Friday, February 21^st, 2003 Velan will present Playtime by Swetlana HEGER (Brno, Chzech Republic, 1968). The artist lives and works between Berlin and New York, she cooperated with different commercial brands (Adidas, Levi’s Hermès, to quote just a few) which dressed her figure. She worked in strict connection with stylists and fashion photographers. The project has thus become a performance: the artist has been portrayed each time according to different connotations, dressing and interpreting the various marks. At the origin of the work there is the exploitation of the “Bohemian Bourgeois and New Mobiles” the so called “BoBo”, a social and economic phenomenon, a true way of life, where the artist becomes an icon.

Swetlana Heger lives and works in Berlin. In the beginning of the Nineties she was moving in the slight border between art and commerce and analyzed the transformation and processes of value attribution in artistic objects. In the series Animal Farm (2007) she found out and portrayed many bronze statues scattered in Berlin parks created, according to the historic reconstruction recovered by the artist, from the fusion of the monumental statue of Stalin which stood on the Karl-Marx-Alle, and removed after the publication of the Chrushchev’s report about the war crimes of the soviet hierarch, in 1961. Heger reflects on the phenomena of ideology removal and on the continuous contaminations in history, leaving physical as well as political traces, recycling objects and constructions with ever changing meanings. Her works were exhibited at Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich, at the Neuer Berliner Kunstverein, at the Mak in Vienna, at the Centre National de la Photographie in Paris.