Barbara Borcic
HEROES ARE FALLING
What happens when the protagonists meet at the black-and-red chessboard? The game rules are precise and strict, the competitors are experienced and ready to fight. The crowd crushes in on the chessboard, the space and time references are elusive, the developments run wild.

Heroes are falling in front of us with accelerating speed; each fragment on the video screen bears a weighty meaning. This is not the montage and swiftness of a video clip where image is conformed to a piece of music; and this is also not the slow rhythm and paper-thin theatrical acting of an artistic video. This is a live performance: little mise en scenes in the frames of emptied TV sets, and mechanical figurines with character, image and subjective views. The twinkling two-dimensional surface of the screen expands into the spectator's realm where everything becomes possible and unreal at the same time.

This is not a game any more, it is a fight - not a battle, but a slaughter. The presentation of an avant-garde game of chess transforms into a Luddite-like theatre of reality, reconstruction mutates into destruction.


The protagonists stage a live performance immediatedly after the screening: the chess duel protagonists appear again from behind the TV objects-installations, this time for real. It seems that they have stepped right out of the video screen into the auditorium. In the same mechanical movement as in the video film, with suitcases in their hands, they approach the stage where the final sequences of the video film are repeated. However, the actors surpass the margin separating the imaginary and symbolic from the real; the edge where they move is obviously sharp and slippery. Althrough the live happening starts rather amicably and not threathening -- a humourous sketch in the manner of expresionistic silent films -- it finishes similary to the video film: violence without a winner, turning from grotesque to horror.

Marko Kovačič's works exhibited at the Fort Into the Past exhibition presented the eighties in a head-on confrontation with the nineties. The exhibition was saturated with memory: personal (the artist's production over several years) and collective memory (found, assembled, transformed and shaped objects, signs, symbols), both of which inseparably ran one into another and aroused myriad references and associations. The old and the new, something which may be called the past and the present, were placed side by side. TV objects were installed (again) into the ambiance of a snug living room; various boxes, optical and mechanical gadgets and devices attracted our gaze; and a figure in space was but very small, so that we could only enter the realm of illusion and deceit after we ourselves had gone through the necessary diminution.