Andrea Schneemeier: Five Star (A Dinner) 2008.

Performative video project

Opening: 21 October 2008, 19pm The project is based on an article published on a Hungarian Internet portal.
This tells about a story of a dinner for homeless people, initiated by the director of a luxurious hotel in Budapest, one of the most expensive at the heart of the city.
Before Christmas the hotel invited a (selected) group of homeless people to a dinner at the hotel’s restaurant.
This dinner will be re-staged with the original participants, this time without ‘an invitation’. The performance will be recorded on video, which, together with interviews conducted with the participants and the involved parties, will be the material of the video installation.
The project is based on participation, where the events unfold freely in the given framework set by the artist, providing a limited but free space for reflection and interaction. It is operating in a temporary autonomous zone, where the dinamics of different contexts and artistic gestures are freely examined in their interactions.
This way the artist exploits her own position in knowledge production, examining as well the possible positions of artistic agency. This approach leads to a critical praxis where subversive affirmation as an artistic strategy challenging the mechanisms of authority, by opening up space for diverse, alternative narratives.

Andrea Schneemeier