Bowerbirds II
For the two collaboration performances Marianne Vlaschits and Michael Bäckström over the course of several hours (Bowerbirds I) or two days respectively (Bowerbirds II) imitated the mating habits of Australian Bowerbirds and assembled two love nests geared to the stimuli of their potential partners. “Bowerbirds” pursues the aim of utopian art: to give its viewer the promise—and underlining the illusions—of an elsewhere. Working at the intersection of post-pop inquiry into contemporary visuality and the idiom and problematics of the present body in performance art—with sarcastic laughter, muted aggression, and even coy sadness—Bowerbirds exploits the dissonance of these idioms to manifest the frictional interplay between bodies and the islands of desire they are embowered in.
A collaboration with Michael Rupini