultural, social, and embodied meanings. Rather than a realm of mere failure or decline, she spotlights falling as a threshold experience where the body becomes a site of both vulnerability and potential. To fall, whether from a pedestal, relations, or identity, may reveal the power structures that led to the fall in the first place, and may thus enable ways of reclaiming and of transformation. When considered an act of going off-script, of falling out of line, or of leaving the terrain of social or political determinism, falling initiates attentiveness, improvisation, and sometimes connection, too. Like a rupture in the regime of linearity, it requests “an expansion of time” in which “the mind stretches between fiction and reality,” as Kongstad states in her performance text. 

The performance is taking place with the kind support of the Danish Arts Foundation.

Miriam Kongstad (*1991, Denmark) is an artist based in Berlin and Copenhagen. Originally educated as a choreographer at the Hochschulübergreifendes Zentrum Tanz Berlin (HZT), she subsequently completed an MFA in Visual Arts from the Sandberg Institute in Amsterdam in 2020. Materialized as images, performance, sculpture, text, and sound, Kongstad’s practice is anchored in explorations of embodiment, identity, and social codes. By articulating ambivalent and complex aspects of life, such as health, sexuality, pain, and desire, the human body is explored as a multifaceted, organic, social, and spiritual entity – an expanded experience of being flesh. Miriam Kongstad has exhibited and performed internationally, including: the National Gallery of Denmark, the Ny Carlsberg Glyptoteket, and Kunsthal Charlottenborg, all in Copenhagen; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Bergen Kunsthall; Het HEM, Amsterdam; KØS – Museum of Art in Public Spaces, Køge; Kunsthal Aarhus; MMAG Foundation, Amman; Fundación Botín, Santander; Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin; Panoply Performance Laboratory (PPL), New York City; and Sophiensaele, Berlin.