Lada Nakonechna. Appropriated Phrases (from The Good Person of Szechwan by Bertolt Brecht). 2012. Installation (five projectors, graphite on wall). Variable dimensions

Work description

The work was situated in a rather narrow corridor. A series of projectors were installed on one wall, displaying text excerpts from the play by German playwright and poet Bertolt Brecht. As viewers walked through the corridor, they would inevitably block the light from the projectors, casting their own shadows over the text on the screens. A duplicated text, hand-drawn by Lada Nakonechna on the wall, came to their aid. However, only the lines were duplicated—not the names of the characters who spoke them. In doing so, the artist places the viewer in a state of partial disorientation and estrangement from Brecht’s play, while simultaneously enhancing their subjectivity and prompting them to enter a kind of dialogue, responding to lines already written by the artist’s hand.

In this work, she directly references not only Brecht’s text but also responds to his famous “alienation effect” (Ger. Verfremdungseffekt), which he employed in his genre of “epic theatre” (the 1941 play The Good Person of Szechwan being a prime example). Alienation involves rejecting emotional identification and belief in the characters or the story, instead encouraging distance and critical reflection, ultimately leading to independent conclusions. Brecht’s term “Verfremdung” itself references Marx’s notion of “Entfremdung” (alienation)—a condition of the working class, stripped of both the means of production and the products of their own labor through capitalist exploitation. Since both terms are traditionally translated into Ukrainian as “відчуження,” Nakonechna plays with this linguistic overlap by titling her work Appropriated Phrases (“Відчужені фрази”) and the exhibition in which it appeared The Alienation Effect, (“Ефект відчуження”)  deliberately intertwining the concepts of two well-known Germans.