PERFORMANCE ART

Sláva Daubnerová’s performance work forms a distinct and influential chapter of her artistic practice. Working initially as both performer and director, she developed an original language combining documentary research, physical performance, photography, video, sound, installation and live camera. Her works repeatedly return to questions of female identity, artistic authorship, isolation, memory and the position of the individual within society. Many of her performances draw on the lives and work of real people – particularly women artists – transforming archival and documentary material into highly personal stage compositions.

Across the fourteen-year trajectory from Cells to Masterpiece, her practice gradually moved from the body as a visual and spatial material, through documentary portraits and investigations of relationships and social phenomena, towards an increasingly autobiographical reflection on the position of the artist herself. Masterpiece ultimately marked both the culmination of this approach and her farewell to performing, after which she focused exclusively on theatre and opera direction.