Leko Beštak & Anja Andrej

Andrej Beštak and Anja Leko are an artist duo from Croatia, working together since 2020 in the field of experimental visual art practices, combining installations, performances, CGI, and video works. They consider themselves storytellers in space using visual language and sounds rather than words to create an emotional dialog between artwork and the audience. Finding inspiration from their private lives or random information theory stumble upon, Andrej and Anja create stories that delve into instinctual, intuitive, and spiritual dimensions.

For the residency period we will explore the historical context and impact of rave phenomena. Transformative elements of dance in large groups and impact of the specific subculture on contemporary sense of body and body in relations to community.

The goal of the time spent in MQ residency is to create a digital personality, avatar-like entity that serves as a polygon for visitors to explore and experience trance-like sensations in the controlled space combining sound, video performance and VR experience created in Blender and Unity softwares.
We draw the correlation between rave culture and shamanic ritual practices and how rhythm, lights and community can create an environment characteristic of spiritual experience. Our research would focus on elaborating and isolating sensations within the rave experience that are parallel to some of the spiritual outcomes such as the feeling of euphoria, time distortion or sense of unity all leading to altered states of consciousness.
For this project we are interested in finding a way of creating a space that serves as an alternative to broken religious institutions and purely hedonistic club culture. Freed from any ideology or cultural influence, focusing on bodily experience.
Some examples of creating such an experience are movement meditation in traditional Chinese medicine such as Tai Chi, Qi Gong, Liu Zi Jue, Marina Abramovic work ‘’Freeing the Body’’ (1976), Japanese Dance of Darkness.