Focus: Performance

performance is a medium of the absolute present—simultaneously embedded in reality and slipping out of it. it is an art form in which the body acts under conditions of complete vulnerability to the moment. the performative medium seems to describe the present perfectly—this unstable “setting” of our lives.

we live in a time when conditions change faster than memory can form around how things used to be. what once seemed ordinary—possible, permissible, self-evident—gradually becomes inaccessible, and soon, unremembered.

we want to speak about this quiet forgetting and the instability of any moment, fact, or situation. they slip away and disappear: did it happen, or did it not?

“it was there / it was not” is an exhibition of surrender. together with the entire space, the curator yields to this new kind of forgetting. the exhibition opens empty—and gradually, event by event, fills with artifacts, documentation, and traces of the presence of this small life.

*what you see in the space now are traces of those who were here, who acted here. they are no longer here. perhaps they were never here at all. that’s the kind of melancholy it is.

Anna Zavediy

Photo: Ivan Sorokin