performing the exhibition: art-act-box
& analysis of the dance material of the ART-ACT-BOX project: žitnjak atelier

Having been invited to take part in the cooperative project Performing the Museum put on by the Museum of Contemporary Art in Zagreb, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Novi Sad, the Fine Arts Gallery in Slovenj Gradec and the Antoni Tàpies Foundation in Barcelona, making use of works from their holdings as material, Andreja Kulunčić directly refers to the title theme, problematising artistic methods of communicating with the audience and, indirectly, institutional and non- institutional presentation practices as strategic decisions in the transfer of knowledge and the emancipatory potentials of art.

Collaborating with the contemporary dance performer Zrinka Užbinec, she devised a discursive dance performance in which, with the help of objects from the ART-ACT-BOX; a box which she created for this project, rephrasing works of the artistic groups TOK, the Group of Six Authors, KOD, Bosch + Bosch, Art&Language and the artists Pino Poggio, Bogdanka Poznanović and Lygia Clark. These are artists who in the 1960s and 1970s, giving up on the idea of the object, making use of cheap and non-artistic materials, addressing an accidental audience and working in extra-artistic contexts, implemented a conceptual turn in art, critically referring to art and social systems. 

In Performing the Exhibition: ART-ACT-BOX, the dance, in a choreography based on the research of the conceptual practices of the 60s and 70s, and particularly of the selected artists, with body, movement and text acquainted the audience with the artistic intentions, principles and strategies, drawing it into the performance. Reconstructing one strategy after another, one work after another, the dancer and audience together “set up the exhibition”. The settled roles are reversed; the performance ends at the moment when the “exhibition has been set up”; the process of the performance is also, at the same time, its product; the audience that takes part in the creative process of the origin of the exhibition, does away with itself, since after the set-up of the exhibition, its role is over. The performances take place in collaboration with a broadly defined audience and in and in places not usually thought of as artistic: in libraries, schools, local communities, culture centres, retirement homes and a psychiatric hospital. Key aspects of the artistic practices of the 1960s and 1970s, now historical and enshrined in museums, body, text, movement, space, public space, are transposed into and activated in contemporaneity through an entirely different medium, the art of the dance, and the artistic methods cited are offered to the audience as creative tools for the activation of their own everyday lives and social engagements.

In the 3 years of the project, almost 30 performances were carried out: Zagreb, Barcelona, Novi Sad, Slovenj Gradec in 2016 // Čakovec, Šibenk, Pazin, Zagreb (Jelkovec, Susedgrad), Vukovar, Bedekovčina in 2017 // Split, Rijeka, Poreč, Zagreb, Sisak in 2018.  

The concept, however, becomes more complex upon returning to the gallery situation. This time, Andreja Kulunčić and Zrinka Užbinec jointly dissect their own work by using it as artistic material in the new performance, whereby they do not use the works from the museum anymore, but rather the dance choreography they previously used to convey them. The new work, Analysis of the Dance Material of the ART-ACT-BOX Project: Žitnjak Ateliers, serves both authors as an entrance into the zone of experiment. From the perspective of own fields of expertise, they question the possibilities of dance in museums and galleries and the points of their convergences, by grasping – now from another angle – the subject of “performing the museum”, as well as the experimental thought of the authors cited earlier. Neither of them, however, is in a safe zone anymore. The new collaboration simultaneously builds, demolishes, and changes the framework of the unknown. Both authors put their codes to the test, they question and seek to breach own practices within the newly-created field.