User:Tjasa DNK/Bara Kolenc

Bara Kolenc, Slovenian philosopher and performance artist * 20. 3. 1978, Ljubljana

She is member of the Ljubljana School of Psychoanalysis and current president of the International Hegelian Association Aufhebung. She is Research Fellow at the Philosophy Department at the Faculty of Arts, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia.

Kolenc is the author of Ponavljanje in uprizoritev: Kierkegaard, psihoanaliza, gledališče [Repetition and Inscenation: Kierkegaard, Psychoanalysis, Theatre], Society for Theoretical Psychoanalysis, Analecta, Ljubljana, 2014.

She is a recipient of the German theatre award Theatertreffen Stückemarkt Commission of Work in 2016 and of The Highest Artistic Title of the University of Ljubljana in 2018.

Background

After finishing Classical Gymnasium Poljane in Ljubljana, she enrolled in the study of philosophy and comparative literature (BA+MA) at the Faculty of Arts, University of Ljubljana. She was student of Mladen Dolar, who was the co-founder, together with Slavoj Žižek and Rastko Močnik, of the Society for Theoretical Psychoanalysis, whose main goal is to achieve a synthesis between Lacanian psychoanalysis and the philosophy of German Idealism. Dolar was supervising both her BA+MA thesis Amphitryon: From Comedy to Psychosis (2004) and her PhD thesis The Philosophical Problem of Repetition and the Real in 20th-century Theatre (2014). Her PhD thesis was published as a book Repetition andInscenation: Kierkegaard, Psychoanalysis, Theatre in the same year (2014).

Bara Kolenc has classical and contemporary dance education. She has finished Primary Ballet School and Primary+Secondary Contemporary Dance Program at the Secondary Ballet School in Ljubljana. In 2003 she was awarded with the European danceWEB scholarship at ImpulsTanz in Vienna.

Kolenc presented her first short choreographic work Sama [Alone] at the age of 15 and her first full-length performance Bela [White] at the age of 19. Her work was well received and she started to collaborate in numerous artistic projects in the fields of performing arts, film and visual arts. During her studies, she continuously developed her artistic work, traveled and performed at venues and festivals in Europe, Balkan and Middle East.

Philosophical work

Central focus of her philosophical work is the problem of repetition. Leaning on her background of Hegelian dialectics, structural linguistics, theoretical psychoanalysis, Deleuze's transcendental empiricism and Marxist social economics, her starting point (filozofsko, miselno izhodišče) is relational. However, in her research she interrogates the very status of a relation, explores its different apparitions and questions its limits. In her PhD, she argued that ontology as the primal philosophical discipline never questions being and non-being in-itself, but always throughout their relation: as soon as thought intervenes, we already have a split, a doubling, an establishment of interrelation of being (or nothing) towards itself. That is why the principal ontological question of what is and what it is not, of being and non-being, of something and nothing, of existence and non-existence is fundamentally connected to the problem of repetition.

She proposed four ways of thinking the relation between being and non-being, between oneness and otherness, which can be understood as four matrices of repetition: deflation, reformation, inflation, formation (production). From this perspective, she executed an in-depth analysis of Plato’s, Hegel's and Kierkegaard’s ontology in view of repetition, with an emphasis on extensive comparison of Lacanian and Deleuzian ontology, along with the critique of their limitations.

In her further work, she elaborated extensively on Marx's economical structures and the difference between Agamben's and Lacan's notion of a gap. She also argued that analysis of different matrices of repetition offers taxonomy for analyzing the ontology of change and the problem of the new as a fundamental concept of the modern age. Novelty, she claims, is not only a complement of the ideology of progress, but is the very condition of possibility of market economy.

She has recently also worked on implementing the developed structural models of repetition into the critique of ideology, the question of enlightenment and the idea of anthropogenesis. Ontology, she claims, is not some self-sufficient philosophical discipline, but affects all the aspects of human condition: the formation of social structures, economy, morality, sexuality and beliefs.

Through different research projects she was also exploring the concept of a face, of representation, theatricality of power and inscenations of subjectivity as well as the question of touch as an intra-linguistic phenomenon.

She was initiator and organizer of three groundbreaking philosophical conferences in Ljubljana: Repetition/s: Performance and Philosophy in Ljubljana (2016), Concept/s: Hegel's Aesthetics (2018) and Hegel's 250th Anniversary: Too-late? (2020).

Artistic work

She started her artistic path as choreographer and gradually developed her performance language at the intersection of body, image, speech and space. She is a conceptual artist and thus conceives her projects as multimedia units, interrogating specific topics and their placement into the concrete social environment. Often, she also authors the texts for her performances.

The Theatertreffen Stückemarkt jury member Árpád Schilling wrote about the Retorika performance: "The dead silence, the noises that mask meaning, the barely visible bodies, all belong to a coherent, closed concept and point in the same direction: towards the traces of lost communication. (-) Solitary figures wander around an unrecognisable space, which is dissected, at times by sounds, at others by lights. There are no points of support and the mattresses lying around serve no purpose. Instead of evoking cosiness, home and peace, it feels like a clearing-out: It’s as if our culture had dropped away from our bodies and we were suddenly rendered culture-less. Everything is exhausted, dusty, foggy. Words no longer fulfil their purpose, as if robots were wandering the earth."

Throughout her work, she developed long-term collaborations with visual artist Atej Tutta, composer Matevž Kolenc, composer Mitja Cerkvenik and art theorist and dramaturge Bojana Kunst. She was also initiator of two artistic collectives: Threshold collective and Eat-art collective.

Bibliography

Books

Book chapters

Articles

Art projects

Collective work

Collaborations

Awards

References

Theatertreffen webpage

konference repetitions > številka MAske

www.barakolenc.com

članki o meni

https://issuu.com/znanstvenazalozbaff/docs/repetitions

https://www.uni-lj.si/media_center/gallery/highest_artistic_titles_of_the_university_of_ljubljana/2018101514034472/