Delicate Instruments of Engagement
Alexandra Pirici’s Delicate Instruments of Engagement wanders through the past, the present and the future, pondering the increasingly blurry lines between politics and pop culture. With five performers, the artist recreates a subjective selection of images, situations and Internet memes that have become iconographic memories of our time. The audience can choose different beginnings from the various stories over and over again. These include, among others, images of Ceauşescu’s execution after the Romanian revolution, the almost identical speeches delivered by Michelle Obama and Melania Trump, the removal of the full-size tapestry copy of Picasso’s Guernica at the UN during a speech by US Secretary of State, Colin Powell, to garner approval for an intervention in Iraq, Joseph Beuys’ whisky commercial from 1984 for the Japanese brand Nikka, which served the artist as a means to finance the 7000 Oaks project for the documenta, George Michael’s song Freedom ’90 and sequences from Grace Jones’ video Slave to the Rhythm.
Alexandra Pirici is a Romanian artist with a background in choreography and performance that works undisciplined, across different mediums. Her work has been shown at the prestigious Skulptur Projekte Munster 2017 edition, the Venice Biennale, Manifesta 10, Berlin Biennale 9 and Tate Modern London among others, having stablished herself as a central protagonist of a generation of young artists who use performance as a medium. She uses the human body and enactment to reflect on the monumental, history and memory as well as their relation to new technologies and the online sphere.
Credits
Come and go as you like.