The Dialogue – video-performance by Anna Kutera

1/5Poster of the XIX Meetings of Artists, Scientist, and Theoreticians of Art, Osieki '81. Published in the website of Muzeum in Koszalin, Poland: http://muzeum.koszalin.pl/?q=node/929

1/5Script of the performance. Photo from the archive of Anna Kutera.

1/5Photos of the performance (courtesy of Anna Kutera) Photo: Romuald Kutera.

1/5Photo of the props (courtesy of Anna Kutera) Photo: Romuald Kutera.

1/5Photos of the performance (courtesy of Anna Kutera) Photo: Romuald Kutera.

No documentation remains of the first action performed in Osieki. The video-performance was repeated three times: at Gallery Labyrinth 2 in Lublin, Poland (1985), Philip Waters Gallery in Banff, Canada (1985), and during the “Polish Manifestation” exhibition in Drents Museum, Assen, the Netherlands (1986).

The title dialogue takes place between the artist in the gallery space and an image of herself prerecorded on video playing on a TV screen. The conversation concerns the situation in which the artist found herself: the relationship between herself and her image, and their relation to the audience and the gallery space (the actual one as well as the empty one in which the recorded performance took place). The final dialogue concerns a misunderstanding between the two Annas: the TV one whose space of action is clean and neutral and the live one whose space of action is always relational, always considered an encounter, never neutral. She suggests that her TV image consider her art in the illusionary freedom gap and even does not take responsibility for her actions because she is only an image.