Fight Club installation by Nika Dubrovsky was invited to participate in the Art Encounters Biennial 2023 that will take place in Timisoara, Romania between 19 May – 16 July. The installation was created as a follow-up of the Fight Club theatrical performance and assembly first shown at HKW, Berlin 2022.

Fight Club project is a series of theatrical dialogues designed to engage a diverse audience in discussing the issues that define our lives.

Nika Dubrovsky about this work:

Why do we live by the rules described by Thomas Hobbes and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, even though most of us don’t even know who these long-dead men are? Why do we believe that the state is necessary and that without it there would be a war of all against all?  Where did the notion of private property come from? Why do we believe that human nature has been defined once and for all?

This installation is inspired by a Brechtian learning play, the Commedia dell’Arte, the Dadaist theater, and the New York experiments of the 1980s. The curtain covering the balcony windows is printed with a carnivalesque photograph of clowns playing the battle between Graeber, Hobbes, and Rousseau during the live performance in HKW, Berlin, 2021. The curtain outlines a theatrical stage where the audience faces each other, discussing issues of crucial importance.

Three monitors with a play featuring actors who were David Graeber’s friends: Jacques Servin from The Yes Man Group, Savitri D from the Church of Stop Shopping, Jamie Casey from Global Assembly and Extinction Rebellion engaged in a dialogue that discusses ideas about human nature, the social contract, property, and the state.

Fight Club is a public learning space designed to change public common sense through debate. After all, it is through changing public narratives that revolutions take place.