THE GAME, 2005

ANDERSSEN - KIESERITZKY

The immortal game

1. e4 e5
2. f4 ef4
3. Lc4 Dh4
4. Kf1 b5
5. Lb5: Sf6
6. Sf3 Dh6
7. d3 Sh5
8. Sh4 Dg5
9. Sf5 c6
10. g4 Sf6
11. Tg1! cb5
12. h4 Dg6
13. h5 Dg5
14. Df3 Sg8
15. Lf4: Df6
16. Sc3 Lc5
17. Sd5! Db2:
18. Ld6! Lg1:?
19. e5!! Da1:+
20. Ke2 Sa6
21. Sg7:+ Kd8
22. Df6:+ Sf6
23. Le7 mat.

...Janešlieva’s most recent project, one of her series of committed projects, is entitled The Game (2005). The game she has chosen this time is chess again — one of her favorite (symbolic) playthings she also used in her other projects. In this particular case, however, the artist offers a real game — a specific, already completed game of chess with a known outcome. There is only a “slight” ironic/sarcastic artistic intervention in that identified game: the pieces bear the names of individual countries. According to some mysterious code similar to that of Nostradamus or according to her own logic of a “global strategist,” Janešlieva has given the pieces the names of the world’s major powers and also of many smaller countries known to us all as the world’s crisis spots. But as an artist and a “strategist”, Janešlieva endows herself with another advantage: in her arrangement of the game, the real power of the countries rarely corresponds to the power of the chosen pieces in chess. (In other areas of life, such an arrangement would probably cause a series of diplomatic incidents.) In this game of international and global positioning, countries gain or lose their power according to completely new, artistic parameters. Some abandon the “historical scene” unexpectedly quickly... will they manage to survive? Of course, the game has to be played to the end to find out who is “the toughest”. And if you don’t like this ending, then imagine yourself as a strategist and invent your own game, guided by your own parameters!...

Zlatko Teodosievski

excerpt from the text in catalogue "Slavica Janešlieva", 2005