Talk to Him
video-work/installation
21’
2011
This video-work is about enjoyment, indulgence and touch (haptic images) that can occur between a film and its audience, or maybe it is just a story of unrequited, unnoticed love, slowly becoming torture over time.
She participated in the 49th and 51st October Salons.
The work is a result of an unusual collaboration or rather exchange between two artists, and therefore freed from the prescribed plans and expectations during the shooting. Marta Popivoda, the filmmaker “had received” the dance piece I Heart Lygia Clark by Jennifer Lacey, and immediately after, she shot the next performance in return. The dance piece itself addresses the idea of therapy as an artistic practice through a series of beauty treatments that the choreographer provides to each individual viewer. Raw material from this shooting is in possession of both authors and can end in very different films.
The video-work/installation Talk to Him by Marta Popivoda amplifies the multilayer performance, the performance for and with the spectator who doesn’t see it; the “backstage” performance between the three performers who – apart from executing the tasks that produce the sensorial event for the blind / dead spectator – perform their roles for one another; and the cinematic performance constructed by the camera eye. How to locate here the spectator’s eye, the point in which the set of actions, micro-events, and audio-visual sensations become performance? Is it about trust and confidence? In the search of the missing and shifting spectator’s eye, the film loses the sovereignty over its “object” and becomes a fragile affective experience, thus transmitting the sensuality of the performance to the film spectators.
Choreography: Jennifer Lacey, Audrey Gaisan, Barbara Manzetti
Performers: Nicolas Courtier, Jennifer Lacey, Audrey Gaisan, Barbara Manzetti
Copyright: Marta Popivoda
© Cultural Centre of Belgrade, October Salon Collection and the artist
Purchase Contract: III-5 -391/24.11.2016.
Inventory No. 1460
Photo: still from the video work
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Marta Popivoda (1982, Belgrade, Serbia) currently lives and works between Berlin and Belgrade. She works primarily in the field of moving images, at the boundary between visual art and film, exploring the discursive power structures of the contemporary world of art and cultural and political spheres of the former Yugoslavia through her films, video installations and performances. She is a member of the editorial collective of the TkH (Walking Theory), a theoretical-artistic platform and journal.
She has participated in exhibitions and programmes at important institutions such as: MoMA, New York; Tate Modern, London; M HKA, Antwerp; 21er Haus, Vienna; Beirut Art Center, Beirut; Musée de la dance, Ren; MSUM, Ljubljana; Arsenal, Berlin; La Casa Encendida, Madrid; Forum des Images and MK2 Beaubourg, Paris; Beursschouwburg and Kaaitheater, Brussels; Museum of Yugoslav History and Museum of Contemporary Art, Belgrade, etc. Her feature documentary Yugoslavia, How Ideology Moved Our Collective Body premiered at the 63rd Berlinale, and was later screened at many film festivals worldwide.
Popivoda is the initiator of the Illegal Cinema Project (Belgrade, Paris, Bilbao) and art director of REZ, contemporary experimental film festival in Belgrade. She graduated in film directing from the Faculty of Dramatic Arts in Belgrade and completed her post-graduate studies in experimental film at the Art and Media Study Programme of the Berlin University of Art (UdK). In 2014 she was selected for the Berlinale Talents Programme of the Berlin Film Festival, and in 2015 received a prestigious Art Prize of the City of Berlin for the visual arts from Akademie der Künste, awarded to a Serbian artist for the first time. In the same year she also received the Edith-Russ-Haus Award for Emerging Media Artists. More information at www.martapopivoda.info