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Protest/Utopie
The inspiration for the new works comes from two directions. The basic motivation for the creation of these works consisted of the protest against the Government in 2011. in which I've participated. At that point, I was aware that some kind of change within the system is necessary and I felt obliged to actively participate. However, very quickly I became aware of the absence of any changes and the achievement of social progress. I also became aware of the absurdity of the current method of media coverage of these and similar events. Critical mass is never actually created, and protests in the eyes of the media quickly become yesterday's news. After the protest I continued to monitor other events, and concluded that in our country these protests achieved little, while in the world, the result was often even the loss of certain social rights and social norms. What touched me most was the complete marginalization of individuals and groups who want to achieve change (workers Dioki, RIZ, and LGBT populations).
Another source of motivation for the new cycle comes from the contents of a literary work Beauty *, namely essays Whatever Happened to Beauty? from the author Kathleen Marie Higgins *. Within the aforementioned literary work the author questions what happened to the beauty of using the works of A.C. Danto as her starting point. Analyzing his writings, the author concludes that art’s function as a moral arm is still limited. Analogously, I dare say that activist art has its limitations in the context of real activation of the audience, as the viewers often lose interest quickly and continue on their way.
Motivated by the problem described above, I started working on a series of images that have been divided into two parts. The first part of the cycle refers to images that represent my inner world that through my visual code speaks of his own isolation. The second part of the works consists of photographies that show fragments of disappearing people from various protests. In the collective awareness they are, in fact, already begun to fade and disappear by being squeezed by great amounts of news and information served in everyday media.
I wanted this work to study the relationship between the two worlds. The first relates to my own inner world, which is fenced off and in which I’m trying to overcome the feeling of loss permeated through our whole society. For the viewer the first part of the cycle itself does not represent anything except maybe a nice experience. The second part of the cycle relates to the real world. Where almost any social struggle becomes futile and soon forgotten. The world in which the media every day launched a new theme, in which an individual can hardly be expected to understand the system that neglects and forgets his on daily basis. I leave opened the question whether the loss can be prevailed inside by building our inner utopia, or does it leave us to fight, even if it’s often in vain?
* Beauty / / Edited by Dave Beech, Documents of Contemporary Art, Gallery Whitechaple
* Kathleen Marie Higgins, Whatever Happened to Beauty?, A Response to Danto, 1996.
Against the Fall of Night
'The name comes from the title of a book by Arthur C. Clarke, but also a piece of text from a poem by Alfred Edward Housman, which speaks about the passage of time where the poet asks if anything we create can be immune and saved from the passage of time or oblivion?...
I examine what memory of individuals, families, missing persons actually is ... After a person disappears, can the image of that person be sustained through something they left behind, or is it constantly changing as time passes, what happens? Do we idolize that person? Is it possible to preserve memories through art? Does art help or support an illusion we created anew, or is that actually the entire point - to create the image that we want to see?' (The sentences on the drawings represent parts of text from my family’s old documents in the function of creating new seeing.)
The works are also based on the J. Bergers book Ways of Seeing, especially chapter 1 where Berger starts by trying to explain the relationship between words and what we see. He points out that seeing and recognition come before words. It is seeing that establishes our place in the world, but we use words to explain this world. Despite this he argues there is always a distinction between what we see and what we know. Having established that we see first and then use words to explain the world, i.e. what we know, he then goes on to say what we know or believe affects the way we see things. This makes it a dynamic relationship; it may start with seeing and recognition, but develops into a system in which our past experience or knowledge changes the way we see things.
Western Lands
Concept for the exhibition Western Lands is a combination of W.S. Burroughs’ book Western Lands and fragments of personal history. In the works apart from paintings and drawings I also use family documents from World War II.
The main motives of my works are fragments of memories from my personal life and family history and fragments of Burroughs’ mythology. Through my works, I’m trying to analyze the stories of the family members that are gone and the ones that are left. By using assemblage/collage to intertwine (past and present) all the elements, I’m trying to create my own world. My work consists of paintings, assemblage/collage and drawings with words. Every scrap of paper and document is important because it represents all that is left of a family that once existed. I use Burroughs’ work and his idea of the afterlife, in which every man has to deal with his own demons on the way to heaven or perish, as a personal way of dealing with the hard family history. The work was also inspired by my great grandfathers writings in which he tells of the hard family history .