Lada Nakonechna. “Appropriated Phrases” (from “The Good Person of Szechwan: a parable” by Bertolt Brecht). 2012. Installation (five projectors, graphite on wall). Size varies

Job description

The work was located in a rather narrow corridor. On one wall, a series of projectors were installed, displaying screens with lines from a play by the German playwright and poet Bertolt Brecht. Viewers, passing through the corridor, inevitably blocked the projector light and overshadowed the text on the screens with their own shadows. The duplicated text, which Lada Nakonechna drew on the wall, comes to the rescue. But only the lines themselves are duplicated, not the names of the characters who speak them. Thus, the artist simultaneously introduces the viewer into a state of partial confusion and alienation from Brecht’s play, and into a state of heightened subjectivity and the necessity to engage in a kind of dialogue, responding to the lines already written by the artist’s hand.

In this work, she directly refers not only to quoting Brecht’s work but also reacts to his famous “alienation effect” (German Verfremdungseffekt), applied within his authorial genre of “epic theatre” (the play “The Good Person of Szechwan” (1941) is a vivid example). Alienation implies the viewer’s refusal to empathize and “believe” in the characters and the action in general, instead offering detachment and critical reflection, which should lead to independent conclusions. The Brechtian term alienation itself refers to Marxist alienation (German Entfremdung) — a term denoting the condition of the working class deprived of the means of production and the products of their own labor due to capitalist exploitation. Because both concepts are traditionally translated into Ukrainian as “відчуження” (alienation), Nakonechna uses a play on words and calls the work “Alienated Phrases,” and the exhibition it was part of — “Alienation Effect,” consciously intertwining the terms of two famous Germans.