OS-58-artist

The work of Trisha Baga combines different media to explore themes such as gender identity, the mechanics of language and the relationship between the real and digital world. A preference for video and performance is accompanied by experiments in the production of sculpture or installation, and often ceramics as well as the collection of found objects. Her productions are characterized in general by a non-linear, open, permeable, intuitive quality. Materials and fragments from disparate aesthetic and semantic universes are freely incorporated, such as the imagery of television and cinema, and the language of the documentary or home video. The 3D film The Voice (2017) is representative of the artist’s fluid and open compositional practice. It weaves together audio tracks from soundtracks of different musical genres and offscreen voices into a visual sequence of heterogeneous scenes: newspaper photographs; filming in the studio, during family trips or during simple daily activities; superimposed images; and subtitles. The work as a whole is articulated as a space in which the different elements that compose it open up to new possibilities of meaning. It is a field of free, spontaneous connections, similar to those of a dreamlike journey, where reality and fiction, memories and visions come together in a single magmatic fabric. The ordinary office chairs that accompany the installation and on which the visitor is invited to sit revisit the relationship between object and subject, acting as interferences or incursions between one dimension and another.

The collaboration between Marija Avramović and Sam Twidale, which started in 2017, focuses on the exploration of the world of Artificial Intelligence and story-telling, in the meeting of algorithms, objects, networks and the human dimension. Often starting from pre-existing literary or cinematic works, the artists highlight—through installations, paintings, videos and animations— novel aspects of human interactions and feelings. Their real-time animations, in particular, explore the boundary between real and artificial in the context of independent virtual universes, in which the characters act and interact according to feelings and personalities defined by algorithms and neural networks. The narrative junctions are therefore unpredictable, generating worlds no less real than the one in which we live. Thanks to video game production software, Avramović and Twidale give life to scripts that unfold like theatrical improvisation, always different and unique. This is the case of Sunshowers, a work produced in 2019 for the Barbican Centre and proposed again in Belgrade, within an installation space redesigned for the occasion. The animation, which regenerates constantly, is inspired by the initial chapter of Akira Kurosawa’s film Dreams and follows a boy in his exploration of a forest. Together with him, animals, spirits, plants and rocks become the characters of a techno-animistic vision of a world in which the borders between human and extra-human realms cancel each other out; an entire oneiric universe that reveals the parallelism, dear to the two artists, between spirituality and Artificial Intelligence.

Jean-Marie Appriou’s sculptural research aims to build oneiric landscapes populated with human, vegetable and animal bodies, captured in spatial configurations with a strong allegorical and narrative nature. The characters move within theater plays suspended between deep memories of an indefinite past and the uncertainties of the future, in a widespread temporality, characterized by a mythical halo. The coexistence of recognizable natural forms, albeit hybrid and in constant evolution, often indecipherable narrative dimensions and allegorical plans gives the artist’s works a layering of multiple possible readings. The use of different materials, from glass to metal, participates in the plastic definition of these worlds, intended as doors, bridges and thresholds for the search for further dimensions, keys to other perceptions of the visible. In the works on exhibition, Écume Métallique and Vapeur Métallique (both 2018), the idea of the access door to an “other” space is clearly featured. Similar to grotesques, the elements of the sculptures recall an underwater or underground world in which the different states of matter—solid, liquid and gaseous—as well as the different natural realms—mineral, vegetable and animal—articulate in space with no interruption. The two sculptures stand in the space like two distinct rock conformations, crystallized in the movements of the creatures that inhabit them, but at the same time crossed by an organic, hybrid and metamorphic force.