File Note 53: Breda Beban

I should come clean straight away — I am someone who works closely with Breda Beban, and I became a friend. It is fully in line with her life-long habit of turning collaborators into friends, and friends into collaborators. For My Funeral Song (2010) Beban films five people who are close to her, as they are listening to a well-loved song they want played at their funeral. The five home-movie portraits drift in and out of focus, the faces fluctuate between uneasy awareness of the camera and the comfort of complete surrender, and the songs compress each person’s take on life into an approximately three minute narrative. It is a form and language that cuts across Beban’s work: she uses structures that are pure, invests her work with emotions, and focuses on deeply personal narratives that reflect the complexity of the larger issues that are looming in the background. 

Close-up. A sharp point of a knife slowly follows a palm’s lifeline, drawing blood along the way, while the hand’s owner narrates the bare facts of a personal history. The hand, the story, and the one-minute film (CV, 2001) are Beban’s. It is one simple continuous shot, the narrative is tragic, and the artist’s understated emotions below the surface are raw. Although I know the particular story, or perhaps precisely because I do, I find it difficult to look at or listen to. Born in Serbia, Beban was raised in Croatia and Macedonia, where as a child she survived the 1963 Skopje earthquake. Starting her career as a painter and performance artist, she began to work with film, video, and photography after meeting her lover and collaborator Hrvoje Horvatic in the mid-eighties. Exiled in 1991 after the outbreak of the war in former Yugoslavia, they travelled from place to place, before eventually settling in London. They continued to make work together in the UK until Horvatic’s untimely death in 1997.

Although it is hard to pinpoint it in time or give a firm reason, I feel that the past few years have seen a subtle shift in Beban’s work. Whilst still persisting to perpetuate a permanent state of contradictions, a certain melancholic note that was present in works at the beginning of the 2000s, such as Walk of Three Chairs, I Can’t Make You Love Me, Little Films To Cry To, and Quiet Rooms (all 2003), have been overtaken by more unreservedly seductive or life affirming works. It is hard, for example, not to be swept off your feet by The Most Beautiful Woman in Gucha (Part One, 2006; Part Two, 2008). When Part One was shown at Tate Britain in 2008, it had staff from an adjacent office spend their every lunch hour in the gallery, subsequently writing the artist to ask if they could perhaps acquire their own copy. Both Parts One and Two juxtapose unedited raw footage shot at a Gypsy music festival in Serbia with edited and slightly fictionalised versions of the same events, re-constituting Beban’s memories of the particular gravity of the moment and the strong emotions present at the time, whilst addressing the discrepancy between memory and recorded reality. Equally strong and uplifting is the ongoing photographic series and film project Arte Vivo (started in 2008 during her residency in Buenos Aires), inspired by Argentinean artist Alberto Greco’s performances of the same name conducted in the 1960s, combined with Beban’s own childhood vision. A more radical shift is Beban’s unreservedly optimistic and site-specific project for the 2010 Tatton Park Biennial, The Endless School, ‘a proposal for a new landmark school that integrates arts, humanities, current affairs, science, medicine, engineering, and business to explore new value systems for a fresh approach to human comfort and happiness’, embodied in an ellipsoid architectural model that is at the same time prehistoric and sci-fi. It looks as if Beban is no longer happy to focus on intimate events playing at the margins of bigger stories, but is now creating an overarching narrative about what life should be today and what it could become tomorrow.