Install specifications:

The video installation includes a video projection on the wall and a rug placed on the ground in front of the projected image. The rug should be centred beneath the image, approximately 20 cm from the wall. The video plays on a continuous loop.

   

Credits:
Performer: Kristina Horvat Blažinović
Camera, sound, and image editing: Kristina Horvat Blažinović
Sound: Antun Toni Blažinović

Requirements for presenting the work:
• video projected onto a wall
• a rug on the ground
• 2 speakers
• a projector

  

About the video: 

Entertainment for the King is an 8-minute performance-based video, filmed in a single take and presented as a continuous loop. It features a female figure lying on the ground, her head and torso covered with a white sheet. The female performer is depicted attempting to inhabit the pose of a ‘dead woman.’

‘Being dead’ is treated in the work not as a finite state but an ongoing one, a process that is being played out over and over again. What exactly is being depicted is deliberately left open: Are we watching a woman who is very much alive, enacting the state of ‘being dead’? Or else, is a lifeless body here being posed, repositioned and rearranged in order to appear lifelike?

The work playfully messes with the definitiveness of the categories of ‘dead’ and ‘alive’. Through a continuous enactment of one dead pose after another, the performer in this performance to camera can be seen as presenting, or compiling, a catalogue of dead poses, as if marking or practicing them ‘for another time’. The performer is repeatedy enacting the ‘dead woman’ pose as if working through different possibilities in order to find the ‘right’ way to represent it.

The video sequence is digitally cut up into a number of sections so that every new pose performed by the performer becomes a separate still image. Selected movement fragments are multiplied and repeated, and certain sections of the video in which the woman on the ground appears to be still, are replaced with the ‘frozen’ stills with extended duration. The accompanying sound comprises two alternating music phrases – using a digital sample of the harpsichord – which are played when the picture becomes frozen. In some sections of the work the music is sped up, and in others the two musical fragments are played in reverse. The sound of the harpsicord evokes the baroque suite and other forms of court music – albeit a decidedly low-fi version of it, which gives the scene an amateurish and unrehearsed feel.