Agitation Performance, Vžigalica Gallery, Ljubljana, 20 November, 2012

Neven Korda introduced his agitation performance with a statement: “A work of art is the object produced by the artist.” This statement was made in order to emphasise the interest, which is the precursor of all other elements in the performance. Primarily, he is interested in the emergence of beauty and aesthetic elements that trigger mental images; emotional and physical involvement in the entire action. The space was saturated with video projectors pointed at all directions. The artist was generating video images by the usage of colour and typographical/word elements. All along he was reciting textual fragments and slogans followed by speech-modulated sounds. The repetition of the words caused the loss of the meaning and they were becoming merely an aesthetic quality. Video and sound were connected with generative programs Isodora and PureData. First of all, the artist was interested in visual effects, namely what he calls the beauty caused by the rules of the operation of technical medium, thus he adopts it in order to cause the inception of beauty. In his words, beauty is the effect that ensures the arts to exist as an independent social field, and prevents art to merge with other fields such as ideology, politics or technology. At the same time, the artist uses critical elements and statements in order to construct a bridge between the field of beauty and ideology. NW from SE is therefore also a criticism of geopolitical relationships. The artist calls for a view, which does not predict for fixed or landowning geopolitical relationships, but rather flexible viewpoints. This would cause a realisation that any position can be specified in terms of something North West of South East. Performance also uses an entirely personal story, as an allusion of the view through the artist’s studio window at Metelkova in the direction of the North East.

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