Proximities, a rehearsal, an archive is the first US solo exhibition of internationally acclaimed artist Katarina Zdjelar, who represented her native Serbia at the 53rd Venice Biennale. It presents a remarkable ongoing project, Not a Pillar Not a Pile (Dance for Dore Hoyer) (2017– ), inspired by the transgenerational artistic exchange between two women artists: the choreographer and expressionist dancer Dore Hoyer (1911–67) and visual artist Käthe Kollwitz (1867–1945). Hoyer was described by German dancer and choreographer Mary Wigman as “Europe’s last great modern dancer,” while Kollwitz is renowned for her devastating portrayals of working-class poverty and mourning during World War I. Undertaking original archival research, Zdjelar foregrounds a little-known point of connection between these iconic women artists as a manifestation of shared affinities with (proto) feminist pacifism, solidarity, and collective transformation across the barriers of time, class, and social difference.

Hoyer’s dance company worked in Dresden in the years following the Second World War in a state of hunger and destitution, rehearsing in the single un-bombed room of Wigman’s former studio. Little remains of her production today, except for some photographs and an incomplete music score held in the archives of the Dance Museum in Cologne, Germany. Zdjelar has developed a body of artwork around the fragmented material remains of a dance Hoyer made in response to Kollwitz’s oeuvre, entitled Tanz für Käthe Kollwitz (1946). The Oregon Contemporary exhibition presents an architectonic installation that incorporates a wall sculpture created for the occasion, the multichannel video work Not a Pillar Not a Pile (Tanz für Dore Hoyer) (2017), as well as a series of wall and floor prints based on archival photographs, Zdjelar’s first work in this medium.

For the multiscreened video portraits that make up Not a Pillar Not a Pile, Zdjelar gathered together a group of dancers, activists, and performers, asking them to freely interpret Tanz für Käthe Kollwitz to explore how the “archived bodies” in Hoyer’s and Kollwitz’s works might speak to living bodies in the present. A series of arms, hands, and fingers twist and entwine in the largest, most central panel of this video installation, which becomes a horizontal landscape of moving limbs. A series of smaller monitors appear to be still, yet they capture the barely moving performers as they hold intense physical constellations for minutes on end: a finely chiseled head resting on a hand of another, resting in turn on a shoulder; a chin resting precariously on another’s finger.

As an artist, Zdjelar is particularly interested in how the potential for transformation is held in the body. Like many of Zdjelar’s works, Not a Pillar Not a Pile (Dance for Dore Hoyer) revolves around a form of collective rehearsal, an open-ended space in which things are destabilized or in a state of emergence. Subtle variations in the performers’ skin tones, their tattoos, and other physical markers suggest that their bodies too act as borders of identities that are racialized, nationalized, and gendered. The viewer intuits differentiated sexual orientations and manifestations of womanhood as a spectrum of possibilities.

While watching these bodies, it becomes tangible that what Hoyer seeks in Kollwitz is not only a graphic or choreographic constellation, but a social arrangement of bodies; a specific manifestation of (working class women’s) solidarity at a time of social collapse. Zdjelar foregrounds human proximity as a potential source of alliance and agency across class, race, gender, and orientation. Echoing Hoyer and Kollwitz’s rejection of the bourgeois, socially normative aspects of art-making, she gravitates toward art’s political efficacy. Zdjelar’s work does not promise any utopian outcomes, however. Rather, viewers are suspended in the uncertain and potent act of unfolding. They see how the fraught tension embedded in the performers’ collective intimacies must continuously navigate the possibility of their failure. Speech is bypassed entirely in Not a Pillar Not a Pile (Dance for Dore Hoyer), as if the intensity and fragility of emerging solidarities are not ready to be spoken.

While Zdjelar has previously exhibited Hoyer’s documentary photographs alongside her video works, Proximities, a rehearsal, an archive enabled a further artistic step of isolating fragments of these archival photographs that convey both the tenderness and intensity of momentary proximities and then presenting them as body-scale prints in the space. This process revealed an unintended and truly uncanny mirroring of these minute moments of touch in the video works, despite their movements being based on collective improvisation. Zdjelar chose to reprint the black-and-white archival photographs in color, making their surface scratches and grainy quality visible as material witnesses to the passage of time.

These video works and prints are juxtaposed against Zdjelar’s black-paneled wall sculpture, which features abstracted details from woodcuts by Kollwitz, deeply carved into the wood. The dark presence and energy-infused incisions in the sculpture’s surface echo the mood and strength of Kollwitz’s work. Eschewing Kollwitz’s iconic figurative images in favor of this body-infused mark-making, Zdjelar foregrounds the underlying spirit of refusal, of strength, and of possibility in her images, to which Hoyer was surely drawn amid her own postwar hardship.

Zdjelar’s first iteration of this ongoing project took place in 2017, during the most dramatic right turn in European politics since the Second World War. Indeed, in the Trump era and its European far-right equivalent, and in the growing visibility and social confidence of fascist extremism, many have sensed the haunting presence of the 1930s. Zdjelar’s foregrounding of Hoyer and Kollwitz’s alliance along the lines of proto-feminist pacifism speaks back to the very realness and intensity of fascism, then and now, refusing its provocation of mythic conceptions of collectivity. Her work insistently searches for other ways of constituting and forming imaginaries around togetherness, ways that see boundary crossing and sociopolitical transformation as the nature of life and not its discontents. In the midst of a global pandemic, and in the wake of over a hundred days of local protests against racial injustice as part of the US-wide response to the murder of George Floyd, it radiates human empathy and political possibility.

Lucy Cotter, 2022