Opening hours:
Monday - Friday:12am - 6pm
Monday - Friday:12am - 6pm
14 November 2024 > 06 December 2024 We invite you to the opening of the exhibition "After the Party" by Francisco Tomsich and Borut Savski, On Thursday, November 14, at 7 pm, in the Alkatraz Gallery.
Francisco Tomsich: After the Party is an interactive, immersive installation and an ever-changing, infinite concert, an ecosystem of sound and projected moving images which explores the metaphor of resonance in space and in concept.
After the Party is an exhibition conceived specifically for the Alkatraz Gallery and its Metelkova context. The installation of beer cans communicates this, telling a story about consumption and the politics of recycling, but also touches upon the remains of the party, the fragmented concert of smell and sound, images and sensations attached to the way home or the morning after the party, which are also approached literally and metaphorically in sound and image.
Ana Grobler: The duo that goes by the name The Silent Movies, Borut Savski and Francisco Tomsich, in the third chapter of their mutual conversation, as they call their collaboration – which began with the exhibition entitled Elegy (Cirkulacija2, July 2020) and continued with the project entitled Summer Songs (Cirkulacija2, March-April 2023) – provide a holistic, in fact, immersive, experience for the viewer. Namely, the installation consists of an inseparable interplay of videos from Francisco Tomsich's Silent Works series and sound by Borut Savski.
Borut Savski: The system deals with the human interior, such as empathy, emotions, reflections and concerns, and is built as an anthropomorphic body, with limbs, a basic body, nerves and a central brain, which includes the visual perception of video sources. Periferal nerves of the body
Ana Grobler: or a complex art object that borders on the subject in its existence and contributes its share of the answer to the conundrum of modern times with technology and the emergence of artificial intelligence,
Borut Savski: it is, in fact, a real wiring. [1] This softer, wired, subject-object does not want to hurt anyone, at most it wants to be visited. As far as artificial intelligence is concerned, we are using heuristic methods that are several decades old, which produce diversity and, with it, errors. Sounds are transmitted to the surroundings by vibrating loudspeakers, which create sound by transmitting vibrations to the chosen material.
Ana Grobler: The discarded beer cans in the Alkatraz Gallery, one of the few abundant material resources of Metelkova, are actually part of this loudspeaker.
Borut Savski: The sound image is based on sound effects that evoke destabilising effects: fragmentation of the sound image and the undefined, simultaneous/parallel nature of larger sound streams. All of this is scattered around the space in the manner of six sound sources. No focus. Vague voices, conversations, sound like tinnitus, unclear musical echoes. Uneven waves. The sound dynamics are driven by the changes in the video image of the Silent Videos being played, by the camera detecting the visitor and by the internal inertia of the computer algorithm. A moment of silence would probably be appropriate as well. The four suspended sound sources are not loudspeakers, but light vibrating sound bodies distributed around the space. Their task is to fill or empty the sound space, which is, after all, primarily framed by video images. The synchronicity between image and sound is also not clear, but rather subtle.
Francisco Tomsich: The videos on view are pieces from the Silent Works series, developed since 2016 and shown in different contexts and countries since. These works are composed with fragments of footage taken from my own video diaries (therefore having a strong documentary character) in dialogue with specific traditions of experimental documentary film, video art and early cinema. They are mostly monochromatic. They are narrative and meditative. They are composed as dialogic round-shaped peepholes into some diffuse (out-of) centre of a certain sight. They are silent.
Ana Grobler: The strong connection between video and sound, the embodiment and subjectification of the art object, point to the synchronous work of the tandem,
Sebastian Krawczyk: who builds a holistic experience through an experiment that is constantly in the making. The enclosed circle of sound and light of the art installation circulates around the space, like an unstable mind, in constant motion through the restless stream of thought and emotional instability felt by the night visitor to Metelkova when deprived of sleep. In a figurative sense, we are all in a state of permanent instability, as we are part of a society that, thanks to technological developments, is wondering aloud what is actually real, because the paradox of moving information is in the information itself, as they are most suitable for manipulating reality. [2] Thus, the installation by the artists can be seen as a poetic metaphor for today's zeitgeist: a Metelkovian wanderer, amidst the remnants of yesterday's socialising, who is also an observer of the glitches of an unstable reality.
[1]https://www.cirkulacija2.org/?p=10094
[2] B. Zrinski Matrica: nestabilna realnost, p. 27, in: 28. Grafični bienale, MGLC, 2009.
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Francisco Tomsich (1981) is a Slovenian-Uruguayan artist based in Istria. He produces exhibitions, publications, stage works, collective platforms, research models and pedagogical devices, manipulating different media, languages and tongues. He is a co-founder and member of several non-disciplinary associations of cultural workers in South America and Europe. His work has been exhibited and published internationally and has been awarded several times. His practices deal with the urgency to create critical dialogues between images of the past, notions of the present and active models of the future.
Borut Savski (1960) is an intermedia artist who places great emphasis on sound – while simultaneously using technical solutions for unusual instruments and autonomous sound and visual structures/ sculptures. Closely related to this are the microsocial situations he enters and/or creates. The basic approach is at the level of metaphors – points where transfers/translations of meanings/motives/motivations occur between different discursive fields. Artistic production is always parallel and intertwined with other production. Technology, programming, music, outlook on society. Current preoccupation with tactile interfaces and interactively generated video/audio/music. Various and numerous collaborations, organizations and co-organizations of events/festivals.
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Production: KUD Mreža
Coproduction: Boja, Cirkulacija 2
Curated by: Ana Grobler, Sebastian Krawczyk
Proof reading: Sonja Benčina
Translation: Ana Makuc
Financial support: Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Slovenia, City Council Ljubljana
Thanks to: Eva Drašak, Simon Svetlik, Henrike and Clemente von Dewitz
Photographies of the exhibition by: Nada Žgank
