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Monday - Friday:12am - 6pm
Monday - Friday:12am - 6pm
27 December 2021 > 27 January 2022 Kindly invited to the mini online exhibition "Unfamiliar Area" by Miha Majes: "Dark Fantasy", curated by Nina Baznik.
The author Miha Majes was creating the work titled Dark Fantasy in reflection of the psychoanalytic concept of Cart Gustav Jung's shadow. In theory, shadow captures negative qualities and opposes positive self-image. In this context, the author illustrates the collective symbolic image of the Western world, which was historically considered the absolute of knowledge, but today we are talking about its decline (Oswald Spengler). Regardless of whether the shadow is positive or negative, it is important for a person to get in touch with it. Insight into the nature of one's own shadow is the first step to self-awareness and integration of one's own personality. Pertaining to his own shadow, Jung said: 'We owe it to ourselves to acknowledge all our qualities. If we don't see a side of ourselves, we cannot understand ourselves. We need to include it into our personality, otherwise it limits us and we are only half a person and a caricature of ourselves.'
In the image Dark Fantasy, we see a person entwined with inhuman characters. There is an expression of fear on the face of the only human character. We notice that this person is holding part of the clown's coat. The clown laughs with a cigarette in his mouth and wears a hat that says 'new era'. The clown does not laugh at the person, but at the little man sitting on the person. Ridicule is probably aimed at the higher ego of the person (whereas the ego is the one that takes 'control' when we feel threatened or scared). But we quickly notice another important relationship in the image. The clown is being preyed on by a white character or parasite, which is above him and holds a wooden plane in his hand (a wooden plane and a haystack are parables of a terrorist attack on the world trade centre 11/ 9/ 2001, when the understanding of contemporaneity and life in the Western world were redefined). The image of Miha Majes is a sincere, intimate and straightforward confession of his understanding of collective trauma revealed by the emergence of coronavirus. The image is thus grotesque and terrifying, people, animals and characters, who are often pleasant images, are transformed into something foreign, unknown and frightening in Majes's work.
Nina Baznik