Lords of dirt
UGM l Maribor Art Gallery, Strossmayerjeva 6
Opening: Friday, 2 December 2011 at 19:00
After Party: KALU & Saša Šuštar, sound project, Jazz Club Satchmo at 22:00
Artists: Claire Dantzer (FR), Meta Grgurevič (SI), Giorgio Guidi (IT), Jaša (SI), Kyle Milne (USA), Valerio Nicolai (IT), Mark Požlep (SI), Jyrki Riekki (FIN), Urša Vidic (SI)
In the project Lords of Dirt, an international group of young artists researches the construction of everyday realities and the installation of a subject within them. Through artistic work, the otherwise passive observation of the world transforms to an act of hyper-awareness, which enables the individual to translate the multitude of exterior images or information into a controllable, sensually denoted system of coordinates. Lords of Dirt represents a (possible) reorganisation, appropriation and subjectivisation of the informational workaday, marked by the mythology of the banal, in order to deliver it, by experiencing the reality of the artwork, into the arms of the subject again.
This hyper-ambience installation at Maribor Art Gallery is being realised through the structure of visible and sensual impulses, mediated by expressive media and by the help of everyday materials and technological solutions. The project as a whole strives to affect the observer with its omnipresent vibration, images and experience dependent on the imaginary as well as the real. Along with the outline and the reprogramming of the exterior, the artists simultaneously discuss the incessantly attractive world of intimate wishes, hopes and fears. By the ironic, even blasphemous exploitation of the "exterior material" as well as the lucid introspection of subjectivist preoccupations, on the level of content, the project Lords of Dirt concentrates on the critical observation of mechanisms, by which perception and comprehension of the world are beyond definition and conditional upon the superficial manifestations of the visible.
The initiative for this project comes from a group of Slovene artists of the younger generation − Meta Grgurevič, Mark Požlep and Jaša − who with independent projects challenge their original creative positions oriented towards the supplementary "group" production. Their past projects involving various foreign artists now serve as a platform of basic ideas and principles (e.g. Bad girls & Bad Boys, City Art Museum, Ljubljana, 2007; Jürgen, Museum of Modern Art, Ljubljana, 2007; Time to Become Poets, Friche Belle de Mai, Marseille, 2009; Queens and Criminals, Kibla, Maribor, 2010).
Curator: Simona Vidmar
More about authors
