Opening hours:
Monday - Friday:11am - 7pm
Monday - Friday:11am - 7pm
21
September
2010
>
08
October
2010
Curator: Petja Grafenauer
The opening of the exhibition will take place at 20h in the Alkatraz gallery.
There is no way to deny that the integration into the »hegemonic relations and struggle for domination in control of certain society segments« is nowadays »evident at all levels, when one of the key characteristics of this process is almost a total passivization and neutralization of political aspect of the subject (or de-politicization of its demands for society’s transformation and the disabling of the onset of politics).«[1] The discourse of contemporary art is nevertheless filled up with questions concerning the political and the engaged; however, this saturation only provoking the feeling of dilution of the engagement. In the art it takes on the form of illustration instead of the one of action, arising no wish for a real social action.
The exhibition of Ivan Fijolić, Miha Perne, Arjan Pregl, Marko Tadić and Leon Zuodar, is trying to take a different path. It does not avoid the fact that a work of art and the artist are always threatened by the possibility of comodification (and, that until now, a solution for this problem has not yet been found), whilst not forgetting the fact that the art in its apparent freedom, offered to it by the gallery, actually denies the ideology of the social system it originates from. Between the exhibition and the products, being created within the frame of soft capitalism, advocated by Google, for instance - there is still some difference. The selected works have not been created under the pressure of empty employers’ promises, seemingly allowing the subject the expression of her/his individual wishes and needs, creativity at the work post, flexible work time and similar snares, leading to an even greater enslavement of an individual, now driven into the execution of one’s work tasks by her or his own creative ego. The art works are not a result of work duties for they have been produced solely as a consequence of the wishes, fancy and obsessions of their creators.
Storyboards of Marko Tadić reminisce on school desks that we used to cut, write and smoulder names, witty ideas and similar into. They represent visual scenarios for a film that will never be shot, an obsessive incomprehensive film, with its several versions playing in the artist’s head. The film is always linked with danger, fire, industry, madness and dark fantasy, incessantly being discharged in a drawing, expanding from the apparent scribbles all the way to realistic images brought to perfection.
Starting already on their website Miha Perne and Leon Zuodar make an announcement that they operate in line with the “Kinder egg” principle, meaning that each of their exhibitions is a surprise of its own.«[2] With no exception, their present co-operation has not passed without surprises, complications, changes, possible failures, but it seems that an autonomous drawing will be created and will be realized on the attire of »brothers in painting, wishing to look smart for the exhibition. They will see a tailor with selected fabrics and he will make a couple of tailored suits for them. So they should be pretty as a picture at the exhibition’s opening.«[3]
Beside the two living statues, there is also an self-portrait sculpture of a Croatian sculptor Ivan Fijolić taking part at the exhibition. The artist keeps obsessively returning to the analysis of the dark childhood, so very different to the one mass media wish to persuade us about. When creating Hopscotch, it is created from tomb marble, his Mono-Cycle is, for example, instead with a seat, equipped with a sharp spear a child will get hurt on, and Rectum is a superhero, saving the world with a help of a rectum, swanking on his chest.
Force Majeure by Arjan Pregl are drawings that cannot be sold, as their life span is limited to the freshness of our dear bread. They first came into existence last May, firstly as a game, into which the “force majeure has intervened” onto a burnt toasted bread »scratching the excessive parts off with a stanley knife.«[4] Thus some well-known icons of our time show up, the relics that gradually get old, dry out and crumble.
The exhibited works combine the images, stemming out from the world of contemporary mass culture, but modified with a personal obsession, fantasies, wishes and utopia. They bear no wordly purpose, their primary function is not to change the social reality. With their aimlessness they create the possibility for the freedom of fantasy, playfulness and creativity, that the spectator, when seeing the exhibition, may wish for and also liberate it in her or his daily life.
Petja Grafenauer
