Barbara Novakovič: Footstool, M025, Omega series

From the start, Barbara Novakovič marked the Slovenian art scene as an interdisciplinary artist, her key attribute being the constant interconnectedness of theory and practice. Her unique creative path was already foreshadowed by her multi-layered educational context. Studying sociology of culture, art history, and drama, Barbara Novakovič was led to the concept of a rhizomatic understanding of art. She works as a director, producer, and custodian, tightly connected to Muzeum Institute, which she established in 1996, fixing her permanent, yet constantly developing idea of infiltrating art history in her theatre work and vice versa. In the Slovenian performance scene, Barbara Novakovič is synonymous with ‘philosophical theatre’, which she understands in extremely complex and interdisciplinary terms as concept creator and performance author. Her work has always been (constructively) torn between theatre and visual arts, within which she has curated a number of notable international exhibitions to date, including the 2015 Prague Quadrennial. At home, her work includes the exhibitions Theory Open/Trilogy (2002–03, a spatial installation in which she sowed a unique harmony between pigeons and the fluttering of books); Paper (2007, which represented paper as an act carrying three meanings: naked body, document, and gesture); and the retrospective Time Folding (2014–15, which covered the works by Muzeum Institute).

In 1993, Novakovič conceived MUZEUM Theatre, a conceptual project exploring the relations between theatre elements, inventions, creative challenges, and mind mobility, and to research the relations between movement and gesture, image and word, space and time, and music. In September 1995, she then established Muzeum Institute for art production, mediation, and editing, founded in the strong context of the cultural-political and aesthetic-performance break that emerged at the beginning of the 1990s (with the emergence of private, non-governmental institutions and shifts towards performative practices, techno- theatre, and intermedia art). In her projects, she circles between various acting positions and stage/costume designer, preserving the constant rotation of perspectives of her own work and expression. Along with her personal projects, she has also produced numerous theatre projects in the fields of architecture, visual arts, dance, film, and theory. As the founder of the Muzeum Institute, she ‘inverted the letter z in the logo of the Institute, because in art we are always accompanied by the question of how much it reflects our world and ourselves. The most important thing is that art can create new worlds – not just mirror the world’.

Novakovič’s theatre can be defined as a series of signifiers that continuously overlap and comment on each other, each time searching for unique new worlds. Her theatre is filled with elements of atmosphere, movement, recital, the non-verbal, the conceptual, the physical, dance, post-drama, and theory. It is a theatre language that walks between the reality of philosophical analysis and the fragility of fleeting performance. If, on the one hand, a good many of her projects relate to philosophical-theoretical premises of historical characters (Spinoza, 2016–17; Dynamics of Spaces – Pendulum Movements, 2016–19; SLEEP|FORMS, LANDSCAPES, CREATURES, 2019; VENUS I–II, 2018–19; Slumberland, 2020), some of her recent projects also focus on the ‘brutally current’ state of the world, such as the ecologic crisis in the dance performance Allegories of the Months – Attributes (2022), in which she explored the natural order ruined by climate change,  affecting the disappearing dynamics of the seasons.

In Slovenian art, the artistic signature of Barbara Novakovič has always been recognised as subversive, rich in references, focusing on humanities, and stemming from an analytical knowledge of Slovenian and foreign art history. She has always entered the scene with her own rhythm and with topics that have often been risky, despite their historical relevance for the contemporary time, and can be described as the ‘edge of the invisible’, which cannot always be contemporaneously reflected due to the complexity of the material – only time can show their effects. If, a decade ago, her performances could be seen mainly in the light of intangible visions of the future, today her conceptual thought appears as a very tangible reflection or representation of the coming time. The question of climate change and the self-evidence of various seasons, which she has analysed in her recent projects, have now changed from the questions of the relationship between tradition and modernity into the fundamental question of the disappearance of the ‘traditional’ ancient image of the world – in the most worrisome sense.