2020: Obscene | Alexandra Bachzetsis

Is it a scene from Blowup, Michelangelo Antonioni’s renowned film, or maybe a studio where a porn film is shot? The setting of 2020: Obscene, with its bright colors and cameras recording everything, is on the edge. Like everything else happening during the 85 minutes of this performance that comments on lifestyle sadomasochistic eroticism’s fetishism.

Alexandra Bachzetsis, a Greek-Swiss performer, choreographer, and visual artist based in Zurich, who has notable landmarks and collaborations throughout her career – MoMA New York, Tate Modern, ImPULSTanz Vienna, Julidans Amsterdam, among others – in 2020: Obscene uses body, text, and image to explore the ambiguity of ‘scene’ and ‘obscene’.

Together with three co-performers she is focusing on the relationship between the staging of the excessive body and its consumption by the coveting gaze and the overwhelming textuality. On the one hand, the work examines the problems of theater as a manipulation machine with regard to seduction, attraction, and games of sexual identity; on the other hand, it explores the performing body itself as a place of alienation and limitation of the human being.

The performers are confronted with their own corporeality – with the contradictions between intuition and gesture, light and night, score and script, norm and form, conception and action. The piece, thus, not only questions the subversive and the normative in performance art, but also addresses itself to communication through excess as a radical interruption of formats, gestures, cultural patterns and archetypes.

-Born in Switzerland to a Swiss mother and Greek father, Alexandra Bachzetsis presents herself as “uprooted”, without making use of origin or identity to delineate her political and aesthetic position. She notes: “I didn’t have a sense of belonging within language or place; therefore I wanted to establish one for myself, to produce a space where I could exist.”

-She made her choreographic debut in 2001 with “Perfect”. Since then, she has presented more than 30 works in partnership with such major arts organizations as MoMA in New York and the Tate Modern in London.

-She is a graduate of the Accademia Teatro Dimitri in Verscio (Switzerland), STUK – House for Dance, Image & Sound in Leuven (Belgium), and DasArts, the Center for Advanced Research in Theater and Dance Studies in Amsterdam (the Netherlands). Over the last 15 years, Bachzetsis has garnered such honors as the Swiss Art Award (2011 and 2016) and the Swiss Performance Art Award (2012).

-She appeared at documenta 14 (Athens/Kassel, 2017) with the performance “Private Song”, which explored gender issues and cultural constructs rooted in gendered models.

-In the eyes of Bachzetsis, pop culture, the mass media, and the Internet are producing new contemporary dance motifs. She herself construes dance as an intersectional language within which many systems of representation inter-cross: everything from painting and architecture through to photography, video clips, cinema, television, and pornography.