Performance | Spätschicht x Leila Hekmat

I’m Leaving. It’s Too Infinite for Me

A Poetic Personification of Rabble Rousers, Lost Souls and Mystic Comedians

Collage of James Main, Arthur Chruczsz, Monique Fei, Roman Ole, Shade Théret

James Main, Arthur Chruszcz, Monique Fei, Roman Ole, Shade Théret © photos: Robert Knoke / Lisa Baer / Chisom Ibe / Roman Ole / Shade Théret

For the final edition of Spätschicht this year, Leila Hekmat has curated a multifaceted performance programme. The works in I’m Leaving. It’s Too Infinite for Me activate areas of Gropius Bau that are normally inaccessible to visitors.

”Timothy Leary and Taylor Mead had a baby and it’s you. Today you’re born and it’s your birthday. Off beat, childlike baby, irreverent cartoonish mercurial visitors searching for the exit or the entrance through the never ending corridors. Tantric lovers, life artists, self-actualised hedonic-elitists escape from the masturbatory limits of their bodies via bio-neural fusion. Members of this caste recognise each other by their radiation. Your amphibian brain cannot be repressed: It demands regular stimulation. Action.“

Artistic Team

Leila Hekmat – Curation
Arthur Chruszcz, James Main, Roman Ole, Shade ThéretPerformances
Monique Fei – Costumes

Leila Hekmat is a Berlin-based artist whose work satirically merges installation, performance, film and music. Through hand-crafted costumes and stage designs, she constructs worlds teeming with detail that subvert and play with social conventions and the constructions of sexuality and gender. 

Arthur Chruszcz works as a physical theatre artist, actor, and performer and currently lives in Berlin. His performances combines gesture, movement and theatricality into shape-shifting interrogations of subjectivity and desire. He presents his work internationally and regularly collaborates with artists from the fields of visual art, theatre and dance.

Monique Fei is a French designer and artist working at the intersection of craft, couture, fashion and performance. Her practice redefines materials traditionally linked to sensuality and fetishism, particularly latex, through fine art techniques, experimental costuming and sculptural construction.

Shade Théret is a choreographer, dancer and director based in Berlin. Her work deconstructs classical Western dance forms to explore interpersonal dynamics, physical exertion and the uncanny. She works across performance, film/video and poetry, with presentations at institutions and festivals throughout Europe and the United States.

Roman Ole is a Berlin-based transdisciplinary artist with a focus on sound and performance. Blurring the lines between composition and embodiment, she creates sonic and spatial experiences that merge voice, movement, and ritual.

James Main aka i.u.r.a.n.u.s aka James Jeanette is an integral figure in London’s underground scenes, being the founder of the notorious performance space Jeanette’s and frontman of the garage-kink, cock-rock band Wild Daughter. His recent work in the bands Itchy Spots and Death Awareness Café circles around the question of disappearance and of identity as an unstable medium.