Pero Kavgić: Going out / Izlazak: Post Festum

Photos: Filip Borelli, Saša Dervišević

When, where?

• , Premiere: Pero Kavgić – Going out / Izlazak: Post Festum, Zagreb, Croatia, Museum of Contemporary Art, in the program of "Summer in MSU"

Official video trailer

/ Production

Concept / Description

The performance partially reflects on the theater and dance performance “Going out / Izlazak”, which has two premiere nights on June 17 and 18. 2021., in KUC Travno, Zagreb, Croatia. It is a stage work that explores the concept of dating from different perspectives, and in which Pero Kavgić participates as a performer, via video.

In the Zagreb Museum of Contemporary Art, the audience will have the opportunity to attend the live performance of this specific artist and find out what the “grandfather of performance” thinks about Mate Rimac’s fast cars, Elon Musk’s chipped pigs, seniors who are better off not existing (as well as those who are for us better off existing), the purpose of love, and not to mention, the equally important cooking of beans.

Biography of the artist

Pero Kavgić (1927) is an artist who has engaged in endurance art throughout his life without much media attention. If Marina Abramović is the grandmother of performance, Kavgić is definitely the great-grandfather, which will soon be confirmed by Croatian Wikipedia. His most significant works, unfortunately poorly or not at all recorded in the archives of history, span two world wars and move into the new millennium. They range from the multilingual “Stay low, arbeit macht frei, natura non facit saltus” (in which he actively managed to work on the action of doing nothing for 365 days), to the endurance performance “Pišem ti pismo” (in which he writes letters to pigeons about the state of the world during the continuous 15 hours of light of the Croatian summer solstice, which ends infamously due to significant communication difficulties that he attributed to the pandemic of Asperger’s syndrome in the population of central Croatian pigeons), to “Y2K, go away” (in which he sends a prayer in Morse code to the hackers of the world to stop the millennium bug), to the most recent Zoom performance “I’m looking, but not hearing – anno domine 2020.”, technically supported and sponsored generously by the telecommunications start-up giant SpaceMoBBing. Pero Kavgić returns as a living and active artist at 94 years old, with an elderly back and a great appetite for enlightening the world about the state of affairs. His performance “Going out – post festum”, among other things, looks back on his participation in the project “Going out” with women from the generation of 60+, but it thematically and motifly deals with the idea of getting out of all kinds of shells of life, both personal and social.

What Pero is talking about

Pero is 94 years old and he has been talking for 34 years now. Before he finally leaves this world, Pero has a job to do for this same world. He has a message to share, an opinion on:

• – chauvinists and antifeminists, like himself
• – Corona-virus approvers and anti-corona personas, where he is present in both cases
• – old people, who it would be better off not having, like himself, but also those it would be better to keep
• – important things in life
• – poetry
• – cooking chickpeas and picking salad
• – ecology and barbecues
• – fast cars by Mate Rimac and fast chip-tuned pigs by Elon Musk
• – crypto currencies and which one to invest in to be a trillionaire by 95 years old
• – the meaning of money and the purpose of love

Photos (premiere)

Photos (audience)

Workings