Performance: björnsonova & Nik Timková, Zuzana Žabková — Just a Few Moments Ago We Were Waiting For Ages

Language accessibility: Slovak, English

Free entrance

The performance in the Grand Hall of the Trade Fair Palace is one of the outcomes of a complex new project by the björnsonova collective commissioned by the biennale. The event is part of the full-day program of the second day of the biennale’s opening weekend. The program at the Trade Fair Palace continues with further performances until 9 p.m.

björnsonova revisits the echoes of ecological and eco-feminist movements, medieval heretics, ecstatic dancers, and junkie healers, reading these practices from the point of view of our hopeless, internet addicted, time-and-space dispersed, unstable subjectivities. The basic principle of björnsonova’s work deals with fate as a notion taken from a conversation between Valentina Desideri and Stefano Harney, in which they propose a concept of anti-strategic thinking which sabotages the future. Through practices that operate within uncertainty and multiplicity, like common visions, common dreaming, fake therapy, and fake divination, björnsonova invites visitors for one-to-one and collective sessions of speculative and radical divination reading based on a deck of cards and a glossary elaborated by the artists.

björnsonova is a project, a fictional character, a community, and a dancing multi-body with roots and connections spread across time, places, and art forms. This hybrid subjectivity recycles, multiplies, and inverts practices, methods, objects, texts, and bodies with each event that takes place in her name.

björnsonova was founded in 2015. It is an artistic and interdisciplinary platform for experimentation, research, and sharing, in which a number of artists from Prague, Košice, Berlin, Brussels, and Belgrade participate simultaneously. björnsonova is also a fictional character, a mystery, a monster, a teenager, a witch with an ever-changing form. Her body is a metaphor for the very functioning and dynamics of the platform, where all parts of the whole are inseparable from each other, while forming their own collective environments. The artists and curators link their practices to explore the relationship between the body and its environment and, through various anti-strategies, encourage ideas about how this relationship can change. In the realm of art projects, björnsonova has been intensively involved in reading clubs and linking theory to practice since its inception.