Dec 4, 2016 at 2:30 pm
DIVA STATION On Tour
With Barbara Borcic, Emil Memon, and Pawel Wojtasik
The program will include a showcase of films from DIVA Station – an archive of Slovene video art produced by SCCA-Ljubljana and a screening of curated program DIVA Station Presents No 3 which consists of 17 video works and is divided into three sections. Featured artist Emil Memon will be in discussion with curator Barbara Borcic after the program.
1) FROM ANALOGUE TO DIGITAL presents various ways the artists involve in the topic of television, either as institution and mass media or its space, frequencies and aesthetics. Performative video using the method of measuring the edges of the screen was often used by video artists questioning television that captures reality.
2) FROM MEMORY TO FICTION presents various modes the artists cope and play with memory, personal or collective, and make narratives that are in-between reality and fiction.
3) FROM IMPRESSION TO DIGRESSION presents video works based on impressions that quite easily turn to digression, from cityscapes and highway walls to body and urban noise, control and photon noise.
Program
Miha Vipotnik, Space 2
1'53'',1986
The author encounters the disapproving attitude of TV stations towards video and video makers by defying gravity as he moves around the four edges of the screen, pointing out the possibilities inside the limits of the medium.
Ana Čigon, One More Kick
4’35’’, 2009
The technique of measuring the edges enables the author to redefine limited space and subsequently establish new perception of reality.
Sašo Sedlaček, The Big Switch Off
1’48’’, 2011
With an aspiration of founding an autonomous medium, which could have been carried out during the transition to digital television signal, the artist decides to organize a happening in which the residents of a Ljubljana block of flats throw out their analogue televisions.
Luka Dekleva, Singing Bridges
4’14’’, 2008
The author creates new contents and techniques by manipulating video and audio recordings of a bridge.
Vesna Bukovec, Important News
54’’, 2003
Humorous and inventive montage of TV news gives a unique commentary on mass media manipulation.
Nika Špan, How to Socialise the Blues
1’58’’, 2007
From online found footage, the artist excludes the narration, placing the visual support part into the foreground and gives it new meaning.
Marko A. Kovačič, Forth Into the Past
9’30’’, 1995
Video, a part of a larger art project, questions the present through a civilization
Valerie Wolf Gang, Distant Memory
2’43’’, 2014
In between reality and fiction this video poetry tells the story of Yugoslav President T ship Galeb.
Miha Vipotnik, Path of Crazy Wisdom
9'58'', 1993
A research about the life of a sculpture Eric Orr reaches to the point of absurd and com fiction in a strange manner of police interrogation.
Emil Memon, Blue Movie/Schizophrenia
5’37’’, 1983/95
The intimate visual and sound recording about New York, filmed from a small room in the middle of the city landscape, searches for its references in the field of non-narrative art cinema.
Nataša Prosenc Stearns, The Noise Factor
3’15’’, 2012
The author translates visuality and sonority of noise to a meditation about personal space and time surrounded by constant urban sounds.
Urška Djukić, Persistence 2
1’22’’, 2014
Designed as a video painting in one sequence shot the work initiates the question of persistence of man and nature in everlastingly exchange of power.
Jasna Hribernik, Tense Present: Photon Noise
1’18’’, 2015
With the usage of photon noise video effect the author gradually erases a group of migrants moving through Slovene landscape from a recording, making a comment on the austerity measures against refugees at Slovenian border.
Ana Čigon, Finger in U.S
2’15’’, 2010
The video is a humorous, simple and bold commentary on the austere customs control in U.S.
Neven Korda, An Autumnal Still Life
4’05’’, 2002
A reflection on the author’s early video works from the 1980’s, marked with poetic and contemplative atmosphere and accompanied with melodic music, shows melancholic autumn impressions.
Andrej Lupinc, In Eight Minutes Around the World,
9’35’’, 1990-2000
The work is an original documentary video patchwork with shots from various places in the world that Andrej Lupinc visited in the span of ten years.
Zvonka T Simčič, Broken h-h-h…egg
1’, 2000
A vibrant video talks about the traps of mother’s love and problems with insemination through a gently erotic scene in a sensitive and painterly manner.
66 min
Pawel Wojtasik creates poetic reflections on cultures and ecosystems in the form of short films and large-scale installations. His investigations into the overlooked corners of the environment have led him to pig farms, sewage treatment plants, wrecking yards and autopsy rooms. Wojtasik received an MFA from Yale University. From 1998 until 2000 he was a resident at Dai Bosatsu Zendo Buddhist monastery.
His work has been shown at festivals such as Berlinale, New York Film Festival, and Hong Kong International Film Festival where his film Pigs won the grand Prize in the short film category in 2011. Wojtasik was a featured filmmaker in the 2009 Flaherty Film Seminar. His installation work includes the immersive 360° Below Sea level, about post-Katrina New Orleans, exhibited at MASS MoCA and included in Prospect.2 Biennial; as well as Single Stream, shown at the Museum of the Moving Image in New York. The cinema version of Single Stream was presented at the 2014 Whitney Biennial and at Ann Arbor Film Festival.
Barbara Borcic is an Art historian and media theorist, advisor at SCCA-Ljubljana, Center for Contemporary Arts and head of video programs and video archive DIVA Station. She is active as a curator, lecturer and publicist. She has regularly lectured and published texts, e.g. Video Art from Conceptualism to Postmodernism, Impossible Histories: Historical Avant-Gardes, Neo-Avant-Gardes, and Post-Avant-Gardes in Yugoslavia, 1918-1991(Massachusetts: MIT Press 2003); What Television Can Be, And What Artists Can Use It For, Amuse Me (Ljubljana: Mestna galerija, 2013); The ŠKUC Gallery, Alternative Culture, and Neue Slowenische Kunst in the 1980s, NSK from Kapital to Capital. Neue Slowenische Kunst – The Event of the Final Decade of Yugoslavia (Ljubljana: Moderna galerija & Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2015). She is the author of the book Celostna umetnina Laibach. Fragmentarni pogled [Gesamtkunst Laibach. Fragmentary View], (Ljubljana: Založba/*cf, 2013).
Emil Memon is a Conceptual Artist in a sense that he works with ideas as a building elements for his work and uses diverse appropriate mediums to properly materialize them. He works with Video and Video Installations, Music (as diverse as Noise electronica, Rock, Dance and POP),Digital New Media, Painting and Drawing,in Spirit of Social Sculpture with Art Curatorial, Hybrids between Art and Design, Art Criticism and currently he is working on a Film. His work can be confusing in this sense but it has through all of these different mediums a center in dealing with Act of Creativity and Art as a tool of Social consciousness and Criticism. The element of aesthetics is used as delivery tool.
Through years he showed extensively in NYC, Berlin, Miami, Bogota, Munich, Ljubljana, Washington DC, Zagreb, Belgrade, Duke University, LA, Ottawa, Manchester Community College CT, Museum School in Boston, Lugano, etc. In 1990 as a part of Art group ATW he participated in a show at PS.1 and in project INBETWEEN at 1994 Venice Biennale. His work is in few American based Art Collections , Slovenian Embassy in Washington DC, ICC (International Criminal Court) in Hague, NL. collection DIVA( Archive of Slovene Video and Digital Art),Ljubljana, Slovenia. Memon attended Graduate school/ Installation Art & Printmaking ALU, Academy of Fine Arts, Ljubljana, Slovenia, is a Fulbright Scholar and holds an MFA/ New Forms from Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, NYC.
