Limited Spaces
Inspired by behavioural psychology, the multidisciplinary performance installation Limited Spaces No.1: Cube (2005) by the video artist Alexandra Dementieva requires an active participation of the spectator. It seeks to interrogate our perception, our relations with others and with our own image. Meaning reveals itself through the visitor’s involvement with dance, image and music.
With references to the physically ingrained, ambulatory spectatorship of Minimal Art and to the virtual grounds of dance perception, Limited Spaces revolves around a series of transformations that allow the spectator to observe hidden aspects of his perceptual behavior. Sliced, dispersed and multifocally projected, the dancer’s physical body enters a virtual realm that invites the spectator to a peripatetical exploration of the installation and of his own body. Moreover, the fugitivity of the medium dance perpetually reminds us of our own anticipations, projections and memories at play in our reception of reality. Aren’t dancing bodies always already virtual, clotted with body imagery and mental spaces? In which way are the spaces of our behavior, perception, memory and imagination limited and are we prompted to surpass them when we are literally stuck in a limited physical space?