Warped Space

The installation consists of spatial forms that are wrapped into the corporality of a book triptych. A close-up of moving images from the performances unrolls on the white surfaces of book pages, the need to leaf through the book enables the viewer to touch the invisible matter of the imagination. Simultaneously, one touches the reflection of the recent past and of the imaginarium of the performance.

Tactility and the repetitive gesture of meditatively leafing through the sheets replaces the seduction of our gaze, bending it into contemplation. At the same time the so-called inner world is turned inside out, as the medium of the message in a book, carrying the visible field of the magic world of the performance. In this way the semi-distant absence of visual elements of the performance is enacting the ephemerality of theatre. A mere document (a museum artefact) is actually a manifestation of how a certain curved space of the subconscious binds new meanings.

On the opposite side of the triptych there is an artefact from the performance In the Name of the Mother by the Irwin group entitled Kapital 2018 inserted into the borderline: the fourth wall is shifted into the background and the actors become a kind of repoussoir.

The audience is invited to take seats and watch the performance only after they have taken a tour of the exhibition. Still, some principles set by landscape painters of the 16th and 17th centuries are imminent here. They created oversized canvasses that were fastened onto the scenery horizons, flanked by curtains and stage sets of forests, cities. The shift into the world of museums within the stage performance offers an insight into the history of theatre art, when the actor standing in front of the scenography could easily stain his costume with fresh paint.

The fantasy world of painted stage curtains and stage scenery is nowadays in theatre often replaced by moving images. In the performance Irwin’s icons are seen on the surface of the horizon. They are presenting a micro world of a huge oil painting, one which used to play a role in the context of a theatre performance.

Country/Region Slovenia

Presenting Organization Muzeum, Institute of Art Production, Distribution and Publishing

Curator Barbara Novakovič

Artists Angelina Atlagić, Uroš Belantič, Mateja Bučar, Vadim Fishkin, IRWIN, Leo Kulaš, Numen/For Use