KukturKontakt Austria, ArtPoint Gallery, Vienna, 2009
Gallery installation / 11 photographs and 11-channel video
KulturKontakt Austria Artist in Residence, Vienna, A
In the project “ANALOGUE (city)” I dealt with the phenomenology of space. I tried to inspect two different modes of reality, appearing from the same (analogue) source, but with different impacts and different consequences. During my 3-months residing in Vienna in winter, the first mental map of the city drawn in my mind was the one of the underground tunnels, passages, escalators and elevators. Above this concrete and clear spatial structure, dispersed fragments of the city-sites “floated”. It always felt as if I was trying to attach them to a particular exit of the city’s subway system, to mentally re-create possible geographical connections between them. The project investigated what is happening with our perception of space and place in a traditional sense, with our awareness of terms such as “public”, “political”, “social” or “participation”, while we move through isolated traffic corridors and non-places, cleaned from whatever could interrupt (but also shift) our attention and our direction of moving.
In regard to my artistic methodology, I appropriated the logic of the underground surveillance system, operatively and aesthetically. I recorded a multitude of video shots, but instead of surveilling people, I turned the view against the space. Shown are recordings cleaned from human presence, revealing thus more about the characteristics of space itself and the accentuating presence of the “surveilling eye” which has its impact on patterns of our behaviour in public (non)places as well. In a gallery setup, those sequences were shown on numerous subway-monitors on one wall, while photographs depicted the above-ground spaces between the subway stations, covered with snow and photographically overexposed (alluding to the disappearance of the traditional place) on an opposite wall.
tonka malekovic 