Balkans: "Night of Performances"

18:15-19:00 & 20:30-21:15 | MAIN LOBBY
Igor Josifov (FYROM)
"2-Dimensional"

21:00-22:00 | FOYER 1st-5th FLOOR
Bruno Isaković (Croatia)
"Make One's Way"

21:30-23:00 | FOYER 4th FLOOR
Bojana Radulović (Montenegro)
"Air Doll #2"

22:00-22:20 & 23:00-23:20 | YOUNG THEATRE WORKSHOP (5th FLOOR)
Petra Kovačić (Croatia)
"Act(ing)"

22:30-23:30 | MAIN STAGE
Bruno Isaković (Croatia)
"Denuded"

23:30-24:00 | MAIN STAGE
Tsvetelina Stoyanova (Bulgaria)
"White Plague"

24:00-00:30 | UPPER STAGE
Alen Sinkauz / Nenad Sinkauz / I.M. Klif (Croatia)
"66th Day of the Year"

Petra Kovačić (Croatia)
"Act(ing)"

"Act(ing)" is a live art installation in which Petra Kovačić exhibits her work in an unusal manner – exhibiting the work and herself in the gallery as well. She challenges the gallery space as a context that usually presents the finished product, but as audience we rarely get to see the working process. The starting point of the work is the desire to have the audience witness the process as well. With this Petra Kovačić completely turns the usual order of audience experience upside down as she makes the audience question their relationship with the work (of art) and the process of its creation. This immersive project results in visually impressive patterns that remain as traces of the artistic labour.

Alen Sinkauz / Nenad Sinkauz / I.M. Klif (Croatia)
"66th Day of the Year"

"66th Day of the Year" is an audio - visual performance and installation. The title of the performance changes according to the consecutive day of the year on which it is performed, thus symbolically emphasising the uniqueness of each event. Therefore, 7 March 2014 dictates that the title of the performance is "66th Day of the Year". Through improvisation and live sampling, the artists examin and exhibit the process of creating an 'instant composition'. The musicians are arranged opposite each other, communicating by interventions in each other’s sound and rhythm while the tension of maintaining and building up the musical and visual material has a strong, almost dramatic quality. During the performance, the audio-visual structures mutate over time into unexpected forms resulting from constant construction and de-construction of sound and images.

Bojana Radulović (Montenegro)
"Air Doll #2"

The artist presents her body as an object in the space, playing with most stereotypical images of a female body. The body is exhibited in a sterile environment, it is isolated in the space and framed by the white walls. The artist is dressed in a latex costume which reduces the body distinctions into amorphousness and depersonalization. However, two openings on the latex costume are the cornerstones of the imagination the artist offers to the audience. The performance points to moments in life that are dominated by pain, fear, and sometimes too much communication. Reducing everything to two openings, two plows, two vents, the viewer is given the chance to phantasise and perhaps abuse the body presented in a sterile, medical type of setting. Physicality is all that the artist proposes with her body, but psychology of the audience is where she aims.

Bruno Isaković (Croatia)
"Denuded"

"Denuded" emerges out of the research that Bruno Isaković did while preparing his previous solo performance "Invoke", which explored the otherworldly and demonlike features and methods of their exteriorization. In "Denuded", Bruno Isaković further examines the physicality of this subject, separating it from the source of its meaning, creating a solo transformation ritual. The work was created during a process that involved not only physical (de)formations of the body movements, but invoked psychological introspection to create a gestus which is carefully carried throughout the performance. The use of voice in the performance becomes part of the movements that sculpt the body, making this process and performance additionally experimental.

De-dramatizing the classic narrative with very simple structure while not abandoning the linear and logical development of movements, gestures and voice on stage, "Denuded" reviews possible relationships between the audience and the performer. This intense performance is full of intimacy and personality and it opens a confidential communication with the audience mirroring emotions, perspectives and gazes.

"Make One's Way"

How did we arrive to our needs? What was our point of departure and what did we collect on the way? As we strongly feel our selves is it possible to recognize the propensity of what outlines our current state and how does it change? Can we predict it?

To create transparent notions of what made us we need to look in the most unexpected, forgotten and in all of that we take for granted. This is not a psychoanalytical story, cause it is not only about us, it is about the world and a net of systems which strongly effects the journey in our becoming.

Tsvetelina Stoyanova (Bulgaria)
"White Plague"

"White Plague" is a performance and installation about life and disease. The artist Tsvetelina Stoyanova, who is a medical doctor herself, bases this performance on possibilities of patient – physician relationship. What is health, what is illness, who decides that and who imposes on the power that comes with those decisions? The strong visual elements in the artist’s work play with our expectations of a society that is overly medicalized, and the society evolved to a stage where we are not citizens anymore, but patients.

Igor Josifov (FYROM)
"2-Dimensional"

"2-Dimensional" is a performance installation that explores the delicate relationship between the artist and the viewer. The artist lies underneath a plexiglass structure inviting the audience to walk over him to reach their destination, one by one. A possible reflection on both the subjectivity of wedding processions and their importance to identity building and the cultural and aesthetical relevance of cemeteries in his native Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (FYROM). Josifov reflects on the state of contemporary identity, art making, loss and death. It is also reminiscent of his earlier experimental performance and photography series "Lost Bodies"—dying artist, in which Josifov partnered with American artist M. Ryan Noble to abstract on the artists’ subjective experiences of the local places and cultures which they are from and on their roles as art makers. In this performance the artist is an observer as much as he is observed while the spectator becomes a performer. This inversion of roles is a crucial point in the experience of the audience and the artist, as Josifov reflects on the uses and abuses of contemporary art(ists).