B#SIDE WAR FESTIVAL - VENICE STAGE
(A SPECIAL Opening WEEK for the 3° edition OF THE FESTIVAL)
the artist ANA MROVLJE PROTAGONIST IN the
international B#SIDE WAR festival
From October the 14th - to October the 22th, 2016 / Venice (Italy)
The B#SIDE WAR is an artistic and cultural festival of
spread art, diffuse in 12 territories of Italy and Slovenia, thanks to artistic
exhibitions and installations, performing, talks and conferences, researches
and publications. The festival covers the area from the Mediterranean Sea to
the Julian Alps, in addition, special events in Toronto (Canada), Kansas City
(USA), Canberra (Australia), Verdun (France), Ieper (Belgium) and London (UK)
take place every year.
Designed with the main scope of investigating the
legacies that connect the First World War to our everyday life, the B#SIDE WAR
project has then been devoted to the analysis of the relationship between the
Human Being and the ‘900 conflicts, as well as to the examination of the
kinship between our war past and the vision of the world we nowadays have. The
third edition of the festival will takes place thanks to the artistic and
curatorial work of several contributors belonging 39 different country: 68
artists from all round the world, 17 national museum directors, 25 researchers,
a team of 25 cultural organizers.
Key themes for the third
edition of the festival are: captivity, prisons, multi-vocal and poly-focal
vision of history.
For the opening (called
"Venice Stage"), the art
direction has involved the international artists Ana Mrovlje, Manca Bajec and Dan Allon, which will inaugurate the
third edition creating a week of intense and unique performative acts,
interconnected by a common necessity of re-reading the war stories the artists
have experienced on their skin (the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the war in
the Balkans), or the war stories of which they are heirs (the first and the
second world war).
The Opening Week wants to involve the audience in exploring issues
related to repression and inheritance of the conflict, entering into a
contemplative space in which to undertake new interpretations and relive a
necessary poly-focal and multi-vocal perception of war facts.
Ana Mrovlje, author of the installation Peacestool (Sit Down and Deal with War
Inside of You), artist who
studied as psychoanalyst, investigates something that is still part of our
collective memory, lying in the subconscious and in everyone's inheritance: the
lagacy of war. A chair shaped with 3000 bullet shells from the World Wars
coming from different countries, appears as a witness of conflicts that with
their echo nowadays are able in influencing other wars (as the Balkan conflict,
of which the artist was a witness). The chair evokes also the path of
introspective investigation that the artist pursued, sitting in the studio of
her analyst every week, questioning herself about war from a chair. Putting the
visitor in the centre of the artistic action, he becomes the protagonist of a
war that takes place intimately in his/her mind and that becomes collective
again in virtue of its “silent presence” in each of us.
The opening week will
continue with the performance Witness Corner Marked by Manca Bajec: internationally renowned for her poetics and her
research about the movement defined by James E. Young the ‘Counter-Monument’,
the artist shows how contemporary art may act as an intruder, clarifying
element for the grey areas of history writing. Witness Corner Marked focuses
on the transmission and perceptions of multi-voice war stories (immaterial
monuments of a collective past), feeding in this way
a pluri-focal
vision of history which still is a necessity today.
In a vacant space animated by floating voices,
querying the memory of the past, sounds and objects become carriers of the
experiences people endured in war. The visitor will share universal symbols and
emotions, being a witness of individual moments that have never been
“monumentalised”.
Than, the Israeli artist Dan
Allon, who, in the performance All in
Order Mr. General ponders upon the topic
of repression, which is one of the principal instruments in the struggle for
power. During the 7-day performance, the artist will step into the shoes of a
dictator in captivity, imprisoned in a uneasy place, under everyone's eyes
(being at the same time victim and executioner), creating a reverberation about
some archetypal figures and re-elaborating the intense experience he lived as
jailer in Kzioth (Israeli-Palestinian conflict).
Being aware of the relationship between the most
powerful and the weakest in societies in war, the artist sheds a light on the
complex relation between the military and civil world that are divided, so in
wars of yesterday as today, by a very thin line. The performance concerns the
complexity and the ambivalence of history, creating relationships and tensions
with the visitor, starting from the asymmetric relation that binds the visitor
to the prisoner.
Talk with the artists:
saturday, october 15th, 6 PM (free entrance, booking is recommended)
THE
B#SIDE WAR OPENING WEEK WILL
TAKE PLACE @ CAOS ART GALLERY
Calle lunga San Barnaba (Dorsoduro), 2687, 30123
Venice, Italy
www.iodeposito.org
info@iodeposito.org +39
348-7768935
Press: press@iodeposito.org
+39 349-0526136