Marvin Gaye Chetwynd (b. 1973, UK) works with exuberant collective performances and films merging irreverence and joie de vivre. Celebrating popular culture, she has adopted elements as diverse as Michael Jackson’s Thriller, Miyazaki’s Catbus, and Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales.

As part of PRAXES’s inquiry of her practice, titled Paddling Up Stream, Chetwynd will gradually carve out a new work for Bergen Assembly, invented and reconfigured in episodes presented throughout 2016. Employing choreography influenced by the accelerated fixation on the young and the new, improvisation, business magazines, and pseudo-anthropology of Norwegian norms of collectivity, Chetwynd summons a motley troupe of participants around an epicenter of elderly cool cats, envisioning a futurology of channeled geriatric knowledge.

Parallel to the new commission, events and exhibitions take on Chetwynd’s long-term involvement with social mores, humor, and performance traditions, including her ongoing series of over 300 Bat Opera paintings. The year-long sequence begins with one of Chetwynd’s earliest participatory works: Iron Age Pasta Necklace Workshop, first introduced in 2004. Originally heralding the artist’s mother as the central “Discerning Eye,” this cruel craft party invites audiences to participate in a joyous Iron Age X Factor glue gun showdown.