Alexandra Bachzetsis is based in Zurich. Her practice unfolds at the intersection of dance, performance, the visual arts and theater, generating a conflation of the spaces in which the body, as an artistic and critical apparatus, can manifest. This fundamentally interdisciplinary approach is reflected in her educational background. She studied at the Zürcher Kunstgymnasium, the Dimitrischule in Verscio, the Performance Education Program at the STUK arts centre in Leuven and the Theatre and Dance Studies centre in Amsterdam. During these years of training, Bachzetsis began to work as a dancer in the contemporary dance and performance context, collaborating with Sasha Waltz & Guests (Berlin) and Les Ballets C. de la B. (Gent), among others.
Much of Bachzetsis’s work involves choreographies of the body and, in particular, the way that popular culture provides source material for gesture, expression, identification, and fantasy as we continually create and re-create our bodies and the way we identify. Within this, she scrutinizes the mutual influence between the use of gesture and movement in the ‘popular’ or ‘commercial’ genres on the one hand (online media, video-clip and television as a resource) and in the ‘arts’ on the other hand (ballet, modern and contemporary dance and performance). For Bachzetsis, the artificial and often precarious relationship between such genres produce an inquiry into the human body and its potential for transformation, however conceptual or actual. Ultimately, the way we all perform and stage our bodies and ourselves – through stereotypes and archetypes, through choice and cliché, through labor and spectacle – is a question that continues to shape the work of Bachzetsis.
Since Bachzetsis started working independently in 2001, she has created over 30 pieces, which have been shown in theaters, festivals and public space venues around the world. In addition to this, her work has been exhibited in a variety of contemporary art spaces and museums, including Kunsthaus Zurich, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Modern Art (New York, 2017), the Stedelijk Museum (Amsterdam), Tate Modern (London), the Jumex Museum (Mexico City), and Kunsthalle Basel, as well as a number of international biennials and large-scale exhibitions, such documenta 14 (Athens and Kassel), the Biennale de l’Image en Mouvement (Geneva), (d)OCUMENTA 13 (Kassel), as well as the 5th Berlin Biennial.
Chasing a Ghost (presented at FIT 2022) was commissioned by the Art Institute of Chicago and is touring Europe since 2019. Bachzetsis presented her latest work Notebook at Kunst Halle Sankt Gallen in 2023 as an installation that reviews, challenges, and expands her artistic methodologies of the past two decades. In recent years, she collaborated with Cullberg Ballet in Stockholm on a piece titled Exposure. The work premiered in Sweden in September 2024 and is currently touring in Europe.
< photo Bill Georgoussis
@ FIT
Chasing a Ghost
2022 Edition
28.09 – 11.10
