Lecture-Performance: Alexandra Bachzetsis

Choreographer and visual artist Alexandra Bachzetsis discussed with ARTWORKS Fellows about her work and performed parts of her work Private Song (Documenta14, 2017).

Alexandra Bachzetsis is a choreographer and visual artist, based in Basel (CH) and Zurich (CH). Her practice unfolds at the intersection of dance, performance, the visual arts and theater, generating a conflation of the spaces in which the body -as an artistic and critical apparatus- can manifest.

Much of Bachzetsis’s work involves choreographies of the body and, in particular, the way that popular culture provides source material for gesture, expression, identification and fantasy, as we continually create and re-create our bodies and the way we identify. Within this, she scrutinizes the mutual influence between, on one hand, the use of gesture and movement in the ‘popular’ or ‘commercial’ genres (online media, video-clip and television as a resource) and on the other and in the ‘arts’  (ballet, modern and contemporary dance and performance).

Since Bachzetsis started working independently in 2001, she has created over 24 pieces, often working collaboratively, which have been shown in theaters, festivals and public space venues worldwide. In addition to this, her work has been exhibited in a variety of contemporary art spaces and museums, including Kunsthalle Basel (Basel, 2008), the Stedelijk Museum (Amsterdam, 2013 and 2015), Tate Modern (London, 2014) and the Jumex Museum (Mexico City, 2014), as well as a number of international biennials, such as the 5th Berlin Biennial (Berlin, 2008), (d)OCUMENTA 13 (Kassel, 2012) and the Biennial of Moving Images (Geneva, 2014). Bachzetsis was nominated for the DESTE Prize (2011) and is a laureate of the Migros Kulturprozent Jubilee Award (2007), the Swiss Art Award (2011 and 2016) and Swiss Performance Prize (2012). In 2016, Brachzetsis participated in “The Parliament of Bodies” and “Continuum”, Public Programmes at documenta 14. In January 2017, she presented Massacre: Variations on a Theme at MoMA, New York City. Later that year her work was included in documenta 14 exhibitions at Athens and Kassel.