Rita Batievsky is a performance, video, image, and language-based artist interested in peeling life’s layers down to the root.
Her work dresses up in different modes of presence; its form and content always permeable to the world. Parting from associative feeling, she dissects both personal and collective narratives in search of points of trigger. Structures that appear familiar are cut open and inspected in an effort to infiltrate from within. Like a dream or a parasite, reality masks itself and bends to meet spectators at eye level.
From pretending to marry for papers, dressing as an influencer, or a mermaid in a shop window, to posting a picture of a pigeon every day, fiction becomes a means of adult play. Filtering experience through the optic of humour and criticality, her practice implies the constant testing of pre-established bounds between work, self, and other.
On stage, deliberate conditions of scene serve as catalysts for public reaction. Tactics of controlled attention, distraction, and participation set a stage for illusion: upon entering the work, one agrees to being part of it. Viewers are thus prompted to act and reflect in the present tense. As existence is pushed to parody, and as the gap between myth and fact begins to lose all visibility.