Learning Water, Salty Eyes (performance)

2020

Solo exhibition and performance with Eva Priečková, video, sound

(To watch a video excerpt of the performance, please find the link below.)

Learning Water, Salty Eyes is a site-specific performative work created in a collaboration with artist Eva Priečková.
In this meditation on water, two bodies move through a dark gallery space in a choreography built around a poem I wrote. Their movements alternately merge and come apart while their voices give sound to the multitudes and intricacies of bodies of water and the water of our bodies. The only source of light is a flashlight held by one of the performers.
The performance was accompanied by a video titled "Learning Water, Salty Eyes", in which we performed a loose interpretation of Watsu therapy. The sound was created in a collaboration with the Czech artist Michal Kindernay.

"Water passes through this house in a rational network of metal pipes, as someone had determined.
In this house, people are dreaming of the sea or dreaming of drowning. In this house, they watch glaciers melting in the evening news, they look at those who are, somewhere far away, thirsty, while they return home with heavy cartons of bottled water.
In this house people sweat in bad dreams while water dries up at the bottom of their glasses in darkness, leaving behind a sequence of fine lines like Amenemhet's water clock. The water that leaves us remembers our bodies.
The water runs through them as it does through caves, soaking in stories of our interiors."
(an excerpt from the performed text, translation to English by Katarína Hrušková)

This project was supported in the form of a scholarship using public funds by the Slovak Arts Council.

(Photo documentation by Leontína Berková)