IRKA

Description

Shaped like a passport, the Irka book was invented as a way to bypass legal restrictions of civic mobility using art system as a vehicle. It’s content is documentation of this very process of its making, consisting solely of e-mail correspondence between the artist and the protagonist Irka, a Belarussian student at EHU university in Vilnius, Lithuania. But once you read it, it reveals itself as an inventory of elusive genres both of writing and of the relationships between the collaborators. Like in a good novel, once you think you know what is happening, something else occurs. For instance, you once read that all the names have been changed due to the politically and otherwise delicate issues discussed (the colour of the letters is likewise the beautiful marine blue according to the protagonist’s preference) to discover later that Irka has made up her mind to speak for herself. And so in her case the decision has been reversed, but the name of the artist behind this project – Flávia Müller Medeiros – is nowhere to be found. The International English of the artworld is covered by thick layers of misspelling, direct translations of Slavic and outerwordly grammar and various other odds throughout the book; that alone can make one shrink with pleasure – or disgust. The book was first presented in London in 2007 during a book-signing event hosted by Irka, which has served as a convincing pretext for a trip.
—Virginija Januskeviciute, Master Humphrey’s Clock, de Appel, Amsterdam 2008