OS-58-artist

The artistic path of Igor Simić, initially only focusing on video, over time came to include a wide range of media, with the artist experimenting with photography, 3D-printed sculptures, music, writing of essays, articles, painting, as well as creating video games as part of the activity of his Demagog Studio transmedia company. The artist’s main line of research in the field of moving image goes together with his interest in contemporary culture and politics in a broad sense, and with an attention to the social dynamics of the dystopian technological era, involving surveillance systems and post-apocalyptic visions. From the illusions of advertising to the chimeras of the medicine of the future, from the fantasies of dating sites to the hypnotic language of algorithms, the world of today and tomorrow is probed by Simić with a gaze that is both direct and hallucinated, capable of highlighting unexpected perspectives and landscapes. This approach is exemplified by the two works exhibited at the 58th October Salon. In the video Melancholic Drone (2015) a surveillance drone reflects on its own existence, flying over the city of Belgrade and following an unplanned trajectory. The drone, a humanized technological character, seems almost bored by its own functionality, a subtly ironic allusion to a theme that worries and fascinates the scientific community and certain movie productions: the possibility of a digital conscience. The series Radio Nostalgia from Mars (2018) is a sophisticated animation that describes a post-catastrophic landscape, among the ruins of an Earth destroyed by an ecological disaster and a possible life on Mars, the preserve of a small percentage of wealthy earthlings. Using the narrative and aesthetic codes of the animated short film, the work reflects with disenchantment on the economic inequalities and devastating outcomes of a possible future.

The work of Augustas Serapinas is often marked by an intense and empathic re-appropriation and reinterpretation of the places in which it is hosted. The artist investigates the layering of stories and tales in a sort of excavation process that includes research and meetings, from which he draws the elements he creates his pieces with. Whether consisting of concealed and rediscovered frescoes, original and forgotten functions of places, removed stories, omitted people, destroyed and recovered materials, the elements that make up the artist’s work contribute in forming new points of view, new perspectives on a layered, dense, permeable, open world. Serapinas’ explorations often begin with the observation of a city, as in the case of Belgrade, and then move to the deeper investigation of a specific place, in a process of identification which moves from the general to the detail, during which individual and collective stories are involved. The artist’s new production Cast Iron Saber (2020) is the result of his analysis of the original function of the Belgrade City Museum, a former military academy. The encounter of archival images showing the fencing lessons held in the 20th century inside the premises and the discovery of a hidden storage room filled with radiators led to the formalization of a series of swords, incorporating the radiators as their material. The different elements of the past are thus merged together and constitute a new object, now revived and placed back in the place it belongs—as if the building itself had decided to wake up through a memory.

Graduated from Harvard University with a master’s degree in landscape architecture, Max Hooper Schneider has developed an artistic practice that feeds on the technology, materials and biological systems endemic to this discipline. His installations explore nature, conceived as a process of relentless transformation in which bodies, as continually forming matter, are intended as the principle mode of nature. As co-constituents and co-creators of the works, bodies and matter—a starfish, a discarded boot, a neon sign, a mannequin, a fossil, varied debris from the discarded relics of the contemporary world—like the work as a whole, are not viewed as static or formally concluded but as ‘alive,’ in constant flux, an endless swirl of creation and destruction. In the works thus produced, technology and geology, natural and artificial, living and dead, past and future, art and science, ideas and materials collide to materialize novel spatiotemporal configurations and mutational ecosystems. The formal recollections of Minimalism and Land Art are reworked with uncanny materials and unleash a vision that attempts to transcend categorization—neither utopian nor dystopian, fact nor fiction. In this conception, the artwork is thus conceived as actual nature rather than as a representation of nature, and the artist, as one among many bodies, is no longer viewed as an independent actor in the creative process. The artist’s new piece, created specifically for the Belgrade Biennale, consists of a group of translucent, glowing fiberglass human figures hybridized with heads of fossils, corals and minerals. These distant, alien, mutant figures, who seem to blend a prehistoric past with the mutations of a future still to come, are placed in an urban setting consisting of metal scraps collected by the artist in the city of Belgrade and situated at the base of a forgotten monument. As often happens in Schneider’s experimental research, and also in this case, natural elements and man-made artefacts produce bizarre ecosystems and narratives that suggest a possible future in which the boundaries between flora, fauna and anthropogenic interventions will be questioned according to their new relationships and juxtapositions.

An exquisite tension characterizes the sculptures and installations of Bojan Šarčević: tension between his wildly diverse choice of materials, between the fragility and the assertiveness of his forms, between the relationship of an organic universe to a functional one, between the cold “neutrality” of the exhibition space and the messy reality of a lived environment, and between time and space, viewed within their social, historical, cultural and psychological dimensions. The practice of the artist is often marked by a strong architectural sensitivity and an interest in the creation of formal systems that challenge certainties and stereotypes, raising questions regarding the empirical, theoretical and sensory understanding that the individual has of the world. The installation Retribution (2021), on display at the 58th October Salon, consists of a series of commercial freezers, filled with thick layers of frost and emitting an intermittent sound piece. The triad of industrially made monoliths evokes both the aesthetic codes of Minimalism and abandoned food storage containers. The hum of the devices is complemented by fragments of the melody of a Rom/Serbian folkloric song from the 1980s, Livadama, Dolinama, by Vida Pavlović, which draws upon a local ethos mixed with innocence, emancipation and forbidden love. This sentimental folk ballad is interspersed with fragments of a more recent song by the Swedish metal band Meshuggah, Demiurge, characterized by a throbbing score and interwoven with abstract references to armed conflicts and humanitarian crises. Transducer speakers installed within the freezers emit vibrations that rely on solids to generate sound. As such, the thick layer of frozen condensation that has formed from the moisture in the air of the exhibition space becomes the physical carrier for sound wave transmission, creating sounds that are quite literally born from the piece’s immediate context—the very air around it. The effect is one of nostalgia and indictment: anguish and history are mixed with references to the culture of consumerism, the readymade, and a past that is both frozen and still, today, constantly gaining layers of new frost.

Since the 1990s, Anri Sala has worked with a range of media including video, photography, installation, and more recently drawings and sculptures. His work explores the boundaries between image and sound in order to generate carefully assembled time-based moments which overlap one another. Through a new form of language, his work opens to multiple perspectives and interpretations, bringing together the past, present and future. Giving prominence to light, sound and space design, Sala’s work is often presented in immersive spaces, thus stimulating our senses and creating a link between the body and the architecture. The video Dammi i Colori (2003) represents the changes the Albanian capital underwent following a program of urban renewal that involved the repainting in vivid colors of the city’s buildings. The voice of the then Mayor of Tirana Edi Rama—promoter of the project as well as an artist himself—describes this regeneration process, based on the ideas of hope and utopia. The video is a portrait of a changing city, full of contrasts, caught between night and day, with the sounds of everyday life on its streets. Interpreting the contrasts of reality from an intimate and daily perspective, the video has a profound political value. It offers a suspended observation of a changing and porous landscape and a deflagrated social fabric, but driven by the desire to rebuild itself.

Culling video and images from the far-flung corners of the web, the work of Jon Rafman explores the influence of contemporary media and technology on present experience. In his practice, Rafman employs the rich vocabulary of the Internet subcultures, virtual worlds, and video games, to create work that reformulates the concepts of present, future, memory, nostalgia, identity, and the psyche. Rafman’s Dream Journal 2016-2019 (2019), with a soundtrack by James Ferraro and Oneohtrix Point Never, is a 3D animation with an absurdist storyline developed using automated writing inspired by “cursed” images from the artist’s vast archive. Dream Journal’s fragmented narrative follows its characters through a series of dystopian, ever-changing landscapes which include metropolitan neighborhoods and nightclubs, rotting wastelands, glaciers and deserts, starry skies and parallel universes. Weaving together broken temporalities, distorted spatialities, and unexpected lyrical inspirations, Dream Journal leads viewers on a surreal Dantean journey into the recesses of the Internet’s psyche. The second film exhibited in Belgrade, Minor Daemon, Vol. 1 (2021), set in a surreal dystopia that feels like the deranged fever-dream of Hieronymus Bosch if he grew up on 4chan, traces the intersecting fortunes of two young men, Billy and Minor Daemon, who share an extraordinary gift for virtual reality gaming and go through a series of nightmarish events.

The body represents the conceptual pivot, the tool and the chosen medium of Sonja Radaković’s research. Through video, photography and especially live performance, the young Belgrade-based artist investigates the boundaries of morality, taste and social norms, using her own and others’ bodies to define novel relational possibilities. By exploring seduction, narcissism, voyeurism and desire for self-determination, Radaković thus questions her own identity as a woman and artist, highlighting the contradictions of the mechanisms through which society exercises its control or makes its own judgment. The performance Occupied (2021) takes place physically in interstitial, non-conventional spaces between public and private. Radaković and a group of performers enact a paroxysmal performance of everyday gestures, at first sight ordinary, but which a persisting repetition makes alienating and disturbing. Visible in part live and in part in live streaming, the actions and performers play with the distance between the displayed and the concealed and with the tension between online and offline, in a game of mirrors of everyday life and theatrical representation.

After an unusual path in approaching art production—including multimedia design, post-production work for television, blogs, online video platforms and the underground music scene—Wong Ping has found his area of interest in a variety of media including video animations, installations and environments. Frustrated and repressed sexual desires, isolation, obsessions, dominative and submissive relationships, tension between the intimate sphere and social relationships, old and young age, are some of the opposites on which the artist’s story-telling universe is structured. This imaginary, where sparks of irony flash in the darkest recesses of the human psyche, is portrayed through lo-fi shapes, pop colors, two-dimensionality and a language that harks back to obsolete technologies. The intertwining of the story—intended by the artist as a sort of diary capable of recording a myriad of thoughts and experiences—and its visual development produces deeply personal pieces that reflect on the contradictions of contemporary life. In some cases, the moving images find an extension in installations that take up the three dimensions of real space, often expressed through the obsessive accumulation and multiplication of the elements. This is also the case with The Ha Ha Ha Online Cemetery Limited (2019), an orderly sequence of toy dentures which, like the title of the work itself, recall at the same time a collective irreverent laugh and the idea of a communal burial. In this case too, the playful and ironic aspect is combined with broader reflections on the fate of mankind in today’s globalized and hyper-connected world.

Precious Okoyomon express their art through sculpture, performances, environmental installations and written poetry in order to explore the substance of places and materials, cathartically sublimate memories and impulses, investigate the recesses of intimacy and the individual and collective perceptions of life and death. Blackness, queer identity and migratory experience are the cornerstones of a research with deep personal roots, in which the archetypal figures of the sun, the angel, the earth and plants keep coming back. History and nature are interwoven in the sculptural and installation space, as well as in the artist’s poetic writing, to generate reflections on the past and the present, on the dynamics of violence, slavery and oppression, and on the fate of communities and individuals in the Western world. The processes of decay, collapse, rotting and destruction are often associated with only apparently antithetical ideas of rebirth, resistance and tenderness, in a poetic blend filled with suggestions and echoes. For the 58th October Salon, Okoyomon unfold the most intimate aspects of their research, designing a cherished environment, a sort of secret garden. In this enigmatic space, reminiscent of childhood memories, where plants and flowers grow spontaneously, visitors are invited to leave a trace of one of their own dreams, which will later be transformed by Okoyomon, jointly with the artist and philosopher Bracha Ettinger, within the oral and written saga of a shared dream.

The relation between nature and technology is at the center of the explorations of Katja Novitskova. The artist employs scientific imaging technologies to explore the composite territory of contemporaneity, complex geographies and implications for potential futures. In the artist’s practice, technological devices, algorithms, and biological organisms contribute to redefining our vision of the world. The art works carry the narrative through a language borrowed from scientific studies, info-graphics and advertising aesthetics. The recurrent presence of automatically generated imagery, often depicting the natural world, as well as devices related to care or reproduction, constantly brings the mind back to the field of human experience, set into a relationship with unexplored systems, mechanisms and balances of the present and future ecologies. For the 58th October Salon, Novitskova presents three works from the Earthware series, part of her most recent production and a collaboration with PWR studio,  supplemented by a site-specific graffiti intervention. By tweaking an algorithm originally designed for shape recognition within a large cave art database, the artist sculpts two-dimensional wall tablets from artificial clay which feature automatically shot photographs of wild animals and blurred animal-human stick figure silhouettes, as if captured in a dream. Earthware aims to capture the poetics of numerical seeing as a timeless loop: from early human art to whatever hurricane of changes is happening at the present moment.