18. 9. 2022 19:30
Jana Orlová & David Helán
live stream from New York
PERDONAME
David Helán and Jana Orlová will be submitting an online performance from their six-week New York artist residency. During the performance, the authors will attempt to materialise the spirit of the big city. The genius loci, as the virtual identity par excellence, will thus become the one who performs for a few moments. And vice versa: the performance becomes a means of comprehensively facing the scale of the cultural megalopolis. With irony as sharp as a piranha’s bite, the artists will thematically develop the knowledge and experience directly acquired during their nomadic journey.
Jana Orlová is a Prague-based performance artist, poet and researcher. Her theoretic and artistic background enables her to work both as a curator and art critic. Her poetry has been translated into several languages including Hindi and Chinese. In her practice, performance art is living poetry and she perceives her body as a field of event, working with ritualistic and holistic approaches. Her work is marked by a combination of a minimalistic form and a raw statement. In 2017, she was praised by Next Wave Festival as someone “who challenges the borders between literature, visual art and theatre with a natural lightness.” As a researcher, she is focused on the distinction between performance art and theatre.
David Helán develops an author’s compositional method based on an abstract, strictly linguistic perception of the world, which seems to need to be continuously unravelled, or if you prefer, unprogrammed. His performances are characterised by the use of the “novononkonfrontno” language, the manipulation with “Ready Mad” props, specific humour with puns, as well as body work and references to art history. In his work David often applies the creative principle of “dada-vanga” oscillating between spontaneous improvisation and script work.