about

Is she a paradox or a pharmakon? Or an impure synthesis of the two infused with ginger acrobatics in her domestic laboratory? Was she a feminist the day when penises grew out of music scores? Whose music did she launder? Pardon, it was not music – she laundered economics. How did it sound? Amazing: she hunted for literal meaning in metaphors and found what literally matters: there is more than one hundred type of bacteria on dollar banknotes in New York including salmonella. The germs were killed with a detergent and a sponge in her hands. Your disbelief remained alive a second longer in front of Leap of Faith that requested you to wear a metal jacket and try the strength of magnet in the wall, “of which I heard a couple of times before” you thought, and then a second later, you are stuck to the magnetic power of an artwork. “Surprise surprise!” – it happened literally as it did announce.

A little book she had a few years ago contained a similar inventory of ideas and prototypes for creative explorations of body, appearances and imagination. It was a mix of Dada, Zen and Martha Stewart. A pool of blood is oozing in the corner of a living room, yet you can remove it as simply as you put it there – it was a piece of plastic actually, an edition, a part of that little book. “A piece of Freud or Lugosi” you thought.

Ana Prvacki never shied away from her desire to be a corporation-like lady. Being determined and goal oriented, yet totally driven by by-products and serendipity, she generously shared protocols and formulas of her creativity. You could hire her to be your intellectual concubine for 24 hours and learn everything about Ananatural world or why do you have to drop Sesame oil on the top of your head. When she wants you to feel with the whole body she takes your whole body a hostage; when she wants your pain to go away she plays flute. This play produces a by-product - saliva that drips and turns into another by-product – a vipe that kills pain together with the whole imperative of use because the quest for useful is so inflated here it makes it toxic. She enjoys providing those services that are seducing, awkward and protocol-based. Day and night she rehearses her disciplines: producing waves in form and spirit and searching for a perfect body position in sleep. Notions of power, performance, achievements and exercise have a big impact there.

Yet in doing that she never plays a role of a pure artist of an artworld who would be building a career in gallery world. She remains marvelously impure. She could successfully work for the department of Sanitation, a Bank or a Museum instead. Or she can successfully change your perception about things you think you know or things you think you don’t need to know. “Will your pain result into something? Or do you fear that by loosing your pain you will become less of an interesting person?” she asks one day. And then you think about whether you want to numb yourself with parts of her saliva or whether you want your pain to remain a pharmakon itself.

Raimundas Malasauskas