Handle with care selected by BEATE Zoe Gudović – Isolation

Isolation, a performance installation to be seen inside the public toilet at brut nordwest during the imagetanz festival, will show the audience the transformation of a public space. The brut toilets will become a temporary living room for artist Zoe Gudović and transformed into a space of encounter, communication, and creation. Toilets are spaces where we feel isolated and at the same time free, they are spaces of intimacy, reflection, and liberation and thus the perfect place to ponder existential questions: How do we cope with isolation? What does the current sense of distancing and loneliness do to us? How do we react to death?

During her two-week residency at brut, self-proclaimed toilet artist Zoe Gudović will invite the audience to 15-minute one-on-one visits in her toilet living room. The artist thus creates a meeting place to accumulate and share conversations, but also music, small performances, voice messages, photographs, and daydreams.
In a lecture performance towards the end of the residency, a larger audience is invited to a tour of the toilet premises, which will have been subject to permanent transformation during the two weeks prior.

Zoe Gudović is a lesbian artist, feminist, activist, and cultural manager. Originally from Belgrade, she now lives in Vienna. In her practice, she combines art and activism. Zoe was active in several collectives, such as Women at Work, Act Women, Queer Belgrade, the music act Charming Princess, and Reconstruction Women’s Fund. She is also a lecturer on women’s studies at the faculty of political sciences in Belgrade, an editor and host of the radio show Ženergija, and an organiser of campaigns for the visibility of LGBTQ+, women’s human rights, and marginalised communities. Since 2001, she has connected female artists from all over the world with Serbian activists under the name Women’s Movement – Women’s Theater – Women’s Body. Zoe Gudović has been awarded the Jelena Šantić award for outstanding contributions to combining art and activism as well as the Feminist Achievement Award of Befem.