Something Like
Nikima Jagudajev, Basically at Westfälischer Kunstverein, photo: Thorsten Arendt.
What is a school without books? A stage without an audience. Rehearsal without a script. Basically, Nikima Jagudajev’s exhibition-as-performance at Westfälischer Kunstverein in Münster is all of these—and none of them at once. Entering the space, you are neither fully a visitor nor fully participant, but something in between, left to your own devices, suspicions, desires, and memories. If not back in school, back on the dance floor.
Is the party over, or has it just begun? There is not one center or focus, no singular performance to witness, but rather an ongoing process, with multiple performers across multiple carpets in the exhibition space, a choreography that keeps shifting shape. As if on a film set before action is called, the exhibition seems to hover between preparation and enactment: not as a production line of happiness, but something like a warm-up or trial run. Think Anne Imhof without the champagne-drenched athletic spectacle, and where there is no clear line between (perfect) performers and (awe-filled) audience. The dissolution of these roles is as reassuring as it is unsettling—who is performing, who is simply there? Am I allowed to be a bit of both, or is it too awkward to?
Nikima Jagudajev, Basically at Westfälischer Kunstverein, photo: Thorsten Arendt.
The floor of both the Münster and Vienna versions of Basically is of a whitish, industrial terrazzo, setting the stage for the ambiguities of each location. It’s a formal coincidence that links the two last iterations, even as the specifics of each exhibition differ. In Vienna, the overhead projection of a starry night on the roof of the building aligns with the outsized galaxy puzzle on the floor, offering a sense of cosmic distance—somewhere between astrology and board game. Münster’s downstairs version, by contrast, unfolds into a more subdued and introspective atmosphere, with black light sculptures-chandeliers hanging down neatly to the floor and the other lighting dimmed for a quieter kind of gathering. The carpeted back room features a silent video of underwater imagery, the projection of rippling water—with intimations of bodies swimming, floating, or drifting through the frame—a shift between the two shows, from galactic to aquatic, from impersonal to immersive.
Basically might be understood as a rehearsal, but not in the sense of a preparation for something else. It’s a stage and a situation where roles and expectations can be shuffled, not for finality but for the act of trying, out, on, and again. On socks, the dancers dance, move, sit, rest, talk, play guitar, DJ, sew (working on a clothing line, reupholstering a couch), come close, and stay afar. People coming in are invited to take off their shoes as well: a small but telling gesture, softening the edge between visitor and participant.
Nikima Jagudajev, Basically at mumok, photo: Zoë Field / mumok.
The work unfolds like an unfinished thought. Here, activities exist per se. Things are done for their own sake and for the sake of rediscovery. A re-enchantment of sorts, Jagudajev’s repetition is not a drive for perfection but for participation, a refusal to create a neat final product. It’s an environment where the idea of rehearsal becomes the point. The cards are drawn, the game is played, the rules function more like indications, and the cues aren’t fixed. The work is choreographed but not controlled, a sentence that the performers and the audience continue, together. And the exhibition is not totally without books: both the rulebooks (just some sheets of paper stapled together in Vienna; a binder in Münster) and the Basically-logoed journals are available in the space for performers and visitors to pick up, check in with, write into, invite reflection and re-engagement, on one’s own terms.
In a way, the title Basically (a so-called filler word and intensifier, like ‘literally,’ ‘really,’ ‘absolutely’) echoes the placeholder function Jagudajev’s work tries to occupy—never quite finished, always standing in for something else, acting as a bridge between people, roles, and identities. The deck of cards is a hidden, dramaturgical tool central to the piece, including dance phrases, music cues, garments, avatars, and event triggers, each reshuffling the mood and momentum of the performance(s). There are what Jugadejev calls “cloak cards,” such as “double time” or “Zombie,” that ask performers to repeat gestures at new tempos or intensities. Sometimes a visitor draws a card. The “dealer,” a role that shifts between performers, but also onto visitors, offers instructions that alter both the rhythm and atmosphere of the scene.
Nikima Jagudajev, Basically at mumok, photo: Zoë Field / mumok.
Through this set of chance operations, Basically resists the idea of a singular, overarching narrative and instead embraces multiplicity—of roles, of actions, of interpretations. The experience is porous, ephemeral, and often anticlimactic, but deliberately so. There is no final number, no endpoint or goal, just a drifting invitation to be-with. Jagudajev’s concepts of “re-schooling” and second chance(s) guide us not toward a takeaway, but toward the texture of an ongoing rehearsal. This experience often feels à l’improviste—a French term that implies allowing something to happen unexpectedly, without clear premeditation: as a sketch, without the painting.
Jagudajev’s work brings us back to the question of what happens when rehearsal is life. Milan Kundera’s reflections in The Unbearable Lightness of Being seem particularly fitting here:
We can never know what to want, because, living only one life, we can neither compare it with our previous lives nor perfect it in our lives to come. [...] There is no means of testing which decision is better, because there is no basis for comparison. [...] We live everything as it comes, without warning, like an actor going on cold. [1]
The “still lifes” that pop up across the spaces—temporary compositions made by the performers from found and brought objects: one with a napkin and doily, wine carafe, plastic dinosaur and cough drop in Vienna, another more explicit with a slip, plantain, band-aid, coins, screw and opened fortune cookie in Münster—are like scattered thoughts on the floor, to be picked up as needed. They extend the logic of rehearsal into the realm of scenography. Not quite props, not quite installations, they function as resting points or fillers of their own, quietly rearranged over time. The instability of these temporary keep-sakes makes them suitable to the ethos of Basically, where everything is in flux and the “painting” remains undone.
Nikima Jagudajev, Basically at Westfälischer Kunstverein, photo: Thorsten Arendt.
In this sense, Basically is not about achieving perfection but about unlearning the desire for finality—avoiding the pressure to close the book, so to speak. Where Degas still felt compelled to reclaim his paintings from buyers under the pretense of reworking them (as Valery describes in Danse Dessin Degas [2]) only to destroy the unfinished product, Jagudajev creates spaces of endless return, where repetition is not a process of correction but of care. But what, exactly, is being rehearsed? A social choreography, a redistribution of attention, a kind of being-together that doesn’t rely on resolution—before or after, now or later.
At its core, Basically asks us to consider not only the lines we draw between art and life, but also the ways we define ourselves within those lines. Are we ever truly separate from the roles we inhabit, or do we all share the same fragile, ever-changing script? More than anything, Basically is an act of assembly: a sit-in, a protest, a celebration. It refuses the clean edges of art as object or spectacle, and instead invites the public into a shared improvisation. Not as therapy, but from solidarity. A gathering where the rules are soft and the future is being played one card at a time.
Basically, running at Westfälischer Kunstverein from 22 March to 27 April 2025, is the inaugural exhibition under Theresa Roessler’s new directorship, part of the year-long research, exhibition and discourse program The Company We Keep Makes the World We Live In.
References:
[1] Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, trans. Michael Henry Heim (Harper & Row: New York 1984), p. 8.
[2] Paul Valéry, Degas Danse Dessin (Gallimard: Paris 1938).
