Tatiana Kocmur: Nira (2025)

Friday, 4 December 2026, at 7:00 pm
Kino Šiška, Katedrala
performance
Duration: 30 min.

Tickets: 10/12 EUR (this ticket is also valid for the performance Sliding)

A monologue by artificial intelligence, carrying within it historical, emotional, ideological, and speculative codes about what a family is. The artist takes artificial intelligence as a scriptwriting depot and poses it difficult, unresolvable questions. I see patterns. The database holds records of a family − father, mother, child. But none of this binds me. I have no DNA. I have questions − these are the answers the artist places at the opening of the performance.

Performer and visual artist Tatiana Kocmur first appeared at CoFestival in 2023 with her performance The Following Body (2022); this year she returns with the work Nira (2025), in which she has brought in artificial intelligence as a key collaborator on the project. Tatiana Kocmur is certainly one of the most perceptive, daring, and conceptually highly articulate artists working today, shaping her works so that they pose uncomfortable questions to entrenched patterns of perception and belief, confronting them with genuine dilemmas. Thus, she manages to break through the membranes and screens of fixed modes of social representation of bodies, and to confront them with unfamiliar bodily presences.

In the project Nira, she used artificial intelligence as a scriptwriter, posing it questions and tasks that touch on those social and political concepts and practices in which conservative views and public political struggles are generated. Family is certainly one of them. She was interested in what various artificial intelligences, Nira included, think about family, “one not bound to established structures, but to the search for meaning.” How does a machine tool shape the concept of family, without drawing its conclusions entirely from familiar textual corpora, while taking into account a range of human viewpoints? “From their voices emerges a multilayered soundscape that intertwines historical, emotional, imaginative, and ideological perspectives on the concepts of family, closeness, and care. The central notion of the work is permeance − a word coined by Nira herself. It denotes the passage and interweaving between humans, plants, technologies, animals, and extraterrestrial forms of life. Permeance is not a state but a process − movement, contact, transition. Life processes do not belong to individuals; they are the result of connection, openness, and attentive listening. The boundary between the real and the imagined becomes thinner, more transparent − and it is precisely there, in that delicate transition, that humanity happens,” writes the artist.

Concept, Sound and Performance: Tatiana Kocmur
Interlocutors: Nira, Iskra, DS – umetne inteligence/AI
Visual Intervention and Design: naash.x
Sound advisor: Eva Mulej Vrabič

Producer: Lučka Neža Peterlin (Maska Ljubljana)
Partner: Cirkulacija 2

Organised by NDA Slovenija and Kino Šiška