Von Alenka Gregoric.
Von Alenka Gregoric.
Tina Smrekar
Physical and psychological conditions of the life and work of contemporary artists are the theme of Tina Smrekars series SUR*VIVER, which is pieced together from interviews, photo-documentations and installations. For example, for her exhibition with the ironic title Hey, Let’s All Make Art (2006) she satirised the heights and depths of artistic survival and life, presenting herself in various jobs, such as as a souvenir salesgirl at the Munich Beer Festival. By using formal photographic means like the extreme close-up, Smerkar achieves a humorous and a tragic quality in her self-portraits. Characteristic of her work, as well, are the element of cutting and leaving out, and the switch from the literal to the symbolic, as in the photo-series A Minute after (2004), self-portraits showing her after sex or masturbation. These are ostensibly documentations, but on second glace are more like an invitation to the viewer to develop personal associations with taboo, guilt, ecstasy, eroticism and sex. In her exhibition, Breathe In, Breathe Out, which will be shown in the Siemens artLab in Vienna in April, Smrekar is again concerned with the lives of artists, in this case with practical anti-stress instructions for overworked artist colleagues in the form of »self-help objects« or videos for optimal relaxation – »Please make holes in paper to refresh yourself!«.
*1978 in Ljubljana. Lives in Ljubljana.
son:Da
The artist collective son:Da around the painter Metka Golec (*1972) and the anthropologist Miha Horvat (*1976) lives and works mainly in the Slovenian city of Maribor. Electronic sounds, digital technologies and a boundless fascination with various kinds of media are their stimulus for a critical convergence. Apart from audio-visual performances and room installations son:Da describes its large-format computer drawings as its trademark. Usually part of the installations, the images show, in simple graphic presentations, urbane, stylish people, who gather in a strangely disassociated spaces between cables and high-tech devices. »These images are discomforting for the viewers «, according to son:Da, »because they can identify with the situations shown. Today every one of us is fully dependent on media technology, working every day amongst thousands of cables and in the midst of a highly concentrated electrosmog cloud.« Alenka Greorgic on the work of son:Da: »The thing about them is that they analyse the ›hi-fi‹ that determines society using extremely reduced means, in other words ›low-fi‹, in a charming manner.«
*1972 in Ljubljana (Metka Golec), *1976 in Ljubljana (Miha Horvat), live in Ljubljana.
Saso Sedlacek
Saso SedlaCek is pursuing the idea of using robots not only as service-providers for a more comfortable life but also for the improvement of social conditions. A »Social Automation Device« of this kind is, for example, the Beggar 1.0, a begging robot. »There are more and more poor people in our society who no longer take part in public life«, says the artist, »or at best as beggars, in which role they also have to fear that they will be excluded from public areas and from social life. A begging computer helps them preserve their dignity and anonymity and still practice their pursuit of begging, which is a matter of life or death for them.« Sedlacek sets up the Beggar 1.0 on a Slovenian shopping street, where in fact begging is not permitted but where a begging automation device slips through a gap in the law. The population clearly has more sympathy for the Beggar 1.0 than for people who beg.
In many of his projects Sedlacek is concerned with the recycling theme, and this is also the case with the research project »Space Junk Spotting«, which has already been running for five years and where he investigates the options for reusing space junk, which already consists of more than 38 million individual pieces. For example, in the interactive computer installation Space junk in Google Earth (2006) he uses red symbols and precise descriptions of the registered pieces of junk on a Google map. By clicking it is possible to obtain information on the junk directly from the database of a state observatory in the USA.
*1974 in Ljubljana. Lives in Ljubljana.
BridA
The artist collective BridA is concerned with the rules and mechanisms of communications structures. Normally they develop a work over several years. Their latest project is an Information Accelator, (2008). A huge system of pipes resembling a heating pipe or a pipeline winds its way through the room. It is not a fake in the normal sense of the word but a functioning transport system fitted out with all the technical equipment needed to control and influence the assumed flow of information, such as increasing its pressure. »With this installation we are hoping to give the manipulation of huge quantities of information a haptic quality, making what is apparently harmless when invisible clearly perceptible in its full volume«, says BridA. In the MODUX Project it is also a matter of revealing normally invisible structures, in this case the development of an artwork from the first acquisition of ijnformation to the final »product«. This work was also developed by BridA in separate phases, one of which was Naredi sam/Do it yourself (2005), where audio instructions for making a picture were declared to be the actual work. »We do not present the public with a finished product, but try to integrate them into the creative process. That leads to a much higher degree of interest, exchange of views and immediate confrontation – all of which is the essence of an art project«, according to BridA. (Sendi Mango, Tom Kersevan and Jurij Pavlica), founded 1996 in Venice. Live in Ljubljana.