International Baroque is a performance that looks at the mass media, commenting directly on the purpose and content of daily newspapers. The project addresses the amount of negative events that are reported by newspapers on a daily basis, which is accepted without much reaction from the political or social circles.
International Baroque (2009) is a performance which re-enacts Marina Abramovic’s ‘Balkan Baroque’ (1997) performance. The project ‘International Baroque’, strives in a symbolic sense (as in Marina Abramovic’s 1997 work), to ‘clean up’ or ‘wash out’ the bitter reality from society, by ‘physically erasing’ all the ‘bad’ contents from the newspapers. The performance lasted a whole day and the photographs of which this work consists, are documentation of the same. The documentary photographs of the performance are introduced with an insert from David Elliott’s “Balkan Baroque” essay, which introduces Marina Abramovic’s early life, her relation to her partisan parents,etc [image a.)].
On a photocopy of the biographical passage from the above mentioned book, Prlja erases and adds with a pencil information personally related to her own life, her relation to her grandparents, likewise veteran partisans. Intriguingly, the remaining (unedited) part of the text written by Elliott could equally refer to Prlja’s personal history and appears as if it were written about her. With this act, Prlja emphasizes the similar destiny of many post WWII partisan families in region of Ex-Yugoslavia.
