This website aims to pull together the various different strands, collaborations and projects encompassing Ant Hampton’ s work as an artist.
Bio -
Ant Hampton
he/him, b.1975, CH
Ant made his first works under the name Rotozaza - a performance-based project starting in 1998, which ended up spanning theatre, installation, intervention and writing-based works. His work, though varied in tone and content, has consistently played with a tension between liveness and automation. Most often, this has involved guiding people through unrehearsed performance situations, and since 2007 it has included the audience themselves within structures loosely defined as Autoteatro. Rotozaza became a partnership with Silvia Mercuriali, and ended in 2009 after their last production Etiquette, which was also the first Autoteatro work. Since then Ant has worked with Tim Etchells, Christophe Meierhans, Britt Hatzius, Gert-Jan Stam, Glen Neath, Joji Koyama and Sam Britton to create the works listed here which continue to tour internationally - over 80 different language versions exist of the various Autoteatro productions created so far.
His performances sometimes require no-one to travel; a paradoxical outcome (for an art committed to liveness and presence) which in turn informed his recent advocacy and research project, ShowingWithoutGoing.live
In September 2023 he founded Time Based Editions with David Bergé, a series of ‘live books’ binding print to time, merging sound with paper. The first edition was his own ‘Borderline Visible’ which won the 2024 IDFA DocLab award for Creative Technologies. On the second, ADE DEA, he collaborated with musicans Ulla and Perila.
Other solo projects include experimentation around 'live portraiture' as The Other People: structured encounters with people from non-theatrical milieu. He was head dramaturg for 'Projected Scenarios' at Manifesta7 Biennial for Contemporary Art and has contributed to projects by other artists including Ivana Müller, David Weber-Krebs, Anna Rispoli, Jerome Bel and Forced Entertainment.
Ant has created and led workshops worldwide including 'Fantasy Interventions - Writing for Site-Specific Performance’ and has also worked as coach / mentor for artist programmes such as MAKE (Ireland), A-PASS, Sound Image Culture (Belgium) Onassis AiR (Greece) and DAS (Netherlands) where together with Edit Kaldor in 2013 he designed and mentored a 10-week block, ‘Every Nerve’. The work with Kaldor spawned his own wider investigation of radical trust, risk-taking and leaps of faith, most obviously via the ‘automatic workshop’ The Thing, created with Christophe Meierhans.
www.anthampton.com
photo, Sanem Su Avci, 2023
DE
Die Arbeiten der britisch-deutschen Performancekünstlers Ant Hampton (*1975) sind trotz unterschiedlicher Inhalte immer gekennzeichnet von einer deutlichen Spannung zwischen strengen formalen und strukturellen Elementen und solchen, die im Moment der Aufführung gelebt und verhandelt werden. Aus seiner Strategie, Zuschauer*innen durch ungeprobte performative Situationen zu führen, entwickelte er in späteren Arbeiten kleinformatige, intime Projekte, die den Zuschauer selbst einbezogen, und in Cafés („Etiquette“) oder im Lesesaal einer Bibliothek stattfanden („The Quiet Volume“). Seine letzten Arbeiten verhandeln die Kunst nicht mehr innerhalb eines sicheren oder autonomen Ortes, sondern ermutigen das Publikum, selbst Wagnisse einzugehen, mit realen Konsequenzen ("Someone Else", "The Thing”).