Alexandra Bachzetsis

The New York debut of Alexandra Bachzetsis' Notebook is a profound and lustful exploration by the performer of her own biography as a dancer, choreographer and artist. The piece was not created in isolation, but within the framework of a dialogue, a method developed by Bachzetsis especially for this project. With her dialogue partners: Lies Vanborm, Safiya Sinclair, Michel Auder, Emi Curty, Zeltia Robin, Marco Delgado, Nadine Fuchs, Lili-Mar-lo Delgado Fuchs, Mélissa Biondo, Loren Tschannen, Antoine Weil, Owen Ridley-DeMonick, Dorota Sajewska and Alban Schelbert, she developed a performative installation in which the encounters with the others can be found again in the form of material and immaterial traces, voices, remains. A dance dialogue with Antoine Weil is (re) performed in part of Solo live and the whole piece is accompanied by live sound composed by Alban Schelbert.

Themes such as lust, sexuality, excess, innocence, pain and ephemerality are addressed in the form of performative notes that manifest themselves in a plurality of voices, images, bodies and objects. The notebook as an indispensable companion of the artistic process, as a private archive of creative work and as a storehouse of ideas for imagined future projects thus reflects Bachzetsis’ artistic affinity for the fragmentary, sketchy, unfinished in creative and performative thinking processes. Here, the body becomes a physical archive of other bodies, the most subversive form of presentation of experience as well as a place of permanent mediation between past and present, event and documentation, liveliness and mediality, originality and quotativeness.

Choreographer and visual artist Alexandra Bachzetsis creates spaces at the intersection of dance, performance, visual art and theater in which the body manifests as artistic and critical apparatus. Her work investigates the choreographies of the body and how culture provides source material for our gestures, expressions and fantasies; through an interdisciplinary approach she examines the influence of ‘popular’ or ‘commercial’ genres (online media, video-clips and television), and the ‘arts’ (ballet, modern dance and performance). The way we inhabit and perform our body - in both everyday life and on stage, through stereotypes and archetypes, choice and cliché - are concerns that continue to shape her practice. In her performances, Bachzetsis addresses stereotyped modes of representation of the female body in popular culture, show business and the sex industry, appropriating these tropes in order to build a new self-reflexive, and empowering formal language.

Bachzetsis began working independently in 2001 and has produced over 24 choreographed pieces (often working collaboratively), showcasing in venues worldwide. She has been the recipient of various awards, including the Performancepreis Schweiz (Swiss Performance Art Award) (2012), Swiss Art Award (2011), and the Migros-Kulturprozent Jubilee Award (2007).

Her most recent solo exhibitions and selected performances include: Notebook, Kunst Halle Sankt Gallen, St. Gallen, Switzerland (2023); Moving Bodies, Moving Images, Whitechapel Gallery, London (2022); 2020: Obscene, Onassis Stegi/ Onassis Foundation, Vaduz, Liechtenstein (2022); Chasing a Ghost, Art Institute of Chicago, USA (2019), performed at Gessnerallee Zürich, Switzerland (2019); Tanzquartier Wien, Austria (2020); Musée d'Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean, Luxemburg, (2020); Bundeskunsthalle Bonn, Germany (2020), among others; Escape Act, Theaterhaus Gessnerallee, Zurich, Switzerland (2019); also performed at Pioneer Works, New York (2019), and Massacre: Variations on a Theme, Centro Georges Pompidou, Paris and MoMA, New York (2017).