Screening and talk
Friday, 6 September 2024, 8 pm
Inner courtyard of Škuc Gallery, Stari trg 21, Ljubljana
Participating: Mohamed Abdelkarim (EG/NL), Neo Nor (SI), Agnieszka Polska (PL), He Zike (CN)
Curaotr: Lara Reichmann
PROGRAMME
These Roots, Interlacing the Worlds
Curator: Lara Reichmann
Duration: 35’
Like in a still air, the highly pixelated images of the treetops remain motionless on the screen. If you got too close, you would see it’s just a scene, a collection of planes. A part of an environment frozen in time, through which one can move but is not able to touch. The hand of one’s proxy digital self just slides through the bushes, grass, trunks… Images of nature are digitally constructed through databases, 3D models, and AI generators. In their desire to reproduce natural habitats and species, new hybrid environments are created, marked by errors and inconsistencies. With their steady rhythm of continuous processing and generation of new information, server centres greedily consume natural resources and are irrevocably changing the landscapes they inhabit. The physical infrastructure of digital worlds spreads across the ground of foreign territories. Sometimes buried a few meters underground, situated at the remote edge of the inhabited world, but always invisible to most users. Digital spaces seemingly emerge from nowhere, while their carriers permeate the soil like fraudulent root systems, an error, an inconsistency that does not adapt to the laws of the biotope it appropriates.
Set in environments that are at least partly derived from physical and virtual reality, the video works of artists Agnieszka Polska, He Zike, and Neo Nor create and transition between possible versions of a world where nature and technology are inseparably connected. Fictional narratives blend our present with a past that never really happened and a speculative future that most likely never will. New ecosystems, in a fragile synthesis, sometimes symbiotic, other times entirely parasitic, between the almost stereotypical concept of untouched nature and the science-fictional role of technology, establish spaces and stories through which their (non)human actors navigate.
Poland, 2023, 9’ 30’’
In the film, the deep and enchanting voice of the actress Tina Greatrex guides the listener through the joined history of humankind and flowers. According to the narrator, blooming plants used to be enormous, and humans were the primary pollinators. A complex symbiosis existed between the species, with both humans and flowers unable to reproduce without one another. Over the centuries, humans mastered technologies that allowed them to break off the cycle and start procreating independently while also artificially altering the size of the flowers. Especially one technology played an essential role in this morally ambiguous process: the technology of storytelling.
China, 2023, 14’ 20’’
Random Access takes the form of a science fiction set in the city of Guiyang and its vicinity, home to the world’s largest radio telescope (the Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Telescope, or FAST) and a “data centre cluster” credited with driving the rapid expansion of China’s digital industry. It is also the centre of the Chinese Karst landscape, where geological information and clouds are stored in the mountain structure and its specific climate. Riffing on her parents’ experience of living in this misty and mountainous technological hub, the artist imagines a narrative unfolding after the unexpected crash of its main data centre. In this disordered digital reality, two characters travel through the city filled with flashes of ancient memories and imaginaries of the future. Whether they encounter information stored in the cloud or expanded versions of themselves, the protagonists must find their way through a rapidly changing world.
Egypt/Netherlands, 2021, 7’12’’
In a world dominated by drones and devoid of humans, the film follows a drone on its journey northward. Through a conversation with an anonymous figure, insights emerge into the conflicts and contrasting power dynamics of infrastructures and geographies. A tension arises between machines and the remnants of humanity, set against the backdrop of an endless desert landscape that spans the globe.
Slovenija, 2023, 4’ 9’’
Farmer Online was developed during an unbalanced/chaotic period in the artist’s life, while playing the first-person shooter video game Counter-Strike: Global Offensive excessively. The short animation follows the central character – a shepherd who loses his flock of sheep due to the intense gameplay of a computer game. Despite his semi-linear narrative, the artist, who takes a somewhat critical stance towards his own obsessive state, focuses more on conveying the feverish zeitgeist of excessive computer game playing than on the story itself.
Photo: SCCA-Ljubljana and Škuc Gallery archive
Lara Reichmann (1995) is a visual artist working in video and animation. Her recent projects focus on digital interfaces, glitches and time lapses that build parallel virtual landscapes of satellite images. She has participated in several group and solo exhibitions that were held, among others, in P74 Gallery and Kino Šiška in Ljubljana, Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art Koroška in Slovenj Gradec, Centre of Contemporary Arts Celje (SI), Krinzinger Projekte, Parallel in Vienna (AT) and Gallery 707 in Brno (CZ). She has curated several exhibitions, among others for the ETC. magazine, SCCA Centre for Contemporary Arts, Škuc Gallery and student pop-up gallery 7:069 in Ljubljana (SI), Gallery Nova – WHW in Zagreb (HR) and the Pita Project platform.
VideoGarden (VideoDvorišče) is a programme of curated screenings and talks on art, video, and film. In the spring-summer period we step out of the dark cinema and the cold gallery space into the open air. In collaboration with Škuc Gallery we organize screening events in its inner courtyard.
DIVA Station is an online and physical archive that SCCA-Ljubljana has been developing since 2005 with the aim of researching, documenting, archiving and presenting art film, video and new media art.
In case of rain, the screening will be held in the gallery.
The talk with the present artist will be held in Slovene.
Free admission.
Organization: SCCA-Ljubljana/DIVA Station, Škuc Gallery
Supported by: Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Slovenia, City Municipality of Ljubljana – Department of Culture
