About Hendrik Quast

Hendrik Quast (* 1985 in Celle) is a queer performance artist. He graduated from the Institute for Applied Theater Studies in Giessen. He works as a solo artist and is part of the performance duo Quast & Knoblich. With a procedural concept of art, he dedicates himself to everyday practices and cultural techniques such as taxidermy, funeral floristry or nail design. He is interested in the acquisition of performing techniques bordering entertainment culture such as ventriloquism, pantomime or musical singing. In his elaborated research, he precisely documents the rhetoric ways of speaking about these cultural techniques. When translating his research into the field of art, grotesquely comic worlds emerge, where Quast’s grotesque alter ego follows his own language, logics and needs for action. This subversive comedy challenges the audience to deal with topics such as nature and art, the relationship between art and craft as well as social backgrounds and (precarious) forms of work.

 

He presents his performances, actions, video works, installations and radio plays in the context of the performing and visual arts. His works are produced with the most important independent production houses such as Sophiensæle Berlin, Künstlerhaus Mousonturm Frankfurt / Main, Gessnerallee Zurich, FFT Düsseldorf, Theater Rampe Stuttgart and Kampnagel Hamburg and are shown at GAK Bremen, M1 Hohenlockstedt and Kunsthalle Fridericicanum. These works are programmed regularly at international art festivals such as Impulse, steirischer herbst, Festival a / d Werf, and Kampnagel summer festival. As an author and director, he has adapted three of his theater works as radio plays for WDR Cologne (including the prize "radio play of the year" 2021 for "Nagelneu" by Academy of Performing Arts). He has received working grants and grants from the Federal Cultural Foundation, the Film and Media Foundation NRW, the Berlin Senate, the Capital Cultural Fund (HKF). In 2022, he stipend of the International Forum of the Berlin Theatertreffen and the Goethe Institute Villa Komagawa Kyoto and Schloss Solitude Stuttgart.

 

Since 2023 he is Ph.D.-candidate at Stockholm University of the Arts (SKH), in cooperation with Zurich University of the Arts. There, he is dedicated to  chronic illness in the performative arts and their grotesque reprensentation on and off stage. From 2011-15 he worked as research associate for the Graduate School of the Berlin University of the Arts in the field of aesthetic research. In 2021, he was a participant in the Zurich University of the Arts Pre-Phd Program PEERS.