MP_per_13 KEEP MOWING
performance art
MP_art, Novi Sad (Serbia)

Authors: MP_art
Text: MP_art
Music and sound: J. S. Bach: 'Six Suites for Solo Cello' - Torleif Thedeen and Nenad Kuzmanović
Voice: Radovan Štulić
Costumes: MP_art and Marijana Đorđević (the Hague, Holland)
Performers: MP_art (Maja Budžarov and Predrag Šiđanin)

MP_per_13 KEEP MOWING is actually an essentially altered and supplemented version of the performance MP_per_05 KEEP A DISTANCE, staged in October 2003 at 1st International Festival of Performance Art Premiere in Pančevo.
The performance is an original production enveloping a synthesis of energies of sound, light and movement. It symbolically evokes - using the power of the meaning of words, the colour of light and the force of a whip crack, and by a ‘corrective measure’ of an intuitive self-controlled accurate movement – dignity, exaltation and the rejection of all forms of surrender, anxiety or chaos. A walk on the edge of safety with a risk of being seriously injured, a maximum concentration on every step, the force of a whip cracking, the word as a power and sense of each dialogue - these are the mental-physical relations and messages of this condense performance brimming with energy. KEEP MOWING also implies the hidden eroticism of relationships in which both participants are equal pér se, with an equal measure of probability for domination and submission.   

MP_art is an acronym of the artistic couple who regard their joint work as more important than collecting artistic biographies – ‘art consists of art alone, not artists’. Starting to live and work together in January 2003, they decided to reject their previously earned personal histories, the work under their own personal names as well as the mediums of their previous research. They focus on exploring mutual emotions and intimacy through a primarily physical (performance art) and meditative (painting/text/colour) expression. In their work they equally use their bodies, photography, text, video, the Internet, and occasionally combinations of the said mediums with different classical materials (ceramics and glass). Their works usually have a strong reference to the place, time and physical/meditative context in which a personal experience of intimacy and privacy reflects upon the universally recognised and accepted phenomena. Their artistic practice/strategy is based on closeness and directness, on interaction and liberation from ideological restraints imposed by mass communication, on the aesthetics of a personal attitude towards the world, post avant-garde and conceptual art experiences in the social context of the current moment, which they are openly critical of.