Collaboration with and text for FOTOPUB group exhibition by Deja Becaj, Rok Hudobivnik, Luca Marcelli, Peter Kolárčik, Michael Kelly

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Think of when falling asleep; all the images, videos, headlines and information accumulated today; all getting ready to intrude. With eyes closed, the body exposes its fluidity. Its sound might be sounds from outside. Our subjectivities blur into the infinite stream of stimuli and project on the backs of our eyelids. The picture on the wall ignores the wall. Sea creatures ask: “What the hell is water?’’ while the machine invites you to speak. Animals entertain and people in a bar are interested in what you are currently working on.

The exhibition “Is it?’’ gathers together four artists translating and analysing their immediate surrounding as a resistance practice against the confusional emotive life of the late capitalist subject. Artists deal with the concept of confusion from the broadest understanding of what is “real” or important and what is not – material vs. imagined, satisfactory vs. fulfilling, inside us vs. outside us, what I want vs. what I need. 

Using dialogue as artistic practice, Peter Kolárčik interviews artists and art students about their reasons for walking away from their practice and finding purpose in a new endeavour. In feeding his curiosity about how priorities change, he questions the nature of ambition parallelly existing with the notion of happiness. Along the way, he tries to establish his own relationship with art. 

Particularly drawn to the materiality of objects and virtual world’s surfaces when intertwining with physical space, Rok Hudobivnik’s work showcases our ever-present obsession with the uncertainty of the real. The installation presents an interface as an overlay of realities.

The fast pace of text installations, scatteredness of objects and unobtrusiveness of the sound in Luca Marcelli’s multimedia work, embodies the equally rapid, scattered, and obscured reality. This is a place where everything is equally important and equally unimportant; hyper stimulating but empty. 

Similarly, Michael Kelly’s recorders create an echoing database of thoughts. The machine will “listen” and “remember”, but it won’t be able to think nor share in a decipherable manner. The words you contribute with to the installation are added to the ever growing chorus of voices on the tape, constantly playing and recording itself. 

The overload of visual or audio information in each of the works reflects the encounter and clash between opposites of two sides becoming harder and harder to distinguish. What we see when we close our eyes is an amalgamation of contradictions.

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