Katja Oblak "Presence Body - Tree" Performance-Sculpture
Samstag, 02. November 2013 - 12:00 Uhr
Galerie Schleifmühlgasse 12-14
Katja Oblak
Presence Body – Tree
Performance-sculpture
The project Presence Body – Tree is about body practicing connection with nature, more precisely with tree(s). It points out the relation between nature and us, as it is one of the basic relations in our being, especially in the context of urban space. A tree gives us the oxygen we breathe.
In my work I usually build space for body: I make a cast from a live body (either of my own body or of another person) and then make a negative body sculpture in partial body forms in paper. Partial body sculptures invite the viewer to complete the empty space around sculpture with their imagination into a spatial image of a whole body form.
I have always been interested in the body and movement and how to get a dimension of movement (mobility) into sculpture work. Before getting to this point of my work with partial body sculptures, I started practicing creative movement with Butoh dance and art performance techniques. From this experience on I try to mobilize, not the sculpture itself, but the viewer's perception of a body sculpture.
Presence Body – Tree is a performance in a sculptural tree-place. A tree-place is a paper sculpture made as a negative of a tree trunk. The presentation of the project is practising sculpture and performance at the same time, with the aim to be present – to experience (with the body) a tree space. The project started in Ljubljana on the edge of the town’s green area (Tivoli park and Rožnik hill) at a place where there used to be one huge lime tree for almost 200 years. Anna Watzinger, an artist from Vienna, and myself did a performance at the tree stump in July 2013 (Lipa 08-31). In this performance event we strive to expose the meaning of trees. Late in the summer of 2013 I was working with a willow tree, which was thrown down by a storm, in one of the parks in Berlin, Prenzlauer Berg. I built a sculpture with paper and did a performance “in situ”. In context of practising relations between trees and myself, I also did some smaller sculptures with alluvial sediments (branches of trees) on the Croatian island Molat.
In the gallery I will rebuild the performance-sculpture I made in Berlin with willow tree in integration with Ljubljana’s tree-performance experience and branches of tree paper sculptures I made on the island in Croatia.