Projects of co-workers
Neven Korda: Alter Faust
Performance

Thursday, 25 September 2014 at 8 pm
Kreatorij DIC, Poljanska cesta 26, Ljubljana

You are cordially invited to attend the performance by Neven Korda, SCCA's associate in the field of video art and archives.

The new project by artist Neven Korda, Alter Faust, is a performance by one author for one performer, who is the conceptual frontman, set designer, technician, gaffer, video designer and performer on stage. This is a construction based on the motifs derived from our neighbourhood, for Faust has recently appeared in Croatia as well as in Serbia, where it tackles the system of national theatre and the nation-state of a “Euro-Balkan type”. (As soon as it announced the formal possibility of union, Europe, too, started disintegrating.) However, the Faustian germs with the prefix alter expand the space towards a critique of the non-institutional scene; towards the theatre that transpires outside the national and institutional frames, where Brecht’s state turns into a scene, into “our” scene: Radio Študent, Mladina, FV, Borghesia, Metelkova, autonomy. In his alter position, Korda literally turns to himself, both in terms of execution and ideas; this is the position of an agent who offers his back instead of holding up a mirror, in relation to the medium of theatre, cultural policy, the state and neoliberal corporatism, which dictates personal saleability. The difference between various strategies of approach to the reading of the text can be described as Faustian in the sense that Miha Zadnikar defines in the article Doctor Faustus, or Three Elements of Drying Up (Doktor Faust ali Trije elementi o usihanju, Eseji 4/1992 in Problemi 8), where he understand Faustianness as the dry stuff (of German manners), in which the story about the sold soul no longer needs any proof of its own topicality. Today, we can read it in the same way – as a metaphor for ourselves.

With his personal confessional performances, visual artist Neven Korda produces and constantly perfects constructions of inner spaces, which are equally intimate and social spaces. Every one of his events (show/performance/installation) thus acquires the status of a special level of enunciation, which, on the one hand, reinforces the discourse of one while, on the other hand, it establishes anew a different kind of the gaze with each event; in so doing, it resists unequivocal representation while it also represent this unequivocalness. In the series of performances Consolidations (Utrjevanja), the various modes of Neven Korda’s performing language have acquired a sharper socio-critical profile with the presence of activist and publicist Miha Zadnikar; within this frame, the field into which Korda is aiming his point is becoming increasingly clear, and it is always double, indeed doubled: the field in which he functions as his own Faust – Alter Faust. All along, he keeps emphasising the importance of theatre both in the sense of the generic communal (space) and in the sense of appropriation of the performing (format). Korda returns not only to the form of theatre but also to its Faustian stuff, in which he opens up the space for the doubled image, for alter ego as the site of appropriation of various modalities of the physical, which can ensue equally from biomechanics (Meyerhold) and Doctor Faustus (Thomas Mann). This concerns the interweaving of theatre stage as reality and reality as theatre stage, in which the author is involved in a live dialogue with his character, which does not reflect reality but rather renders it visible. The world, in which this is possible, is the mediated stage on stage, whose characteristic is the simultaneous subjectness and objectness of the performed, recorded and live contents.

The horizon of the Faustian world is an alternative history of small traitors, infidels, lowlifes, sellers-out. Alter Faust thematises spiritual idleness and mythomania, the atmosphere among people who put their conscience on the market of honour and glory, and then grew tired and complacent all too soon. According to Brecht, the poor scene is not a scene without heroes but rather a scene that needs heroes. Alter Faust is a story of the “subject disappearing into myth”, an impression of sand in the palms of one’s hands, and a parable about the present meaning of the once extinguished glow – of the Futurists (Bodočniki).

MORE: www.aksioma.org/alter.faust

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.

Author and performer: Neven Korda
Dramaturge: Andreja Kopač
Technician: Selman Ćorović
Production: Aksioma – Institute for Contemporary Art, Ljubljana, 2014
Co-production: Prešeren Theatre Kranj and DDT (Zavod za kulturo DDT), Trbovlje
Partner: KUD Pozitiv, Ljubljana
Thanks: Borut Kumprščak, Slavko Glamočanin, Brane Ždralo, SCCA-Ljubljana, Zavod Zank, Davor Balent, Miha Zadnikar
Supported by the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Slovenia, the Municipality of Ljubljana and the Municipality of Kranj.
Sponsor: Datacenter d.o.o.

[Published September 23, 2014]