Raja Feather Kelly / The Feath3r Theory

DOOMERS by New York choreographer Raja Feather Kelly unfolds between performance, installation, and exhibition. It begins with questions of intimacy and desire, social media, the climate crisis, and existential uncertainty - and how these forces shape our bodies, relationships, and attention spans. Inspired by British art historian Claire Bishop's writing on contemporary spectatorship, DOOMERS explores how attention itself is changing in the twenty-first century.

DOOMERS spans the six museums of Kunstmeile Hamburg. Each performance is accompanied by a 45–85 minute installation in which performers are dispersed throughout the exhibitions as living objects, presenting elements drawn from the performances. The performances themselves then take place at designated locations within each museum (see overview), with some gradually dissolving back into installations.

Each performance stands on its own while simultaneously forming part of a larger constellation. Audiences moving between the museums encounter recurring images and movements in ever-changing contexts. The result is a parcours centred on the fleeting nature of live experience, in which the individual works continually reflect, expand, and ultimately blending into a single whole. Each performance station is also accompanied by diary entries that offer insight into Kelly's personal thought process.

JOURNAL ENTRY 7426 

All week I tried to escape only to end up back where I started. Where I guess it all starts. The body. There seems to be no amount of dancing, consuming, or purging that will rid me of my fear or unearth a kind of diligent hope. But I try anyway. Until someone might put me out of my misery.