Ana Prvacki (b. 1976, Serbia) is an artist whose work draws on daily practices and social research. Her interventions are meant to transform the viewer’s perception and experience of daily life and routine, providing solutions to our everyday problems, worries, and fears. She explores social anxiety and the comedic potential of faux pas as well as the sociopolitical significance of welcoming the “other.” Prvacki was recently an Artist-in-Residence at the Hammer Museum (Los Angeles) where she developed “Greeting Committee” (2011), a participatory project about gestures of hospitality, civility, and etiquette. She has shown in numerous international venues including: SMART Museum (Chicago), Bloomberg (NY), Lombard-Freid Projects (NY), Art in General (NY), Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum (Boston), Centre Pompidou (Paris), Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea (Turin), Sydney Biennial, Singapore Biennial, and the Turin Triennale. Prvacki is based in Los Angeles and Singapore.

Visit Performing Daily Practice on Tumblr. This blog chronicles reaction of the six musicians who participated in Prvacki's project between September 2011 and March 2012.

Ana Prvacki spent hours looking, wandering, and playing her flute in the museum galleries during December 2009. These encounters lead her want to delve further a sound work that she had devised for the Centre Pompidou in Paris and the High Line in New York. Performing Daily Practice, was conceived at the Gardner Museum as a series of morning music and vocal rehearsals in the galleries. Prvacki's idea was to invite the students to perform informal practicing scales, tonal exercises, and trills while roaming through the galleries and exploring the visual and acoustic environment of the museum. The project came about in collaboration Neil Leonard (sax), a professor and four students from the Berklee College of Music.--Katie Bilinski (base guitar), Julia Easterlin (voice),Christian Li (Piano), and Rose Seyfried (voice). It was clear during the first trial that the experience was going to have a lasting impact on all involved, from the musicians, to the staff working in the building, to the filmmaker documenting the event. Leonard wrote after the first day:

It was really a pleasure to play in the Early Italian Room and feel a new relationship to those works begin to develop. Pondering the depiction of the Madonna's hands in Pinturicchio's painting while using my own hands became a really inviting kind of stimulus. Instrumental study is so much about practicing listening and presence of mind, so actually contemplating the detailed and obsessive care that went into that work was really inspiring. In addition, I had the privilege of seeing Pinturicchio's work in Spello in Perugia a few years back and the non-mystical, everyday quality of the biblical characters drew me into his work. Upon close listening, my instrument, the saxophone, is not suited to creating idyllic, overly polished sound. When you listen to the sax at close proximity, you hear air escaping from the corners of the mouth, key clicks and the horn's non-uniform rendering of the scale. When I came across that painting I became curious about how these non-idyllic yet very vivid aspects of everyday life were present in both Pinturicchio's and my own. It was at that point that I knew that I would do more than help facilitate this project, and actually choose to be one of the performers so I could explore these connections over several months and repeated practicing/wandering sessions.

Over the course of three months the group came on select Tuesday mornings to perform their daily practice routines in the galleries before the museum opened its doors to the public. Afterward, they recorded their thoughts and insights. On December 7 and 8, 2010 the group did two public practice sessions. Visitors were encouraged to explore the galleries as well as the different sounds echoing throughout the museum. A printed brochure shared the thoughts and insights into the performers’ experiences with the project.

In creating Performing Daily Practice, Prvacki made full use of the specific characteristics of the Gardner’s physical and spatial context as the foundation on which to create a new aural experience of the museum. This work did not strive to transform the environment but rather to alter a visitor’s perception of space. It did not intrude or alter the courtyard and galleries, but rather changed the way we as individuals physically perceived the space.

“The Gardner Museum is a very special place. We might think that it operates as an enormous instrument that can be played in many ways, or as a stage, a succession of galleries forming a lyrical set,” says Prvacki.

Because of the impact on those who witnessed and participated in Prvacki’s Performing Daily Practice, it was decided to continue the experiment for another year. Between September 2011 and February 2012, Leonard returned with five new students, Alexander Baboian (guitar), Lillia Betz (melodica), Jamie Billings (flute), Kerry Leva (voice), Shea Rose (voice), and TJ Usyian (voice), to roam and explore the visual and acoustic environment of the galleries. After each session, they recorded their thoughts and uploaded images and recordings to a Tumblr blog which launched to the public for the groups public practice sessions on March 8 and 9, 2012.

During her first visits to the museum in December 2009, Prvacki often brought her new born daughter with her. This gave rise to another idea, a “lactation tour”, in which she (a new mother) and two staff members (one an expectant mother, and the other an experienced mother) explored images in the collection and discussed topics that related to the joys, the logistics, and the challenges of motherhood.