Sharing practices

artistic laboratory

As suggested already by its title, the Artist’s Lab brings the unexpected and the uncertain. As a common space of the festivals Platform and Performa, it presents our guest artists not only through their works but also through concrete principles of their artistic practice. The lab is aimed at deepening and developing our relation to the unknown – we will namely allow ourselves to address what’s difficult to grasp, or even doesn’t make sense, but is definitely perceived and sensed through certain aspects of our being and/or artistic work.

This year’s format focuses on finding new inter-communication spaces between the artist, the work, the performers and the viewers, adopting an experiential perspective on artistic work. Aimed at developing active participation of the viewer in the artwork, it investigates the processes involved in an exchange of knowledges arising and evolving out of this encounter.

The viewer’s perception of the visible, moving body and the resulting physical experience in the viewer’s body are caught in a continuous process of cause and consequence. What the viewer sees and perceives seeps through into her body and is deposited as sediment on the existing contents of the inner sense-mind maps, where it resonates and affects them in turn. At the same time, the viewer’s continually changing inner maps are always in a process of opening and protruding on the outside, guiding the senses, perceptions and thoughts. Understanding the viewer as active participant in the artwork, one that co-creates the perceived work with her awareness, thoughts, and presence (physical and mental), the lab will focus on the possibilities of how to develop this fact even further and find ways to enter an experiential dialogue, where the physical relation actually occurs. To open up a space in which the participant, with her body and according to her capabilities and interests, thinks, develops and explores different ideas, states and questions that touch upon the specificities of the artwork.

The 2-day lab will bring into focus artistic explorations of our two guest artists, choreographers and makers in the field of urban choreography, Sebastijan Geč and Mateja Bučar, who each in their own ways explore the thin line between everyday movement and representation, between the overlooked and the newly perceived.

The artist’s lab is intended not only to dance artists, but to all makers, theoreticians, thinkers and lovers of art, as it will try to work in the direction of inter and transdisciplinarity.

Anja Bornšek (SLO/D) is a dancer, choreographer and pedagogue. She graduated from contemporary dance at the Salzburg Dance Academy SEAD. She holds a Master’s degree in Contemporary Dance Education from Frankfurt University HfMDK and a Somatic Movement Educator’s certification for Body-Mind Centering method.
A receiver of an art scholarship from the Ministry of Culture Slovenia, as well as a German scholarship Studienstiftung des Deutchen Volkes for her Master’s study, her artistic language was shaped through many performances and collaborations with choreographers and directors, such as Begum Erciyas, Joao da Silva, Matej Kejžar, Snježana Premuš, Jana Menger, Mala Kline, Sebastijan Horvat, Maayan Danoch and Matija Ferlin.
Besides teaching workshops, performing and creating, she has been intensively developing and regularly facilitating an audience format called Physical Introduction in Tanzhaus Düsseldorf, through which she is creating spaces for physical/bodied thinking about perception, active participation and other possible relations between the art work and its viewer.