Alexandra Pirici at the New Museum

In her work, Alexandra Pirici (b. 1982, Bucharest, Romania) uses performance and choreography to address symbolic manifestations of history through frameworks that define bodily presence in both real and virtual space. Her new project for the New Museum takes the form of an ongoing action with live performers and one holographic performer. The project approaches the concept of presence in an expanded sense, focusing in particular on its increasing dispersion. In Pirici’s ongoing action—conceived especially for the New Museum’s South Galleries—presence is revealed in a variety of ways: as physical body as well as artificial stand-in, avatar, and ghost, taking on the character of a memorial or monument; as image and abstraction of the living subject into quantifiable, monetizable data; and as the expanded life of “dead” objects in museum collections—using the presence of live performers to challenge their stable state and static interpretation.