“Six naked female bodies are situated in space, looking for a place in the audience, on the stage, along the walls of the venue. The performers in different positions are grating carrots, courgettes and cucumbers, symbolically enacting both jerking off and housework at the same time. In a raw, refined way, the performance uses a single action to reduce women to sex objects relegated to privacy,” reads the concept of Olja Grubić, which was apparently also financed by the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Slovenia and the Municipality of Ljubljana.
In the space of the Museum of Modern Art in Ljubljana, naked female bodies, initially covered by indoor plants, opened a voyeuristic insight into human intimacy and its relationship to its own physicality through a simple action – by grating carrots and courgettes on graters in their genitalia. The almost orgiastic, but by no means vulgar group action – at first glance, the humorously painful images of masturbation with eco-bio ideology were intertwined with the stream of thought – the monologue of each of the performers: their momentary fears, momentary incidental observations and reflections on their intimate relations to other performers, to their bodies, psyches, society, environment and art, as dramaturg and scriptwriter Vanja Hrvatin described the performance of the project or art piece called “Naked life.”
“Naked life is a performance that invites us to rethink what it means to be a living species in a living world; what it means to have a body, conditions of existence, life potential, individual and collective conditions of development, the power to change them… Through poetic language, Naked Life visualises the intimacy of the living presence of the human body and the dynamics between its physical, mental and emotional identity,” says the website presenting the project – in addition to Olja Grubić, the following performers are also listed: Anita Wach, Kristina Aleksova, Sara Horžen, Anja Novak, Ena Kurtalić and Lana Zdravković. Performances took place since October 2019 (when Marjan Šarec was the Prime Minister and Zoran Poznič was the Minister of Culture) – mostly at the Museum of Modern Art, and the last one is listed on the 18th of June this year at the “Firstborn Girl Festival Skopje.”
We, the taxpayers, are paying for this vulgarity!
If artists and the interested public believe that these kinds of performances are art, it is actually not unusual for sexual abuse and, consequently, suicides to occur in certain artistic circles. Maja Megla, a long-time journalist and editor at the Mladina magazine and then at the Delo newspaper, sent a letter to several media outlets in which she exposed the perverse and violent behaviour of the now-deceased Roman Uranjek, who had apparently found an ideal companion with deviant tendencies in Dušan Smodej. But all this becomes even more problematic if such practices are also supported, at least indirectly, if not even directly, by a state institution. As can be seen from the Erar web application for the portrayal of public money use in the Republic of Slovenia, Via Negativa, an association of creators and researchers of contemporary performing arts, has so far received a total of 1,300,495.93 euros of public money, of which the Ministry of Culture contributed 713,896.36 euros, and the Municipality of Ljubljana contributed 462,539.43 euros – the highest amount was paid in 2019, and they were not exactly stingy in 2018 either.
More hard-earned taxpayers’ money for more “art”?
Given that the current government of Robert Golob is intent on collecting as much taxpayers’ money as possible, we can probably look forward to even more “artistic” performances of one kind or another, as well as scandals that will simply be swept under the carpet.
Sara Kovač
