Nika Ham

Nika Ham, „Squat“, 2020

Deutschsprachige Version des Artikels

Although the phrase “make the petrified conditions dance by playing them their own tune”(1) is a much-cited quote by Karl Marx, seldom has it been taken literally. Artist Nika Ham from Ljubljana/Slovenia manages to do just this with her video “Treature,” which she produced in collaboration with the Berlin musician junk-E-cat. They make the conditions dance that prevail between the museum space, the visitors, and a monitoring system.

The film takes place in the space of URBAN NATION Museum for Urban Contemporary Art, a cooperation partner of Fresh A.I.R. and also a project of the Stiftung Berliner Leben. It shows us the exhibition space from the static perspectives of the surveillance cameras. We first see the entrance area from above and observe a museum guard as he locks the door. In the next shot we see him wandering through and checking the empty exhibition architecture. Suddenly objects and figures appear behind his back. At first, they are visible for only a brief moment, and then we see how they crawl across the floor, climb on chairs, or simply stand still.

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Moving images and stop motion sequences alternate according to the fast beat of the electronic music. Suddenly the museum guard begins to dance, hesitatingly at first, but then exuberantly and wildly once two masked creatures and a young woman with blonde hair have taken over the room with their movements. A voice repeatedly sings: “Don’t be afraid to dance to a creature,” and “it’s got a lot a lot to teach ya,” while the four bodies glide, tumble, and cavort around the gallery and hallways. Responding to the sound of a saxophone, the gestures and moves become exaggerated and then return to repetitive, mechanical motions; the movement is never threatening but instead strange, humorous, and surprising, as a voice-over emphasizes: “It just wants to play and meet ya.”

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As part of her long-term project “Squat” (in the sense of occupying a building) Nika Ham has explored various museum spaces, while using performance and film in a similar way. The most striking thing about the resulting videos is how the artist uses her own body to insert herself into the system constituted by the museum architecture and surveillance cameras, thereby causing confusion and turning everything on its head whilesimultaneously expressing appreciation for the context. This brings us back to Marx’s famous words about “making petrified conditions dance.” And this is precisely what Ham does here. The cameras, installed to ensure that museum visitors behave according to certain rules within the museum architecture, are used for just the opposite. They capture a choreography of gestures and movements that are sometimes only minimal but then particularly funny, because they by no means conform to the usual code of behavior and appear virtually meaningless. With his statement, Marx was ultimately referring to the fact that it is not enough to simply want to improve or reform things as they are, but it is important to remind ourselves for what they were intended—by playing them their own music and properly disrupting the order of things.

(1) Karl Marx: A Contribution to the Critique of the Hegelian Philosophy of Right (1843)

Text: Dr. Kea Wienand


About Nika Ham

Nika Ham (1991) is a graduated painter with an MA in painting that she completed at the Academy of Fine Art and Design in Ljubljana, Slovenia.

She studied in Great Britain, was involved in various projects supported by the city of Ljubljana and was part of many group and solo exhibitions. From the year 2016 she has been working as Head of graphic design for the LET’S CEE Film Festival in Vienna. Meanwhile, she has also been working at the Museum of Modern Art in Ljubljana and in the Laibach Kunst department.

In recent years she has shifted from painting to video, digital art and performance. She occupies the space of cultural institutions and gets herself into unconventional situations using surveillance footage. She also works with theatre performances and the club scene in Ljubljana, using graphic design and video.

For more information about the artist:

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The online showcase of Fresh A.I.R. #3

Fresh A.I.R. showcase

The online showcase offers an opportunity to get an overview of the highly diverse projects of the third group of Fresh A.I.R. artists with their different kinds of media and aesthetics.

On view are video and photographic materials about the individual projects, each of which is accompanied by an explanatory text that aims to offer insights into the work’s aesthetic experience.

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