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Zoran Srdić Janežič / Corpus Indeterminata (*Undefined Body)

07 December 2010 > 07 January 2011 Curator: Jadranka Ljubičič
Sculpture Association Gallery, Križevniška ulica 2, at 7pm - Introductory performance and exhibition
The Alkatraz Gallery, Masarykova 24, Metelkova mesto, at 9pm - The exhibition opening
Cordially invited to a guided tour with the artist on 6th of January 2011 in Alkatraz gallery at 6pm

A sculptor, visual artist, puppet manufacturer employed at the Ljubljana Puppet Theatre as well as a publicist in the field of contemporary art, Zoran Srdić Janežić, will introduce himself at the Alkatraz Gallery with an exhibition from his opus entitled Corpus Indeterminata (*Undefined Body).


The entire exhibition project is divided into several parts and will be performed in two phases. The first two parts will be presented at the Alkatraz Gallery and the Sculpture Association Gallery; the exhibitions will open on the same day at a different time.


At 7pm the opening performance at the Sculpture Association Gallery will start the exhibition. The performance will contain the artist’s taking off of a felt shirt. It was created during the performance carried out at the time in the art studio of the Ministry of Culture in Berlinu in June 2010, when the author was pulling out his hairs with tweezers for 24 hours. The hairs were, later, in the process of felt-production agglutinated into a material the shirt has been made from. At the same time the exhibition will also present 21 gold-plated coins from the series entitled Lost & found 2010; a continuation of the homonymous series from 2007, including the found hairs from urinals, placed on coins under fibreglass.


At 9pm the artist will – for the occasion intentionally unheated Alkatraz Gallery – present a sculpture cast of his own body with a pig head, made from lard and cracklings. The exhibition questions the role of the artist as a creator that necessarily requires inspiration for its work, counterposing it the cast of the body, made from a mould. This is the way the artist states, among other things, that an artefact is not only a premeditated and inspired creation of physical objects, but (pointing out that) the context and critical engagement behind it are equally important.


The author places lard, a food of various uses into a context arising repulse in the spectator. A hybrid of a man and an animal points to anthropocentrism of our society and announces the second part of the exhibition, where the artist will - from his own fat – make a pig body with a human head, created with the aid of 3D scans. This simple swaps of roles or the use of raw materials are so extensive and so easily taken for granted in our daily life that we have stopped questioning them, while we can here face them in an entirely new light, so we are forced to re-evaluate their meaning and appearance.


http://sites.google.com/site/zoransrdic/


Ana Grobler


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The artworks (sculptures, performances, objects, videos) from the cycle entitled Undefined Body are linked by the most – paradoxically for sculpturing – intangible: the idea, not yet entirely defined thought, invisible body, that is thought as hallowed, as repulsive, that is sloughing from the extraordinary into a conditionally attractive, through a multitude of various media, that the artist utilizes as his expression. This is no insistence at classical sculpturing or per formative ness as a fashionable trend; the means serve the idea, however, the primary fascination over the material and procedure (the cast lard with cracklings; almost invisible hairs, sublimely felted into a shirt) turned over from the artist to the spectator.


The conception of an idea can be traced back to the enthusiasm over some small sculpture from the art museum in Frankfurt am Main from the beginning of the 19th century. A spiritual person holds – in a glass dish – a hair, probably a relic of a saint. When we mention the locks of Elvis Presley’s hair, or a lock of lover’s hair soldiers used to keep, we come close to the notion of fetishism. Fetishes are, amongst other things aesthetic-ised objects and photography has, with its distance towards the object a suitable medium, instantly determining aesthetic view, hence the uneasiness when – in it - we recognize a hair from an urinal, the very same hair that is – next to the photograph – also exhibited, and of course picked from a public urinal – »with no filter«. The aesthetic function is therefore replaced by a documentary, an exploring one, we could say.


Had Duschamp turned/made a commodity into an artistic object and Gober’s urinals are models of public lavatories with no function and represent, as modelled objects the work of a sculptor, then Srdić Janežič is interested in the traces on the commodity that testify of cooled down absence, the body that once was but has gone, its excrement, »impurity«. Before we come to mention the fragility and diminishing, let us mention that added to the work there is always a touch of humour, when we can suspect/sense that it’s a joke of a teasing artist.


A human figure with a pig’s head made from lard and cracklings is cast after the body of the artist and the head of an anonymous pig from a pig farm, while the series should – in its continuation – contain a smaller figure of a pig with the head of the artist made from the artist’s fat (generated by z liposuction). In the latter case there is far less material available. The body’s mould will be made according the 3D scan of a pig and the artist’s head. Srdić Janežič is obviously avoiding expressiveness that is inevitably been imposed on us in the case of modelled sculptures. He does not care for the feeling, but the transmission of the real form; the mould here literally representing the space of the missing body, the method becoming expertise; it could have been serial as what the artist is interested in is the perception of the whole, i.e. the material – lard and human fat – amalgamated with the form and all the connotations it brings along: animal farms and food industry, beauty surgery and its »remnants«, food transformed into an artefact (here we can refer to the artist’s sculptures made from bread), the form of the body as its absence, animate-inanimate material. For some more sensual individuals (gourmands) the material of a human figure with a pig’s head represents something attractive (the subcutaneous fat was - in baroque, and not only then – considered aesthetic, even erotic), for many it may be repulsive, or just a joke.


And where is the body after which the void, the sculpture, the hairs and the shirt remained? Is is a body of a stranger, arising disgust, or an artist that can be praised? It’s left many traces behind, but has yet slipped away; it is undefined, we can label it with various phantasms, we can make it sublime or horrifying, for the  unheimliche, the »something«, that returns to us reshaped through horrifying dreams. First there was the Word, we may say the Idea and its temple/foundation is the Body.


Jana Putrle Srdić


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Producer: Galerija Alkatraz


Co-producers: Sculpture Association, Ljubljana Center for Contemporary Arts and Culture GULAG


The project is supported by the Ministry for Culture of the Republic of Slovenia and the Department for Culture of Municipality of Ljubljana.


Shirt manufacture: Maja Peterlin


Coin manufacture: Gio engraving and design Klemen Jeraša s.p.


Mould manufacture: Jernej Mali and Zoran Srdić Janežič


Thanks to: Atelje Mali, Restavratorstvo Mali d.o.o., Saba Skaberne, Peter Šere, Ramzes, Iztok Bobić, Jana Putrle Srdić


Photo: Sunčan P. Stone, Zoran Srdić Janežič, Ana Grobler


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