Projects of co-workers
Aksioma - Institute for Contemporary Art, Ljubljana presents
Neven Korda: Consolidations
Video strategies of mapping in an artist's time and work

Performance: Friday, December 14, 2012, 7 pm
Guest: LadyBird & Miha Zadnikar
Aksioma | Project Space, Komenskega 18, Ljubljana

“I stick to my own, professional, artistic positions, at any cost. I can see no reason to give up my concept after thirty-five years.” (Stane Sever)

Source of creativity: self-representation. A first-rate soup is more creative than a second-rate painting. Video is not this or that in particular; it is not a magnetic tape recording; it is not one of photographic techniques; it is not computer animation, a mechanically generated image. Video is just all this and everything else; it is a technique of combining various techniques. It does not derive from written ideas, but rather affects them; as a procedure of combining, merging various elements, as an immaterial, non-existent link, which was not here once upon a time, but which we nevertheless recognise in everything that once was.

The love story of song and dance, which I had never experienced before, has been blown away by the first storm. The fire is gone. Like letters from the past. The metastasis of discipline. Yes. No. Yes. No. Yes. Yes. Cut. Cut-out. Feedback. Loop. Repetitive object. How terrible, what an end of life, which is sacred! Has there ever been a human civilisation that had not arrived with its right hand raised, as a symbol of peace, and with a murderous weapon hidden in its left hand? Nothing should surprise us. Read my words for the future. This is the world outside the narrow Slovenian world. This is the world we dream about. Unfortunately! Like a performance of something felt, analogous, experienced in front of the spectator and digitally processed. Slow-motion recording of a jet of time; visible passage of time. Offshoot generator. 100% pure video. The theatre of one.

There is no theatre without crisis. This crisis, which is immanent in theatre art, is a continuous dialectical process and, at the same time, the drive of its creativity. Such a crisis ends only when we, in our complacency and narcissism, attempt to bring time to a halt. Human nature does not bear static condition in the sense of constant repetition of the same things; when a certain evolutionary stage is finished, new tendencies are already developing on a different basis, in indisputable dependence on everything that came before. Space and time are not conditions in which we live; rather, they reflect the mode of our thinking. Theatre has always been abundant with such crises; hence, we should not create unnecessary problems out of this. Ain’t got no dough.
In his performance, video artist Neven Korda “returns” to his initial position, that is, to the manipulation of video material, while he gives up neither his own performative attitude nor the presence of theory (Miha Zadnikar) or music (Lady Bird). In Consolidations, Korda represents the position of the artist even more clearly, in the sense of the establishment of “The theatre of one” as an invention and construction of peculiar aesthetic, discursive and production-related modes and rules as well as the emergence of his own trademark, which over the years has been striving, above all, to reinforce and – finally – consolidate itself. Get famous or die trying. With money or without it.

Andreja Kopač

The text features excerpts from The Theatre of One by Matjaž Šekoranja (Knjižnica MGL, Ljubljana, 1971) and various works from Neven Korda’s artistic opus (additional sources: SCCA, ZANK)

Neven Korda is a videast and a multimedia artist with a lasting artistic practice. He explores the issue of the essence of video as artistic expression and video as a medium. He speaks about the so-called pure video. He started using video in the early eighties, as a member of the theatre group FV 112/15, when affordable video equipment became available at the market. He is co-founder of FV Video, the independent video production which has brought to fruition several artistic, music and documentary video projects. Until the end of the eighties, he was a member of the group Borghesia; he did the visuals for their performances and concerts and he directed their video clips. He was a member of the artistic tandem ZANK with Zemira Alajbegović. In the nineties, he also worked as video editor, author of TV images, director and realiser of projects and TV shows. At the end of the millennium, he converted to research, practice and recording of pure video art.

Credits
Author: Neven Korda
Performers: LadyBird, Miha Zadnikar in Neven Korda
Video archives: YYY, Gospod Nahtingal, Odmevi, GSV, courtesy Aksioma - Institute for Contemporary Art
Expert text: Andreja Kopač
Technical supervisor: Branko Ždralo
Make-Up: Tea Skušek
Thanks: Boštjan Čadež, Črt Lipovšek, Borut Kumperščak, Janez Štamberger

Production: Aksioma – Institute for Contemporary Art, Ljubljana, 2012
www.aksioma.org

[Published December 11, 2012]