Notebook

Alexandra Bachzetsis (lives and works in Zurich/CH) views the conceptual and physical form of the human body both as a medium and as a process or substance. In doing so, the artist draws on the vocabulary of ‹pop-cultural› and commercial media such as film or advertising, as well as moments from the history of art, theater and choreography, which she simultaneously stages but also critically deconstructs. At the Kunst Halle Sankt Gallen, Bachzetsis presents her new work Notebook, which is shown as a performance and video installation. The project is a radical re-examination of her own biography as a dancer, choreographer and artist. The piece resulted from a dialogical method developed by Bachzetsis especially for this project. The collaboration with the project partners is evident in the diverse encounters that take the form of material and immaterial traces, voices and remnants. Themes such as lust, sexuality, excess, innocence, pain and transience are negotiated in the form of performative notes that manifest themselves in a plurality of voices, images, bodies and objects. The notebook as an indispensable companion to the artistic process, as a private archive of creative work and a medium for storing ideas for imagined future projects is a reflection of Bachzetsis` artistic affinity for the fragmentary and sketch-like in creative and performative thought processes. The exhibition at the Kunst Halle Sankt Gallen presents Bachzetsislatest performance and at the same time embeds it in the artists multifaceted oeuvre, which takes shape in ephemeral moments and actions as well as documentary, written and multimedia languages of form. Through an idiosyncratic mixture of dance elements, performative strategies and self-recording practices, the body becomes a corporeal archive, the most subversive form of presentation of experience and the site of constant agency between past and present, occurrence and documentation, liveness and mediality.