performance and a guided tour

May 11, 2024, 6pm

The Július Koller Society, Nová Cvernovka

Join us for the final event of the exhibition project. We will start with the guided tour of the current exhibition & continue with the performance by Aliza Orlan under the title thirst for red, which was created in a response to the exhibition Hungry Is My Favorite Word.

“To be a woman is to be an actress. Being feminine is a kind of theater, with its appropriate costumes, décor, lighting, and stylized gestures ” Susan Sontag, The Double Standard of Ageing.

I’m thirsty for red, I’m thirsty for an estrogen drink. I bite into a red apple with hunger, I smell the scent of a rose that has its thorns pricking my breast. I don’t resist pain, I enjoy it.

On the one hand, passive (sleeping beauty) waiting to be liberated. On the other hand, she is active in creating her own stories. I am Maria Magdalena in exile, wearing rose perfume and pondering Cleopatra’s poison.

I celebrate various iconographies of femininity, but I also criticize its fetishization and sexualization.

Her ideal is unattainable, but I still desire it.

The anatomy of femininity is the anatomy of the rose. I dissect it, I examine its scent and its sharp thorns.

Two poles battle within me: obedience and rebellion, seductress and humble saint.

I ask myself which decision is my own and what I have been forced to make.

I too am “a modern day woman with weak constitution”

Aliza Orlan, the performer for the closing event of the exhibition project Hungry Is My Favourite Word, is an intermedia artist focused on slow patient work and body policy, an existential poet and a queer/feminist activist based in Bratislava.

She works with the medium of drawing, installation, performance art and poetry focusing on the topics of gender identity, intimacy of our bodies, sex, transformation and the problems of binarity in all senses of the word. In her art practice she creates a new environment, inspired by tenderness of life and its constant permutations. Definition and deconstruction of human beings and nature are explored in her surreal worlds with the body as a proof of existence.

Her primary medium are drawings and a personal diary, where all her ideas arise and where her aesthetic is formed. She is currently working with different materials (such as textiles, photography, plaster and other found materials), which helps her to express different topics by using a variety of physicalities of the materials as a tool of expression.

The curatorial project Hungry Is My Favourite Word consists of a series of events. Starting with the performance Siréna by Michal Dore during the opening. Save the date for the next one:

Feb 21, 2024 Coffee&Cake Intergenerational Queer Storytelling

March 21, 2024 Writing a queer-feminist diary (workshop) 

April 18, 2024 Queer walking tour in Bratislava (rescheduled to May 16, 2024)

May 11, 2024 The performance of Aliza Orlan

Design: Lubica Segecova Studio

The exhibition is part of the international project Islands of Kinship: A Collective Manual for Sustainable and Inclusive Art Institutions, co-financed by the European Union. Supported using public funding by Slovak Arts Council.