GVR babaLAN (Vlado Repnik): 2023 SE and Space Emoticon

Interdisciplinary artist Vlado G. Repnik is undoubtedly among the more enigmatic authors on the Slovenian performance scene – considering his specific and unique aesthetic of expression, with which he has been present since the late 1980s. His multifaceted expressiveness is certainly due to his educational background in two constitutive fields – the visual (academic painter) and the performing arts (theatre and radio director and Master of Arts). Even during his studies at the Academy of Theatre, Radio, Film, and Television, Repnik stood out as a ‘non-typical product’, as he had already began exploring the fundamental questions of reality and its perception – in the arts and wider fields. As a multifaceted creator and conceptual artist, he has worked in the fields of performance, new media, and visual arts for several decades. A so-called ‘semi-media’ artist, he constantly questions the concept of the real and its manifestations, presenting his research on several levels – in the form of performances, manifestations, and visual lectures. Abroad, his work has been presented at international festivals and in publications in Berlin, Prague, Paris, Madrid, Avignon, Maubeuge, Zagreb, Belgrade, London, Rome, Tallinn, Lisbon, Barcelona, Vienna, Athens, and Tokyo.

Repnik’s aesthetic constantly moves in its own expressional paradoxes that are poetry and aesthetic spectacles (in a media-ideologic sense) at the same time. In 1990s, two projects stood out: Gertrude Stein (1994), which included a subversive ritual listing, and Beauty Brigades (1990), which is considered a specific manifestation of declarative utterance. Although it might seem so at times, Repnik is not ideologically violent – he is, rather, melancholically distant. He is also no mystic or esoteric, but mainly an artist who sensitively perceives the potential of various formats in the theatre as spaces of poeticised game and illusion. Then again, his works are often marked by almost ‘theatricalised memories of reality’, ranging from the inclusion of illustrative, documentary speeches to quoting existentialist authors.

Among numerous other projects, Luftballet (2012) and Last Temptation (2020) stand out, as their aestheticised principles open certain fundamental presuppositions of ‘live event’ and seek the gaps in the obligatory human presence on stage as the condition for an event to be ‘live’. At the same time, they open new principles of understanding animated forms and insights into the possibilities of animating ‘dead’ objects that are, of course, not dead – specifically, completely surpassing human phenomenological and ontological stage effects. Repnik has always sought an unconventional yet ‘ideal’ relation between the real and the sublime, the ideological and the aesthetic, the explicit and the unspeakable.

Vlado G. Repnik has often taken to declarative and transparent recycling of his own (and other people’s) projects, as he wants to convey two key ideas through his own aesthetic language: the first speaks of the permanent poor production conditions of the NGO scene, and the second of a more ontological idea, suggesting that everything has already happened, if not in art, then in everyday life. We might say that this coveys a specific form of laziness, which, as a concept and a stance, also introduces self-criticism and political commentary on a society of constant productivity and efficiency.