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 DIVA Station
Maja Smrekar's video screening
in Athens
International Festival of Digital Arts & New Media, Athens
18-20 May, 2012
Maja Smrekar, Repeating Coincidence, 2009 (still)
GAMA – Gateway to Archives of Media Art that joins eight European video and media art archives and over 10.000 video works will be presented in the frame of the 8th edition of International Festival of Digital Arts and New Media in Athens as a part of Tribute programme to present the history of media art. GAMA will be presented by Eva Kozma, curator of C3 - Center for culture and communication foundation in Budapest. After the lecture she will screen a selection of eight video works from all the archives. DIVA Station will be presented by Maja Smrekar’s video work Repeating Coincidence from 2009.
The main character in the video is a dance performer situated in media environment with splashing saturated colours, like a woman enclosed by the media wall. The speed and braking of the image represents the dancer’s nervous movements in the space that create an emotional tension. The sound by Borut Savski intensifies the fragmented and nervous motions and determines the visual coordinates. The entire sound and visual imagery is saturated, repetitive and fragmented, composed by numerous cut frames. The main focus of the video is the usage of formal video language and technical interventions that produce a strong emotional impulse and a critique of media reality. The video is a result of improvisations by Maja Smrekar and Borut Savski at Cirkulacija 2 collective - it portraits the inner state of mind when undergoing a claustrophobic episode. It is about the emotional voyage into the state of distress, acute anxiety and panic attacks. The image is taken from the film Flash Dance but it is manipulated and cut numerous times, then programmed in Resolume VJ software and rendered through filters, edited, filtered and re-edited many times around. The major part of artist’s media art works is to do with complex cultural anthropologic situations, while in her video works she most often refers to pop images that she reinterprets to reveal their inane constructions.
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 Maja Smrekar (1978, Slovenia) graduated at the Sculpture Department of Fine Art Academy in Ljubljana in 2005, currently finishing MA at the New Media Department. Her main interest is based at the phenomenology of perception which she first started researching through space phenomena by composing live video among various collaborations in interactive sound/visual projects with other artists. Her main artistic focus remains at the media art field. Among others, she has been collaborating with Kapelica Gallery in Ljubljana for the last five years and with Aksioma Institute for the last two years. Under their production she has executed projects within which she was researching frequency phenomena through biofeedback and telematic presence in relations to body, privacy and (inter)subjective perception of space. During the last two years she has been developing projects within the field of bio-art with focus on living organisms. In 2010 she organised International Festival HAIP10/New Nature which has been focussed to interdisciplinary dialogue and collaboration ethics between scientists and artists. The festival took place at Multimedia Centre Cyberpipe in Ljubljana where she has been active as an artistic director for two years. Maja Smrekar currently lives and works in Ljubljana, Slovenia.
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[Published May 13, 2012]
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