Life is made up of moments, to which we try to give a beginning and an end. We don’t know what happened before or after the moment, but we try on the basis of those fragmented stories to understand the world.
Sylvia Schwenk, in her exhibition The world is made up of unfinished stories looks at the relationship between performance and the everyday, and reflects upon the significance and beauty of commonplace activities and spaces. Some works simply capture a moment, and others show socially based interventions. Sylvia Schwenk often works in site-specific locations to engage with the physicality and particulars of the space.
Sometimes she displaces the routine and everyday events of a location with a performance based intervention. Through this disjunction people become more aware of the environment in which they routinely engage, seeing it in a different perspective. When you draw attention to something, there is a fracturing or shattering of the moment that existed immediately before. It is almost akin to breaking a spell, and you reveal something previously unseen.