ELIZAVETA SUVOROVA
(Moscow, Russia)
Casting a Glance
People are a priori fully open to perception. It is impossible to find a way to experience the new intensely by ignoring already-lived experience. It is problematic to fully immerse oneself in the present by consciously subtracting oneself from the historical past.
This two-day performance examines the downsides of understanding history as a homogeneous mass where individuality is erased and humans are an empty machine for producing events, dotted occasionally with color in the form of vivid cut-out lives of politicians, revolutionaries, scientists, and artists. The first day will invite viewers to dialogue with the history of the Gaza House of Culture incarnate, literally leaving the marks of their experience on its body. The second day will sublimate the experience into a meta-performance culminating in a friendly feast at a nonconformist-turned-contemporary art opening. Let’s blur the line between “then” and “now,” stepping confidently into the present by accepting the past.
“Casting a glance” means “humanizing” the past through empathetic consideration. It means showing unity.
Elizaveta Suvorova is a Moscow-based performance artist who works at the intersection of theater and art practices. Her primary research focus is the potential of the human body and consciousness as manifested performatively. She uses artistic methods, including physical and mindfulness practices, to measure the reach of the former and the range of the latter. Suvorova’s art’s main topics include the problem of dialogue in all its possible forms and the problem of constructing an identity in a world where everything flows and splinters and functions according to laws that cannot be conceptualized. Her research centers on performance practices in museum spaces and participatory art as a new stage in dialogue with viewers. Suvorova worked as an illustrator for a long time, until she decided to leave the flat plane behind and stretch—both herself as a writer and her imagery, tired of life in one dimension. As an art historian, she works with the scholarly art journal Sobranie and is researching the history and theory of the German Dadaists’ performance and art practices.