Tatiana Kocmur: The Following Body (2022)

Sunday, 26 November 2023 at 7:00 p.m.
Kino Šiška, Komuna

Through a series of actions, performer Tatiana Kocmur builds an intriguing corporeal display where mimicry and expression appear simultaneously, creating a space in which hunter and prey are, as the poet says in a certain passage, captured in the same trap.
Visual artist and performer Tatiana Kocmur’s recent artworks and performances have been creating bodies with exceptional presence, imagination and a unique artistic consistency that create meanings beyond the labelled and signified. For this reason, they can speak to us of hidden, invisible corporealities, and expand fields of meaning in non-functional areas of agency, being, feeling or emoting. Her performances extend into the realms where contemporary choreography also operates: into materiality that is not subject to semantic or semiological reductivity, into the potentiality of the body, or into the realm of corporeal “spectres” that come in solitary hours to sit with us for a little while and silently exchange messages. In The Following Body, Tatiana Kocmur deals with the problems of physical and sexual violence. She creates a material image of trauma, composed of a body and an associated ambient, which pain puts on and wears. It acts as a space or climatic area, a traumatic settlement, with which the body is in a kind of confrontation. The sensuality and aggressiveness that Tatiana Kocmur considers in her performance are inseparable, as they are mutually formative and at the same time constantly clashing. They constitute the contradictory character of trauma. In the presentation of her work, artist and performer Tatiana Kocmur quotes the American essayist Elaine Scarry, who argues that “[w]hatever pain achieves, it achieves in part through its unshar[e]ability, and it ensures this unshar[e]ability through its resistance to language.” The ineffable, which is always at work in trauma and which is operative precisely because its transformation into the symbolic, into language, is always unsatisfactory, is embodied and expanded in The Following Body through a material, corporeal image, in which everything that the enunciated usually excludes is present.

Images and sounds, used to create a composition for live performance, were selected through the artist’s conversations with individuals who experienced sexual abuse in their youth.

Author and performer: Tatiana Kocmur
Dress: Jaka Grm
Voice: Juana
Video: Domen Martinčič
Video editing and sound: Tatiana Kocmur
Object construction support: Stefan Doepner
Implementation: Liza Šimenc
Photography: Nina Pernat
Mentor: Matej Kejžar
Production: Pekinpah

Duration: 35 min
Entry: 8/10 EUR