OS-58-artist

The irreverent, ironic and provocative character of Fatebe is the undisputed heroine of Ebecho Muslimova’s paintings, wallpapers and graphic works. Since 2011, the artist has in fact created an imaginary alter ego, an uninhibited, free, corpulent version of herself (and whose name is a portmanteau of ‘fat’ and ‘Ebe,’ short for Ebecho), capable of going beyond limits and rules and to move spontaneously in the space of the artist’s work. Depicted with fast and exaggerated traits, the round and naked body of Fatebe, with her sex proudly in view, her swollen breasts and her cheeky comic-strip smile, deals with situations, objects, ever new landscapes, amidst tragicomic misadventures, acrobatic physical contortions and lustful fantasies. By deliberately reversing the voyeuristic and objectifying relationship through which the female body is normally shown and represented, Fatebe questions codes and languages, perspectives and proportions. For the 58th October Salon, Muslimova creates a wallpaper transforming Fatebe into a pattern entirely covering the walls of the exhibition space. In doing so, the artist plays with concealing the presence of the work in the exhibition space, but at the same time uses wallpaper as the basis for a provocative representation of her iconic character.

Starting from a background in documentary photography, and inspired by the long tradition of handwork in her family, Hana Miletić has developed an artistic language based mainly on the creation of woven textile works. Miletić uses the weaving process to reflect on the social and cultural realities in which the artist herself works. Weaving, which requires practice, time, care and attention, allows the artist to formulate new relationships between work, thought and the emotional sphere, as well as to counteract certain economic and social conditions at work, such as acceleration, standardization and transparency. In Belgrade, the artist exhibits a few hand-woven works from the Materials series (2015-ongoing). The works are based on mended infrastructures, architectural elements or vehicles (windows, rear-view mirrors, etc.), held together with plastic, tape, or other simple materials, which Miletić photographed in public spaces in her hometown Zagreb. The artist uses her photographs as “cartoons,” to borrow a term used in tapestry, in the production of her textile pieces, thus activating a situated process that produces material and haptic images. Through her use of weaving, Miletić reproduces public gestures of care and repair while consciously dealing with the encountered states of transition.

Levy manipulates texturally incongruous materials, such as silicone and metal, to create tactile sculptures that provoke sensory experience. Rather than fetishizing synthetic substances, her work accentuates a pre-existing sensuality hidden in modern design. Fleshlike silicone is stretched over sleek, nickel-plated steel, or cast in plump, organic forms that rest precariously on metal armatures. Her references are wide-ranging and often anthropomorphic, both sterile and erotic, amusing and disturbing. The scale of recognizable, quotidian objects is often distorted to the point of absurdity, culminating in uncanny configurations that forgo their original functionality. The work’s humor is belied by a latent anxiety, situating the sculptures in a seduction-repulsion loop. Frequently realized in anemic palettes of beige, pale green, translucent whites, and putrid pinks, Levy’s works subvert notions of ‘taste making’ and the ways in which our designed environments reflect larger systems of value. Each component exists as a potential object to be consumed, in a perverse metabolic cycle that questions the very nature of consumption—both biologic and cultural. The material paradox in Levy’s work is exemplified in her presentation in the 58th October Salon, especially as it applies to the pearl, a commodity associated with affluence despite its mass production. Levy’s installation is oriented around a video featuring long natural nails massaging the fleshy interiors of giant oysters extracting pearls one at a time from their soft bellies. The audience to this almost pornographic exploration is a set of too-small lounge chairs featuring stretched gridded silicone dotted in pearls based on an unrealized design by the late French designer Charlotte Perriand. Cold shining pearls emerge from the soft fleshy interiors of oysters, hard long nails grow from unworked hands, and soft silicone clings to polished modernist steel skeletons. There is a continuing through line of cool hardness rubbing up against soft flesh, the textural incongruity of the melting of a surrealist dream.

Mark Leckey’s films, sculptures, installations, performances and sound works rework the objects and images of contemporary culture in a novel way, translating them into a language that is both individual and universal. Underground and clubbing culture, the world of youth and class issues, the intertwining of autobiography and history, memory and magic, identity and popular culture come together in a heterogeneous body of work, developed by the artist from the early ‘90s to the present, with a unique and original style. Leckey is one of the most iconic and representative artists of his generation and his works convey pressing issues of contemporary life in stories that are anchored in reality and in the physical and bodily experience that each individual makes of it. Dream English Kid, 1964 – 1999 AD (2015) is a sort of mapping of Leckey’s cultural DNA, a “coming-of-age video” made out of a collage of found footage, music and sounds in which personal and collective memories, myth and reality, bodies and technologies, ghosts and dreams emerge in parallel. The result is an intense story, a sort of self-portrait made from anonymous materials (TV clips, YouTube videos, found objects and reconstructions of existing landscapes), in which mystery, folklore and technology converge to define a hybrid dimension somewhere between real and imagined world, between lived experience and dream.

Combining an interest in archeology and artistic forms of the past with the potential of 3D scanning and printing, video images and the web, Oliver Laric produces works capable of making the digital sphere communicate with physical space, in an unceasing interweaving of perspectives and levels of reading. Whether it is his polyurethane sculptures or his videos based on the manipulation of found footage taken from mass communication channels, Laric reveals his interest in the migration of forms and images from different contexts, from a chronological, spatial or semiological point of view. What is analyzed is the path of production, consumption and use of the visual in the contemporary world, which unfolds between the ideas of uniqueness and reproducibility, of authorship and anonymity, of physicality and intangibility. In Laric’s latest video production, Untitled (2021), in an infinite digital metamorphosis the organic transition from one form to another is investigated. A liquid organicity inhabits the video in a sort of primordial soup that crosses the spatiotemporal dimension to materialize in unique forms, in an incessant dialogue between nature and artifice, between real data and the surreal.

Josh Kline’s artistic production aims to highlight the connection between individuals and larger systems such as the organization of work, technological automation, climate change, and the failure of democratic systems. Interested in the way in which these phenomena inform humanity’s experiences and perspectives, influencing the present as well as the near future, the artist uses a variety of media to elaborate reflections and imagine destinies. Therefore, rather than representing a reference model, science fiction is a way of approaching reality and formulating an idea. Video and film are the starting points for all the variations of the artist’s work, including sculpture, made through a process of editing of three-dimensional scans that leads to the 3D printing of autonomous objects. The film Adaptation (2019-2021) is the final part of Kline’s larger Climate Change project. Set in New York in the mid-21st century, it shows a city submerged by the waters due to rising seas, profoundly marked by climate change, global warming and the most extreme consequences of nationalism and neoliberal capitalism. Adaptation is a snapshot of day-to-day life for a group of working people whose job brings them into this transformed future Manhattan. They inhabit a new normal and their human presence, inserted in this scenario, directly addresses the anxieties of our present, at the same time outlining the upsetting and realistic portrait of a possible future.

Nadežda Kirćanski expresses herself mainly through drawing and installation, exploring the contrast among different sociopolitical realities and the social, emotional, intellectual and material life of the younger generation in Serbia. The exploration of space, whether public or private, allows the artist to highlight contradictions, short-circuits, conditioning or oppression systems which are not identifiable at first sight. Her approach triggers an intense recounting, both personal and collective, focusing on the reality in which she lives. Kirćanski’s environmental installation not much 1.0 (2018), reproposed at the 58th October Salon, is an example of the artist’s research. Set up as a simple hospital waiting room, and consisting of painted walls and modular seating, the piece magnifies a sense of anguished suspension, the burden of disappointed expectations, the displacement between promises of support not kept by the current political system, and the impossibility for young people to act and react. While analyzing the material, political and social context of the artist’s country, Kirćanski’s work proposes a reflection on the dream as hope, utopia, the possibility of a change that starts mainly from becoming aware of the state of things.

Despite the diversity of Melike Kara’s means of expression—primarily painting, but also sculpture, installation, photography, and video—the themes of family, tradition and community remain pivotal in her artistic research, which reads and investigates them relentlessly in a deeply personal way, focusing on roots, identity, and the ideas of home and country. The formal distillation which characterizes her pictorial vocabulary has recently led the artist to explore the motifs of textile patterns, in an intertwining of personal and collective memories, of lived stories and myths. The works utilize tradition to create new narratives, blurring the boundaries between what is, what has been and what could be. In her most recent series of paintings, the artist uses Kurdish tapestries as the starting point for her own compositions. Born to a Kurdish-Alevi family, Kara shows how notions of “home” transcend national borders, how identity becomes hybrid, between home and homeland. The paintings’ elaborate texture is achieved through a stratification of painted layers that emerge in and out of the picture plane. They evoke the intricate weaving of tapestries while eluding representation, resting ambiguously suspended between figuration and abstraction.

Rooted in the artist’s hometown of Los Angeles and in the myths around it, Alex Israel’s practice examines and embodies the strategies and aesthetics of the celebrity-driven entertainment industry. Israel’s works present a composite portrait of American pop culture, incorporating actors, reality TV stars, surfers, and props, backdrops and movie sets made on the backlots of Hollywood studios. Using the tactics of self-branding, ubiquitous across the Internet and social media, the artist implicates himself within this visual language of constant visibility and self-promotion. The two works presented at the 58th October Salon—a city-center billboard featuring a painted image of the Los Angeles sky from Israel’s Sky Backdrop series, and a sculpture of a pelican hanging from the ceiling in the museum—although far from each other, are in close conversation, as if they were the setting and the main character in a single dream diffused across time and space. The boundless depth of the sky and the figure of the pelican, whose wings can be made to move by its viewers as in a mobile for children, define through their pairing a united dream of California’s fantastical great-wide-open landscape, a mainstay subject of Israel’s practice.

They have been collaborating as Invernomuto since 2003. The artistic research of the Invernomuto duo focuses on the use of the moving image and sound, chosen as preferred but not exclusive vehicles for an investigation into the facets of the stories, cultures and narratives of contemporary world. The duo’s projects, which often take place in space and time also through installations and performances, aim at a contaminated and protean story, never finished within itself but always open to new variations and developments. Invernomuto’s project Black Med, initiated in 2018, is an ongoing platform which aims at intercepting the trajectories that sounds trace passing through the Mediterranean Sea. This geographical area, once understood as a fluid entity aiding the formation of networks and exchange, is now the scenario of a humanitarian crisis and heated geopolitical dispute. On the occasion of the 58th October Salon, Invernomuto investigate the Balkan area and the multiple sonic directions crossing the Adriatic Sea, thus focusing on the theme of real and imagined borders, so present in the whole exhibition project. The artists present the project through a performative session and an installation. Black Med, Chapter VII (2021) is a listening session based on a DJ set supported by a series of projected slides containing theoretical texts and backstories referring to the musical pieces, grouped by elegiac themes. The sessions explore different journeys of sound movement, touching topics such as alternate uses of technology, migrations, peripheries and interspecies. The sound installation Black Med, Београд, Beograd (2021) is a beta version of blackmed.invernomuto.info —a web platform due to be launched in fall 2021 and designed to perform the musical archive of Black Med. The core of the project is an algorithm able to play with the tracks and to broadcast an endless stream. The system is open and anyone can upload new sounds into it: the goal is to have a growing archive, a Black Med magma, which evolves constantly.