There are times for dance and there are not times for dance.
There is no time. There is no voice. There are no words.
© Petra Veber
The dramatic moment when Leja Jurišić kicked away the chair, leaving herself, angelic-like, taped to the wall. With this work she accomplished an appropriation-transgression of Maurizio Cattelan’s “A Perfect Day” (1999) piece by performing it as an anti-masochistic escape act; arduously working her way free of the self-imposed tape trap. —
Joseph Nechvatal, Hyperallergic, 30 August 2017
Yesterday, freedom was one step away from extinction. Today, we restrain ourselves, silence ourselves, we wait. We wait for them to put their words into our mouths, they are building their new images of a plurality of votes out of us, only to re-pin them – onto themselves. We – are numbed. We hold onto the first branch, the lowest. This is followed by new fixations of ourselves, aversions of ourselves. We do not kill ourselves loudly; we seek our nominal sense in silence, in darkness. The starting points for the installation Without Words are the poem by Jure Detela Birth as Criterion and Perfect Day, a performance by Italian artist Maurizio Catellan. Dancer Leja Jurišić is a hanging body in her installation that has been forcibly deprived of subjectivation, which is why it is fixed: “The most beautiful moments are the shortest; they appear just after pain comes and just before pain comes again. They are mine and I will not forsake them.”
CREDITS
Created by Leja Jurišić in collaboration with Petra Veber
Performed by Leja Jurišić
Commissioned by Yasmin Martin Vodopivec
Coproduced by Leja Jurišič, MGLC & Pekinpah
Premiered at 32nd Biennial of Graphic Arts: Birth as Criterion, MGLC, Ljubljana
