BOŽENA KONČIĆ BADURINA: ADŽIJINA ST 11 A USER MANUAL

audio-guide and wall drawing

(to participate in the audio-guide you need to register via e-mail to blok@blok.hr)

BAZA
Božidara Adžije Street 11
June 4, 2016
11 a.m. -  5 p.m.

The work of Božena Končić Badurina examines the history of the location of BAZA, and it consists of an audio-guide through staircase and a wall drawing, which is the starting and ending point of the tour.

"The story told by the audio-guide is a compound of factual data about the building and its history, the memories of tenants and a careful recording of the most obvious, the most ordinary, the most colourless, banal things which continues as long as the place does not become unsafe (G. Perec, Species of Spaces and Other Pieces). The building readily exposes itself, the stories about itself and its tenants, but the visitor, guided by the voice of a guide, remains an alien or even a suspect because he stays too long at a stairwell where he knows no one and where nobody invited him as a guest. He carefully examines the architectural and other details, he gets an insight into the lives of people he doesn’t know. For a moment he becomes part of the invisible structure of relations inside the building, listening to people living on the other side of the door, he enters their shoes and looks at things with their eyes, but he doesn’t enter into any real relationship with them. The area of the stairs becomes a stage on which the visitor moves on the very border of the inner and outer, on the precarious edge which violates the unwritten code of conduct and on which he is not only an audience any more, where it is actually not quite clear who the performer is and where exactly the performance space is situated.

The wall drawing shows the facade, the section, the rear of the building and the layout of the second floor of the building, giving a sort of an anatomical display of its body, age and other characteristics. It is equipped with short texts, a selection of reports of the tenants of the building, about its history and architectural features. Here we do not insist on factographic accuracy in the statements of tenants, but we record the various ways in which they experience the characteristics of the building, as well as the conflicting reports about its history, the year of construction and the former owners. Gathered in one place, they form a parallel body of the building, one that exists in the memory of tenants. This is its hybrid portrait."

Božena Končić Badurina

collaborator and performer: Rebeka Ljiljak
photo documentation: Damir Žižić 

Božena Končić Badurina (1967, Zagreb) is a visual artist. She graduated in German and Russian language and literature at the Faculty of Philosophy in Zagreb, and graphics at the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb. She uses different media in her artistic practice - performance, drawing, text, video, installation - in an attempt to construct situations for a participation in revising the relationship between performers and audience in the area of performance. She sees her site specific works as a network of relationships between users / tenants and physical, architectural, historical features of certain spaces. She has exhibited in numerous solo and group exhibitions at home and abroad and received several scholarships and awards. She lives and works in Zagreb.