Maja Bekan

Badischer Kunstverein is pleased to present P for Performance: All about us, the first comprehensive solo exhibition of the artist Maja Bekan in Germany. The exhibition opens another chapter in the discourse on various performative practices at the Kunstverein and includes all of Bekan's works created to date, which she has conceived as an ongoing series since 2011 and titled P for Performance. The artist is also developing a new performative project that invites female* scientists from a nuclear research facility in Karlsruhe and brings them into contact with artists.

Maja Bekan works with the community as an artistic format and with collectivity as a potential for social change. Her participatory approach leads to long-term projects with social groups whose forms of togetherness she questions under the concept of "collective intimacy". This intimacy can transform political processes and critically question the contrast between private and public. The artist usually finds her protagonists at the location of her exhibition; in this sense, her works are shaped by the local context, but move on from the place where they were created.

The participants in Maja Bekan's projects are often women* who have to assert themselves in precarious situations. Self-organization and self-empowerment are central concepts in her practice, as are care and solidarity. The special moment in Bekan's collective work is that she chooses performance (or dance) as a rhythmic form to connect the participants with each other. Their experiences are then shared with the audience in public performances, stage sets, video, audio or text installations.

The artist re-stages her projects from P for Performance on two exhibition levels of the Kunstverein. The work Troublemakers (Hold it Together (We Have Each Other)) (2020/2021) was created during the coronavirus pandemic and put various women* in New York in relation to each other to discuss online questions of contact and collective intimacy despite physical distance as well as social structures and friendships in times of crisis. In a later live performance, the participants slipped into the roles of so-called "troublemakers": Women* who could be marginalized by society and labeled as "hard to love" due to their extraordinary actions and lifestyles. For her most recent project Throw Like a Girl (2022), the artist cast women* from the military, who reflected on their roles alongside artists and recognized how new spaces for emancipation open up, especially in times of conflict. Previous projects that Bekan has restaged at the Kunstverein include At some point we all have to dance (2018) and A series of unexpected incidents (2016).

In addition, a new performance and film production is being created in the context of the exhibition, for which Maja Bekan is inviting scientists* from the European Nuclear Safety Training Center at the Joint Research Centre in Karlsruhe and artists to bring their different professions and lifestyles into contact with each other. The Joint Research Center is managed by the European Commission and is a place with a high political profile, but at the same time only a few citizens know about hot cell research in the immediate vicinity of the city.

The mixed-media installation What if we started making less and reusing more? (since 2007) is an ongoing archive and a kind of appendix to Maja Bekan's collaborative projects. Using production boards, the artist communicates some of the texts and production notes that inspire her and influence her practice on both a conceptual and rational level. These reflections are drawn from years of Skype and email conversations with the artist Gunndís Ýr Finnbogadóttir and can be seen as a contemporary version of the artist's correspondence. In addition to important references and discourses, moments of excitement, doubt and hesitation also appear as important parts of a creative process, as well as humor and self-irony as necessary vehicles for maintaining the lightness and enthusiasm for one's own work. The archive is redesigned on its own exhibition level and invites visitors to become actors in the work, to engage in conversations, to reflect and to interact playfully.