Minute by minute what will happen during this hour, has already happened in the hour before. All of today is replaced by yesterday, yesterday by the day before. – script excerpt
Premiere of Imaginary Magnitudes by Zhana Ivanova
October 17 & 18 at 8 pm. (duration approximately 45 min.)
Click here to buy a ticket
An image at a swimming pool on the edge of town in Ruse, Bulgaria, on September 23, 1986, forms a recurrent memory. The performance sets conditions for language to repeatedly return to and diffract this image. Two readers relate a script to four mostly unrehearsed performers, who interpret the text live. Fragments of that memory resurface, dissolving into stage scores and rendering memory itself a diffused structure.
Imaginary Magnitudes traces the tensions between what is intended, imagined and actually occurring. It diverges and multiplies experiences of sensory memory, space, pollution, sexuality and class. Assembling fragmentary sensations through reenactment and increasing detail, the insistence on the particular opens up into a magnified and collective present moment.
Zhana Ivanova, 2025
Cast
Narrators: eva susova, Zhana Ivanova
Base Performers: Nikolai Galvez, Panagiotis Panagiotakopolous aka Taka Taka
Guest Performers Amsterdam:
October 17: Bea McMahon, Venuri Perera
October 18: Aion Arribas, Ahmed El Gendy
Concept, script and direction: Zhana Ivanova
Dramaturgy: Konstantina Georgelou
Process collaborators: Amparo González Sola, Deniz Buga, Molly Palmer
Garment advice: Panagiotis Panagiotakopolous aka Taka Taka
Lighting design: Katinka Marac
Sound design: Nahuel Cano
Production: Helena Julian
Development support: Bau Amsterdam
Special thanks: Sjoerd Kloosterhuis, Joel Galvez, Das Third Cycle Research Group
photo: Elodie Vreeburg
About the artist
Zhana Ivanova has a cross-disciplinary artistic practice – she makes performances, installations, videos, public space commissions, sound and text-based pieces. A live performance component is almost always present in her work, with other forms preceding, being the result of, or in some other way relating to performative gestures. She is keen on rearranging and reconfiguring patterns and structures to which we have grown accustomed. Using script-based approaches, she frequently induces live situations, where interpersonal relations are brought forward, unravelled and made to fluctuate. Language plays a key role, and power structures are of central interest. Her constructions are initially formal and rule-governed; yet within them she insistently exposes the ambiguity of her own rules.
Born in Ruse, Bulgaria in 1977, she moved with her mother to England in the early 1990’s, and now lives in Amsterdam since 2004. Educated at Queen Mary University College, London and DasArts, Amsterdam. Zhana was a resident at the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten, Amsterdam (2012 – 2014) and an artistic research fellow with THIRD, DAS Graduate School, Amsterdam (2021 – 2024).
Presentations of Zhana’s work include a.o. Kunsthalle Basel, Astrup Fearnley Museet Oslo, Fondation D’Enterprise Ricard Paris, Elevation1049 Gstaad, Municipal Gallery Coloredo-Mansfeld Prague, De Appel Amsterdam, Playground Festival Leuven, Framer Framed Amsterdam, Centre Pompidou Paris, Roberts Art Foundation London, Lafayette Anticipations Paris, Oude Kerk Amsterdam, Performatik Biennalle Brussels, and Museum of Contemporary Art Rijeka,
Actively engaging in education, Zhana is currently a tutor at DAS Theater, Master of Performance, Amsterdam. She was a core tutor at BEAR Fine Art (2018 – 2024) and Master of Performance Practices (2016 – 2018), both at ArtEZ (Arnhem). She has been a visiting tutor at Sandberg Institute, Rietveld Academie, School of New Dance Development, SNDO (Amsterdam), KABK (Den Haag) a.o.
