Delicate Instruments of Engagement

Alexandra Pirici

Ongoing performative Action

Around thirty years after Joseph Beuys’ death, Alexandra Pirici’s new work looks at Düsseldorf’s specific heritage as an historic site where the boundaries of art and politics were broken, and roams across the past, present and future. Is today’s society of total spectacle the final manifestation of the concept of social sculpture and Beuys’ idea of the world as Gesamtkunstwerk? When new information technologies turn the real into staged performances, can art and theater then still help to unpack the real and prepare the ground for new narratives?
Alexandra Pirici re-mediates images and events that have become iconographic memories of our times as well as lesser known ones into a mixed brand of popular culture and political gestures. The broadcast of Ceaușescu’s execution following the Romanian revolution and Pussy Riot’s punk prayer in the Cathedral of Christ the Savior in Moscow merge with Melania Trump and Michele Obama’s similar public speeches, Joseph Beuys’s Japanese whiskey commercial that helped him fund his ‘7000 Oaks’ project for documenta and the last speech of Salvador Allende, before his death during the American-backed coup in Chile.
Since her project for the Romanian pavilion at the 2013 Venice Biennale (with Manuel Pelmus) and subsequent works shown in contexts such as Manifesta 10, Berlin Biennale 9 and Tate Modern London, Romanian choreographer Alexandra Pirici has been a central protagonist among her generation of young artists that use performance as a medium. Her work is now rarely seen in a theater context. For some time she has worked primarily in sites devoted to the visual arts – for example, this year parallel to Impulse at the Münster Sculpture Project.
‘Delicate Instruments of Engagement’ is an ongoing performative action that runs for the duration of the festival period, a living exhibition dedicated to representation and the representative: a subjective selection of images, situations, political speeches, memes, important events within pop culture through which a history of art and politics could be told. A virtual exhibition space is created within the exhibition space, embodied by five performers. How is reality manufactured, how is history written, commented upon and changed in our memories and in the embodiment process? Members of the audience become involved in the constantly shifting landscape of monuments, actions and gestures while being able to interrupt narratives and chose new beginnings. In this way a continually rewritten iconographic archive of political events itself becomes a social act.

Can art be a place of radical democracy? What power do political gestures have inside and outside the artistic space? Does art resist? Where performance art usually declares bodies to be works of art, in Pirici’s work art works become bodies and images become reality.

Gestures of the Political
Claire Bishop in conversation with Alexandra Pirici

Romanian choreographer Alexandra Pirici has been a central protagonist of her generation since her project for the Romanian pavilion in Venice 2013 (with Manuel Pelmus). For Impulse Theater Festival she creates a new performative action looking at the specific heritage of Düsseldorf as a historic site where the boundaries of art and politics were first broken by Joseph Beuys. “Delicate Instruments of Engagement“ roams across the past, present and future by presenting iconic and lesser known images and events as a mix of pop cultural and political gestures. Claire Bishop – whose book “Artificial Hells“ marks her as one of the most influential art theorists of recent years – talks with Alexandra Pirici about her work, about museums and galleries as places for performance, and the love/hate relationship between art and politics.

Kunsthalle Düsseldorf
MONDAY, 5 June, 7 PM

ON

Tickets at the box office at Kunsthalle Düsseldorf.

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