We draw on our backgrounds in film-making, stage and costume design, cinema and drama criticism, and game design to make shorter-than-short films, snapshots that blur the line between still and motion media. These are built into physical objects, often installed in locations outside the fine art circuit: a Stockholm railway station concourse, a watchtower on a former Soviet army base, the entrance to the cashiers hall of a bank in Istanbul.
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Performing Pictures’ work combines stillness and movement, often coming alive at the moment a viewer approaches. This responsiveness creates a sense of intimacy and surprise, a playfulness that attracts and occasionally provokes.
A visit to Mexico in 2008 led to an ongoing collaboration with the Talleres Comunitarios de Zegache. This phase of our work has also seen an increased attention to the patterns of human movement associated with economic migration and religious pilgrimage. Sometimes, in the migrant’s dream of a final return, the separation between these secular and sacred patterns dissolves. The crossing of these lines — vertical and horizontal, temporal and spatial, secular and sacred — marks the spot on which our pictures perform their enterprise.
Performing Pictures continues to build upon its marginally autistic catalog of animate images. Performing Pictures will have soon infiltrated all interpersonal forums that are unfettered by reproductive art: gallery spaces, stages for theater and dance, concert halls, applied art collectives, churches and chapels.
We produce films that are shorter than shorts: snapshots that smudge the borders between still and motion media. We short-circuit old technologies with new. Foremost, Performing Pictures persists in seeking out new havens for our growing catalog of ”performing pictures”.
Performing Pictures delivers nothing to given contexts; instead, we ourselves seek out the social contexts within which we create. Increasingly, our enterprises assume the form of workshops. We are evolving into a living social platform, despite the fact that our art could hardly be considered relational or exemplary of social sculpture.
The direction of Performing Pictures has always been to impact – directly.
Performing Pictures is a Stockholm-based team of two, Geska Helena Brečević and Robert Brečević. Since its foundation in 2004, they have been exploring interactive and responsive image technologies – or, put simply, pictures that perform.