Opening hours:
Monday - Friday:12am - 6pm
Monday - Friday:12am - 6pm
24 June 2022 Kindly invited to a one day group exhibition event "Only the End Seemed to be Within our Grasp", on Friday 24 June, between 9 pm and midnight at Park Tivoli in the near vicinity of Švicarija. In the case of rain the artworks will be presented in Švicarija.
Artists: Sara Bezovšek, Žan Juhart & Jernej Šimec, Tim Kropivšek, Nejc Trampuž, Kamila Walendykiewicz.
The one-day exhibition project is a unique collective experiment with a strong environmental message. The participating artists come from a young, engaged generation that has grown up in a digital world. They are friends and colleagues who work together on various art projects. The exhibition presents their recent works in which they question the relationship between nature and technology, our attitude towards the living environment, the issue of the transition from the analogue world to virtual reality and the state of nature in cyberspace.
Their observations lead to questions about the future not only of humanity and society, but also nature, inseparably connected with them. of their inseparable nature. Artists are experimenting with the placement of technologically generated representation into the natural environment. They are wondering how our perception of nature and technology is changing in an increasingly rapidly evolving postnatural world. They are interested in whether technological progress that transcends individual consumption and the generation of the profits for large corporations is possible.
The WorldCrash.img project by Nejc Trampuž is an interactive installation that deals with the impact of technology and consumer society on our environment and explores the reciprocal impact of the changed surroundings on humanity. The artist captures images from unsecured web cameras that include a wide range of artificial as well as natural landscapes and animals, sometimes even people. By deliberately causing digital errors — glitches, which he achieves by interfering with the code of the image file, the images are transformed into each other. The author sees the error as a tool that can be used to discover new territories and achieve completely unexpected goals, which resist digital control due to limited recognition of images.
In her complex, visually saturated video A Quake in Being Kamila Walendykiewicz wonders what will be the nature of the future in the posthuman world. The video is part of the wider online project post_planet (www.postplaneta.com), which constructs the digital world of the future. In it, the author explores the boundaries between the physical and computer-generated world. She is interested in the data durability and the numerous lost digital images on the Internet. The video consists of three chapters that highlight the attitude towards the living environment and discuss the transition from the analogue world to cyberspace.
Sara Bezovšek is also wondering about the future of life on the planet, by using content found online as well. The video www.nuclear-winter.world is a derivation of the interactive story game Nuclear Winter, which is part of the artist's long-term interactive online project SND (Learning about nature and society). The video in the form of a compact collage of quotes from film and Internet culture depicts a possible scenario after a nuclear war, leading to a nuclear winter and global cooling event, respecitively. It would be followed by a nuclear spring and a summer with elevated temperatures, which would erase the little life that would have been preserved until then.
Today’s natural world is already almost overwhelmed by anthrophony, the sounds produced by humanity. This fact is addressed by the interactive light and sound installation The New Natural World by Tim Kropivšek. The ongoing extinction of animal species due to human occupation of their habitat is demonstrated by the small test tubes used in the installation. As a hint at the scientific and technological processes of storing genetic material, the test tubes contain electronic parts to remind us that in the near future we will be able to come into contact with most animals only through digital interfaces. The change of light and the sound distortion of animal voices upon human contact with the test tube represent our harmful actions and the suffering we cause to the rest of the living world. The work reminds us that we are already deep in the period of the sixth mass extinction of species, mainly due to human activity.
Technological progress is often associated with the progress of society. Žan Juhart and Jernej Šimec are wondering what progress means when the most basic human needs are not met in the entire society. Their project Absent Events, is a live video broadcast of their performance of building a shelter from natural materials in the forest. They build it dressed in a special green suit, which, with the help of the green screen effect in the broadcast, causes their digital erasure. Nature thus seemingly builds a shelter on its own and the question arises as to whom. Perhaps for the human of the future who will (again) need shelter in the forest due to the imminent ecological catastrophe, or as a sign of solidarity for refugees and migrants who are forced to travel secretly through the forest due to restrictive migrant policies and police violence.
The artists address the issues of living the living in a modern postnatural, technologically marked world and our understanding of this through digital interfaces. They face digital reality, the speed and abundance of data, and their distortion. The works are marked by a sense of loss, helplessness, anxiety, frustration, fear of imminent catastrophe and extinction. They draw attention to the problems we are already facing as a community and paint a picture of a world without humanity, even without life, and explore the self-sufficiency of nature and the fundamental need for shelter and survival, which is common to all living beings, but humanity expansively accommodated it to its (apparent) benefit. Artists reveal and foretell the consequences of our obsession with (digital) technology, with inventions that were designed as a tool to aid, but soon turned into weapons of conquest.
By placing their works in nature, the artists want to highlight the human desire for dominance over everything that surrounds us. By interfering with it, they want to illustrate the boundless human desire to colonize the other, be it nature, its resources, animals and plants, or a fellow human being, a different culture or society. Through this spectacular gesture, which attracts viewers to the digitally inhabited forest, the artists are criticizing our own dark motives, which are an integral part of society, and outline the traces we leave with our actions. With all the unknowns of technology and the future, as Kamila Walendykiewicz tells us in her video, 'only the end seemed to be within our grasp''.
Vesna Bukovec, Ana Grobler, Miha Kelemina, Sebastian Krawczyk
