[spectre] BADco. at Aksioma Project Space

[Aksioma]

Aksioma – Institute for Contemporary Art, Ljubljana, presents:

*BADco.
/Responsibility for Things Seen: Tales in Negative Space/*/
Spatial intervention and video installation/
www.aksioma.org/badco <http://www.aksioma.org/badco>

*Aksioma | Project Space*
Komenskega 18, Ljubljana
8 - 24 May 2013

*Exhibition opening: Wednesday, 8 May 2013 at 8 pm*


/Responsiblity for Things Seen/ is a spatial intervention and five 
channel real-time video installation by the Zagreb-based theatre compnay 
BADco. It present as a an effort to recreate "theatre by other means", 
pushing the audience center stage, and creating a narrativised 
interactive environment that focuses on the ethical questions relating 
to watching and participating in images. The work was commissioned by 
curatorial collective WHW and first presented within the Croatian 
presentation at the 54th Venice Biennale in 2011.

The present times, ridden with the sustained crisis of capitalism, 
environmental catastrophes and the depletion of common resources, 
require a reordering of economic and political relations on a global 
scale. As is repeatedly echoed throughout BADco's work: "When there is 
not enough for everybody, there is no equitable order that can be 
negotiated. It can function and be understood only on the basis of 
active policing of differential entitlements and exclusions." Yet 
attempts to fathom the ongoing reordering of the global space and to 
imagine a different course of social development to the existing 
capitalist system run aground at the limits of representation of 
systemic totality and the fragmention of agency within it. Even in the 
face of crass injustices, the collective capacity to imagine and project 
the common future remains captured in images, creating generalised 
desires, consumerist fragmentation of responsibility and a sense of 
public progress that are ultimately mobilised to sustain and maximize 
private profit. BADco's work reflects this conundrum using what’s most 
immediate to them as theatre makers: investigating strategies of 
representation, spatial orderings of representation, future scenarios 
and asymmetric acts of collective communication.

/Responsibility for Things Seen/ starts as a spatial intervention: an 
insertion of the outside space into the exhibition room. The existing 
gallery wall has been replicated in the gallery space, and the non-space 
behind the original wall now populates the exhibition room. This 
non-space is a withdrawal of space, a double negativity: not quite this 
exhibition space, not quite a different place. This non-space is 
populated by video screens, that extend Badco.'s intervention from space 
to time. The comings and goings of people are recorded and displayed, 
together with pre-recorded footage that makes the audience become 
co-present in time with someone who is not with them in the space. The 
image is a time machine, a transport in time. It opens and forecloses 
the imagination of the future. Present, past and possible futures are 
endlessly mixed and overlapped. Three videos provide intimate cinematic 
accounts, each accessible only to one spectator at any one time, of 
displacements in space, image and human presence. The first is a photo 
essay. The second is a mix of choreography of performers absent from the 
actual exhibition space and the inadvertent movement of exhibition 
visitors who are present. The third display shows a live camera shot 
processed by software subtracting or adding the human presence in the 
exhibition space. Furthermore, two interactive videos show short 
cinematic narratives algorithmically edited in real time using 
prerecorded material and live feed from cameras in the exhibition space. 
Finally, intermittent choreographic interventions are staged during the 
opening of the piece.

This work endures as a temporal installation: it records in images the 
comings and goings of people. Theatre, BADco's actual line of work, 
always requires the presence of artists. It cannot take place if they 
are not there. And here, in the exhibition, they remain in their 
absence. In recorded images – as the audience will too. And in images on 
screens the audience will see the presence of its absent 
fellow-visitors, just as it will perhaps witness the absence of its own 
presence. Become co-present in time with someone who is not with them in 
the space.

/Responsibility for Things Seen/ demands a scopic act: the much maligned 
capacity of images to capture our imagination and to supplant our 
sociality by its simulation is only commensurate with our capacity to 
always produce new images, new configurations and new disfigurations of 
images. Here it’s no different. BADco. did  produce images, BADco. did 
attempted to create images differently. And, yet, things don’t stop 
here. There seems to be something incomplete in images that coax out our 
action in the receptive act of viewing: our intent capacity to become 
captured, our passionate passivity in surrendering to our own hijacking, 
our engaged absorption in the intimacy of images. And it’s not the 
sovereign, enlightened spectator that is the agent of this activity. 
Rather it’s a beholder that loses her firm ground as she becomes 
immersed in an image, while the image loses its clarity as she starts 
deciphering its detail, unraveling a scene that becomes more and more 
impossible to relate to as she looks closer and closer, requiring a 
spiral of reading, a responsibility disturbed by the non-totalizable 
subject of the image.

/Responsibility for the Things Seen/ is based on BADco.’s analytical 
performative principles. It is an evolving work, presented as ‘theatre 
by other means’- through an installation and an intervention.


*BADco.* is a collaborative performance collective based in Zagreb, 
Croatia. As a combination of four choreographers / dancers, two 
dramaturgs and one philosopher, since its beginning (2000), it 
systematically focuses on the research of protocols of performing, 
presenting and observing by structuring its projects around diverse 
formal and perceptual relations and contexts. Reconfiguring established 
relations between performance and audience, challenging perspectival 
givens and architectonics of performance, problematizing of 
communicational structures – all of that makes BADco. an internationally 
significant artistic phenomenon and one of the most differentiated 
performance experiences. So far the group has produced more than 15 
performances that were presented all over Europe and in the United States.

The artistic core of the collective are Pravdan Devlahović, Ivana 
Ivković, Ana Kreitmeyer, Tomislav Medak, Goran Sergej Pristaš, Nikolina 
Pristaš, Lovro Rumiha and Zrinka Užbinec.


Presented at the 54th International Art Exhibition – la Biennale di 
Venezia as part of the Croatian Exhibition, 2011
Curators: What, How and for Whom/WHW
Venue: Arsenale
Software and interactive installation: Daniel Turing
Light design: Alan Vukelić

Cinematography and still photography: Dinko Rupčić

Camera assistant: Hrvoje Franjić

Video editing: Iva Kraljević
Costumes: Silvio Vujičić

Architect: Ana Martina Bakić

Additional performer: Ivo Kušek

Architectural visualisation: Antun Sevšek

Draftsmen: Igor Pauška, Slaven Josip Delalle

Production assistant: Valentina Orešić

Modelers: Lidija Živković, Ivana Hribar, Barbara Radelj

Promotional photos: Dinko Rupčić, Ivan Kuharić

Props production: Zagreb Youth Theatre workshop
Coproduced by:BADco., Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Croatia 
andZagreb Youth Theatre.
Supported by: City Office for Culture, Education and Sports – City of Zagreb


*Responsiblity for Things Seen at Aksioma | Project Space:*
Production: Aksioma – Institute for Contemporary Art, Ljubljana, 2013
www.aksioma.org <http://www.aksioma.org>

Artistic Director: Janez Janša
Executive Producer: Sonja Grdina
Public Relations: Mojca Zupanič
Technician: Valter Udovičić

*Thanks*: Ljudmila
*
*/*The programme of Aksioma Institute is supported by the Ministry of 
Culture of the Republic of Slovenia and the Municipality of Ljubljana.*/


Contact:
Sonja Grdina, 0590 54360, sonjagrdina at gmail.com 
<mailto:sonjagrdina at gmail.com>
*Aksioma | Institute for Contemporary Art, Ljubljana
*Neubergerjeva 25, SI-1000 Ljubljana, Slovenia
www.aksioma.org <http://www.aksioma.org>*
*




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