15/03/2026 – 15/03/2026, 3:00 pm,

Chloe Chignell: SUNCUT: a lover's Dictionary

, Stadthausgalerie Münster (hosted by Kunsthalle Münster)

Duration of the performance: 2.5 hrs. The audience is welcome to enter and exit throughout the duration.

But remember. Make an effort to remember. Or, failing that, invent.

SUN CUT: a lover's dictionary is a lexicon of 366 gestures that attempts to embody the 366 entries in Lesbian Peoples: Materials for a Dictionary (1979) written by Monique Wittig and Sandie Zeig. In an act of speculative reanimation SUN CUT is an anticipatory document remembering a future yet to arrive. The work unfurls word by word, body by body. Each iteration of the performance progresses through the dictionary: gathering bodies, gestures, dances. It resists linguistic fixity in order to embrace language as a site of transformation, refusal, and reinvention. Inverting the status of printed material in archival practices SUN CUT asks how the body can be both a site and means of preservation.

Lesbian Peoples: Material for a Dictionary is a speculative dictionary that dismantles patriarchal language to posit a world of lesbian relation. Through fragmented definitions and poetic inventions, it reframes language as a site of resistance. Its entries range from definitions of everyday terms to elaborate accounts of mythical events, political movements and cultural practices. The book itself is a queer critique of linguistic authority and its role in enforcing dominant ideologies. Wittig and Zeig subvert the dictionary’s normal function, as a tool of mastery and control, and reshape it into a generative field where language destabilises its own conditions of use. Building on these foundations, SUNCUT approaches Lesbian Peoples not simply as a book but as a practice – a framework for reorganising the body through language.

Chloe Chignell (b. 1993) is an artist working across text, choreography and publishing. Her work focuses on language within a choreographic frame. She invests in writing as a body building practice and in practices of experimental translation. Chloe graduated from a.pass (BE, 2020), from the research cycle at P.A.R.T.S (BE, 2018) and from VCA (AU, 2013). Since 2019, Chloe co-runs rile* a bookshop and project space for publication and performance with Sven Dehens. Her work has been presented across Europe and Australia including: NEXT Festival (2024), Pavillon ADC (2024), Batard Festival (BE, 2019) Saal Biennale (ES 2021), Moving Words Festival (NO 2021), QL2 (AU 2022), KAAP (BE 2022), Littérature etc. (FR 2022), Dancehouse (AU 2016-8), The Kier Choreographic Award (AU 2018) Kottinspektionen (SE 2019) and Venice Biennale of Dance (IT 2017) among others. She has performed for and collaborated with choreographers across Europe and Australia including: James Bachelor, Angela Goh, Bryana Fritz, Stefa Govaart, Ingrid Berger Myhre, Adriano Wilfert Jensen, Phoebe Berglund, Anna Gaiotti, Clara Amaral and Gry Tingskog. In 2020 she published The Complete Text Would Be Insufferable with uhbooks, edited by Will Holder and NOT MOTHER NOT MYTH is forthcoming with Berlin based press Lesbianas Concentradas. Her writing has been published in: misted.cc (NL), Choreography Journal (NO), Le Chauffage (BE), RealTime (AU), This Container Magazine (SE/BE), ...and then the doors open again (BE/NL) and Engagement Arts Zine (BE). She also teaches choreographic and writing workshops at P.A.R.T.S. (BE), HZT (DE), ISAAC (BE) and the VCA (AU). Website Chloe Chignell

Steph Holl-Trieu is an artist and writer whose work engages the social relations that condition modes of perceiving, the production of meaning, and experience—both abstract and lived. Through writing, installation, sound, performative readings, and role-playing games, she constructs frameworks to disengage from and recompose structures of sense-making. Approaching aesthetic experience as indeterminate and intractable, her work unfolds iteratively and is often situated in collaborative or collective contexts. Her work has been presented at HAU Berlin, Kunstraum Niederösterreich, Shedhalle Zürich, and Le Commun Geneva, among others.

Concept, Choreography and Performance: Chloe Chignell Sound and Performance: Steph Holl-Trieu Sound Collaborations: Steph Holl-Trieu, Amina Szecsödy (PAF, Saint Erme Edition) and Mara Schwerdtfeger (Critical Path, Sydney edition)

This work is supported by: Artspace Sydney, Critical Path Sydney, Dancehouse Melbourne, GC De Maalbeek, n22 Brussels, Kunstendecreet, Cité des arts, Paris.