Events
OBJECT:SHOWCASE
(Oct 2022)
OBJECT:SHOWCASE was our summer 2022 series where we invited performers from outside Prague — artists already working the way the OBJECT:PARADISE Manifesto works — to stage a live action under our curation. Two artists took the invitation, and neither of them treated the room as an audience.
First was Adam Ritzke (PL), an action artist who makes the body the whole text. His piece existed once, could not be rehearsed and could not be repeated — fifty surgical needles, a red string, a tree, and whoever happened to be standing in a public park at Přístav that afternoon. That is the Manifesto's first demand made literal: create only in the immediate present, in the context you are actually standing in, and let the context finish the work. The rain that started mid-action became part of it because there was no version of the piece that excluded the rain.
Then was Viviana Druga (ROU), a Romanian artist based in Berlin who grew up in Transylvania and spent childhood summers in a Carpathian mountain village — a rural, communal inheritance she has since built a whole practice out of. She works in installation, object and performance to revive female aesthetic traditions and forms of knowledge that live in the body rather than in books, using ritual as the mechanism: personal and communal rites staged as instruments of release and social change, in the Beuys line where creative work is an emancipatory act rather than self-expression. Her O:P performance was a ritual of purging — a mound of hay, a stack of TVs, a gallon of paint at Punctum — and, like ours, it asked the room to do something rather than watch something.
Both sat for an OBJECT:VAULT interview around their performance — Adam's the day before his, Viviana's months before hers.
Adam Ritzke (PL)
July 23, 2022 · Přístav, Karlín, PragueOne of the most extreme actions enacted from the Manifesto: Adam stood naked atop a mound under the canopy of Přístav's trees and pierced his body with fifty surgical needles, each tied by a red string to a tree beside him.
Adam Ritzke (PL)
One of the most extreme actions enacted from the Manifesto: Adam stood naked atop a mound under the canopy of Přístav's trees and pierced his body with fifty surgical needles, each tied by a red string to a tree beside him.
A group of fifteen or so people gathered to witness the performance. And although it began to rain shortly after Adam began piercing every part of his body, the public crowd watched in awe. Before Adam's makeshift stage, the action was screened live on a small TV as it was being filmed.
Once each of the fifty needles were pierced through Adam's body, a smile unfolded across his lips and he gently began to sway the distant tree, with the red string, with the fifty needles, with his naked and contorted body.
The day before the performance, we interviewed him for an episode of OBJECT:VAULT. The interview was strangely calm and warm, juxtaposing greatly with what we would witness the next day. He later contributed writing to KROTCH Magazine, Issue 4.
Materials Used
- 1 naked body
- 50 surgical needles
- 8 mounds of coal
- 1 small bush
- 1 medium bush
- 1 low hanging tree
- 9 separate species of wildflower
- 1 projection
- 1 happening
Viviana Druga (ROU)
October 1, 2022 · Punctum, PragueViviana brought a mound of hay, a stack of TVs, and a gallon of paint to Punctum for a performative ritual on purging and release.
Viviana Druga (ROU)
Viviana brought a mound of hay, a stack of TVs, and a gallon of paint to Punctum for a performative ritual on purging and release.
Corona stripped off the masks of the world, taking a bit of flesh with the mask in the ripping process. It also put a lot of people into survival modus which is activating the more primitive part of the brain which was maybe more latent during the last decade. Some developed more compassionate skills, others quite the opposite. We are in a process of purging all out what is not working and it very often feels like we don't get nothing back to fill us again. This is because the emptiness needs to be felt before anything new can be consolidated. The performative ritual is an invitation to let it all out. To learn to purge.
See more of Viviana's work at her website.
