sevcuk.nl ............... publication ....... cv ....... works

GENERAL INFO The works consist of interrelated installations, experimental documentary and filmic narratives. In general, these works consider a tension between the concepts of freedom and the limitations of a social body and its economies. PROTAGONISTS Posing as ‘common people’, they are aliens in their own home, seduced and defined by desires or an elusive past. Fear of losing solid ground underneath one’s feet - the abyss of freedom - creates the urge to grasp anything in surroundings to hold onto: culture, history, language... At the same time, the structures of true and false, good and bad, one’s self and identical are loosened. There are questions above ‘common people', empty text-balloons waiting to be filled in. MONTAGE The intention is to sketch an investigation space by zooming in on ‘concrete life’ settings and than panning out to the larger contexts of society. Hereby intersecting layers require reflective participation. Opposites are brought together by a retroactive process similar to the methods of NSK (an art movement originating in the 1980's in former Yugoslavia). It is a process of reversed perspective that unites and links warps in time and space.(a) For instance, some works recycle subversive music as developed in the former communist countries. This music, and 'classical' music in some other works, is re-composed and involved with the contexts of current settings.(b) The videos are sometimes supplemented with additional 'documentary' material. This could include photographs, collages, maps and their legends, flags, drawings or paintings. The montage is extending beyond the core of the video material. ADDITIONAL SPECULATION The subject is both in and beyond language, in and out of ideology - she is captive and independent, fixed in identity fantasies yet able to traverse them. Among others, James Joyce speculated on ‘cutting the roots’ in his semi-autobiographical novels written in exile.(c) Also Michel Foucault wrote on an aesthetic practice of creating our life differently from the one imposed upon us. The doubt remains: can reinventions of self still be efficacious in an age in which all such forms of resistance have been usurped by cultural capitalism?(d) Nevertheless Bulgarian-French author, Julia Kristeva suggests that any political revolt will lead to bureaucratisation or terror unless we turn toward politics at the level of the individual - to keep the individual’s soul alive by pushing the limits of our tribes.   (a) NSK statements in Interrogation Machine by Alexei Monroe (Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2005) (b) See also notes on the bands: KUD Idijoti, Azra and NSK/Laibach in the texts for the videos Unification, Österland and Beyond Language. (c) It is curious how Joyce’s whole oeuvre is supersaturated with Dublin - the home city from where he escaped is synthesized in a complex and fluid new world. (d) Benda Hofmeyr, 'From Usurpation to Subversion', AS Mediatijdschrift, no. 176, 2005-06, p.102