WorkShope online: Elena Apostolovski (APURI)

The event is part of the Rijeka 2020 programme →

This proposal plays with meaning and role reversal in the museum. Museum workers become works of art − the museum collection in search for relationships and context for a temporary display. They become the product of their own work.

We’re presenting the artwork proposal ‘Collective Body’ for collaboration ‘With the Collection’.

“In a strange way, the concept of play remains distinct from all other forms of thought.“ (Johan Huzinga, Homo ludens, 14)

Workers of the museum are invited to a common gathering in order to create a composition of their own bodies, seen as parts of museum collection − through a playful quest for creating relations and a context for a temporary museum set up. These actions tend to put in focus human labor, whose invested time and energy are being materialized, documented and presented in the exhibition space. Shared experience would be guided by a series of games/exercises inspired by Augusto  Boal’ ‘Games for actors and non-actors’ published in the publication of the same name.

The emphasis is put on play, intuition, companionship, pleasure, but also on finding and moving the boundaries of participants’ comfort zones while interacting with one another. In some places boundaries of the body will be intertwined and identities abstracted, as in every lively and unpredictable working process. The experience is important as much as the result. Installation would be recorded with a photograph and exhibited in a human body size, so that it would emphasize the presence of a working collective within the exhibition space.

The action seeks to draw a parallel between work of art as a subject that requires special ways of handling, preserving, experiencing and (inter) human existence. It builds on a practice of observing the body as an active volume in space and it uses play as a tool to create new meanings in everyday life.

Elena Apostolovski

Elena Apostolovski (1994, Pula) is completing her graduate studies at the Academy of Applied Arts in Rijeka. Her artistic practice, based on installation and multimedia, questions the basic humanistic principles through exploration of the interpersonal relationships, human presence in the post-modern society, body in relation to space.