Nick Steur will be presenting two works at La Biennale Toulouse this fall.

Care To Carry

27 september – 12 october 2024 – worldpremiere

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Care to Carry is a 4-hour experience starting with an indoor walking workshop. You get to know your stone, learn the art of carrying it on your head and bond with other participants. For the more adventurous, the journey continues outdoors into the city centre, one of the most challenging environments for mindfulness. Nick Steur’s new art practice encourages finding calm and connection amidst the frenetic pace of the city, while embracing the ‘concrete jungle’. How can we still feel free, focused and confident when everything around us is specifically designed to grab our attention? By wearing a stone on our head, by deliberately destabilising ourselves, we can feel comfortable in discomfort. Wearing your stone on your head shifts your attention inwards. This kind of balanced concentration can blur the environment and open up your senses. As a coherent, quiet collective – like a flock of birds or a school of fish – we can move through Toulouse like an organic organism…  Feeling focused while remaining inspired by the city. Care to Carry invites you to join a collective and inspiring opportunity for empathy. This experience challenges us to find balance and mindfulness amid the chaos of the city.

ORBIT

5 – 6 october 2024

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The stars we observe with the naked eye usually consist of two, or even more stars orbiting each other. Because of the distance to those stars, we can only see one point of light, as if they were one. Once they orbit, they are doomed to each other. Learning this (during the Covid-19 pandemic) inspired me to create ORBIT: Two marble stones are manually activated and will dance towards their final collision. The dance is always different. In one version (group exhibition in Vonk Ateliers) I’ve built an ongoing installation and entered the space every twenty minutes, to reactivate the duo. In another, the industrial, tall space dictated bigger stones, different ropes and an additional performer. To orbit stone became one of my practices. The only fixed parameters are: indoors, manually activated, directly attached to the ceiling.