IOCOSE
All of Your Base

Exhibition
1 December 2021–14 January 2022
Aksioma | Project Space, Ljubljana

Curated by
Claudia D’Alonzo

The artistic practice of IOCOSE collective focuses on the failure of narratives about the future and technological innovation while producing new interpretations of imaginaries, iconographies and rhetorics, sabotaging their original meanings through often surreal poetics. All of Your Base presents the video animations Pointing at a New Planet (2020) and Free from History (2021). The works are the first two chapters of in-progress research on the NewSpace Economy, the movement of extraterrestrial colonization through private investments that is expanding its scope from Silicon Valley to outer space.

In Pointing at a New Planet, a male hand crosses an alien landscape, pointing at an invisible destination. The lone limb is that of Elon Musk, one of the main protagonists of NewSpace. In order to bring it to life, IOCOSE has collected online videos of his public appearances as SpaceX’s CEO, creating a 3D casting and reconstructing the proxemics used by the entrepreneur to push our imagination towards unknown planets through pointing with his forefinger. This gesture has long been investigated by the collective for its multiple symbologies: within the iconographic tradition it is used to indicate knowledge, scientific progress or the future, but also as an image of command, deception and illusion. The journey of the hand is accompanied by a karaoke that mixes some of Musk’s most sensationalist statements with the voice of Albertine Sarges, author and performer of the melody.

In the sequel Free from History, the hand arrives on Mars and begins a process of adapting the planet to human life. Albertine Sarges once again gives voice to the mashup of texts taken from websites and statements of investment funds urging the expansion of markets beyond Earth’s borders. Through the double click on the landscape that the mouse pointer typically performs in terraforming video games, the hand makes trees, buildings and rollercoasters appear out of nowhere, as well as marvels of science and new forms of interplanetary entertainment. Among the constructions generated by the creating hand is a complex of geodesic domes, a form that IOCOSE also physically presents in the exhibition space through its installation. The geodesic dome was made famous in the 1950s by Richard Buckminster Fuller who used it as a structure to symbolize a sense of confidence in progress, technology and the future. Its use spread rapidly in diverse sectors, initially in institutionalized science and the military to then gradually enter mass culture. In the 1960s, thanks in part to the growth of the myth of Fuller, for many a visionary and innovative guru, the geodesic dome was appropriated by counter-cultural circles: its model was used for the self-built constructions of hippie communes, such as Drop City, the radical architecture of Archigram or Cedric Price, and the ephemeral structures hosting happenings and Expanded Cinema, the first expressions of multimedia art. Like the videodomes by Stan VanDerBeek, a visionary media art pioneer who in the late ‘60s saw in the geodesic dome the representation of “Cultural intercom”, a model of knowledge of the future based on a global network of interconnected links and nodes. The exhibition All of Your Base evokes some of the cultural references used by the NewSpace Economy gurus that hybridize individualism, libertarianism, neoliberal economics, counterculture and utopianism. IOCOSE brings out how their narratives about the future actually tell us very ancient stories, rooted in western collective imaginaries. The figure of the male genius, able by himself to create worlds from nothing and conquer new wild territories, now pushes – by his own hand – the progress of humanity beyond the borders of the Earth.

THE AUTHORS

IOCOSE are a collective of four artists: Matteo Cremonesi (Brescia, IT), Filippo Cuttica (London, UK), Davide Prati (Berlin, DE) and Paolo Ruffino (London, UK). They have been working as a group since 2006. IOCOSE investigates how the narratives surrounding the future of technology leave traces on the present. They work mostly with video installations and digital images and have been exhibiting internationally at several art institutions and festivals, including MAMbo (Bologna, 2018), OGR Torino (2018, 2021), Fotomuseum Winterthur (Switzerland, 2017), The Photographers’ Gallery (London, 2016, 2018), Tate Modern (London, 2011), Science Gallery (Dublin, 2012), Jeu de Paume (Paris, 2011), FACT (Liverpool, 2012), MACRO (Rome, 2012, 2017) and Transmediale (Berlin, 2013, 2015). Their work is featured in publications such as Wired magazine, The Creators Project, Flash Art, Liberation, Der Spiegel, El Pais, Adbusters, Neural and Vanity Fair, and on television channels RAI and France4.

THE CURATOR

Claudia D’Alonzo is an independent researcher and curator with a PhD in Audiovisual Studies and a Master’s degree from the Modena Photography Foundation. She teaches at the Accademia di Brera in Milan and the Accademia di belle arti G. Carrara in Bergamo. He has curated projects for Centrale Fies, Cimatics, Careof, Digicult, ICA Milano and the Subtle Technologies Festival and written for Alfabeta2, Digicult, doppio zero, Exibart and Motherboard. Her essays have been published by Mimesis International and Amsterdam University Press.

RELATED ACTIVITIES

PUBLICATION

Daniel Rourke
Why I Want to Fuck Elon Musk
PostScriptUM #39

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Iris Pokovec
Angels & Discounts

Exhibition
3–26 November 2021
Aksioma | Project Space, Ljubljana

Part of U30+ production programme for supporting young artists

Angels & Discounts is an ode to consumerism and an elegy to unfulfilled dreams and lost ideals. It talks about the love-hate attitude to consumerist and popular culture and glorifies its charm and its power of hypnotising the masses, while at the same time offering a reflection on the transience of society’s collective stream of thought. It is a narrative about the search for free choice in the numb somnolence of supermarket aisles and shelves with tinned peas and preserved compotes. 

In the style of illuminated billboards, the canvases tell us how to live properly, how to become a better new me and how to finally catch one’s dreams. How to live the American dream. But the messages on them are directed back to the all-powerful entity of dreams and talk about the consequences and wounds that they can cause – about the present time in which we have become exhausted from chasing dreams; in which we are trying to be sceptical and cynical, but illusions and desires prove to be more powerful than reality. Deep in our own and the collective consciousness, we are still faithful followers of the golden dreams about a better tomorrow, caught in our striving towards the green light of potentiality.

As a contemporary horn of plenty, a shopping cart with its piled-up articles promises us a better, clearer and optimistic future. But the latter is emptied together with the shopping cart when we place the articles on the checkout conveyor belt and its magic disappears until the next buyer of dreams uses it. The magic artefact offers instantaneous happiness, for it functions as a black hole: we place in it other people’s slogans and promises of happiness, which, no matter how devotedly we fill it, always disappear – all until the next purchase.

During our browsing through the store of dreams, we are accompanied by the vaporvawe music, which is occasionally interrupted by fictive store announcements. Through them, the artist transforms her visual language into a phonaesthetic experience of reflections based on her attitude to contemporary consumerist culture.   

Angels & Discounts is a retort to the current pop nihilism, the time and space in which the idea of what is entertaining is built on celebrating the banality of existence, meaningfulness without meaning, and in which values have been almost completely displaced by worth. Plastic, two-dimensional and direct works are cleansed of all unnecessary form to the point of taking the exhibition visitor to the backstage of the game of consumerism. 

On the one hand, the works talk about the poetics of the American dream and romanticise an individual’s attitude to infinite capabilities, unlimited choice and immediate satisfaction, while, on the other, they offer an insight into the phantasms of mass-produced ideologies and marketing slogans. The exhibition is the artist’s personal story about reaching too highly for the stars, confronting what is given and searching for angels and discounts in the stores of dreams.

THE AUTHOR

Iris Pokovec (1992) is a visual artist based in Ljubljana. She studied painting at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design, University of Ljubljana, where she received her master’s degree in 2017 with her thesis Likeability and Buyability. Her practice is primarily based on classic painting and print-based media, with which she explores the communication tools of contemporary consumerism. In content, she deals especially with the relations between present-day consumer plastics, 21st-century marketing slogans and contemporary pop nihilism.
She has presented her work at solo exhibitions 37 Days of Christmas (MGLC, Ljubljana, 2020), Likeable and Buyable (Gallery, Ljubljana, 2018) and Sigmund Freud Collection Premiere (Zigutamve Project Space, Vienna (AT), 2018). She has also carried out several solo projects: New Year’s Resolutions2019, for which she was awarded a work grant by the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Slovenia, as part of which she conducted the survey How to Make Art Likeable and Buyable, The Research (2019) in Slovenia, which she then repeated in England under the same title as part of the Art Residency programme of the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Slovenia in London. She has also participated and exhibited in several group projects and exhibitions at home and abroad: Gallery.Delivery: Live Love Laugh (Ljubljana, 2021), Waardeloos (PERIOD gallery space, Haarlem (NL), 2019), A Percentage for Art (Buy Art Campaign, 2018), Made in China: Authentic Slovenian Art in Belgium (WARP, Sint-Niklaas (BE), 2018), Made in China: Goods and Services (Spike Berlin, Berlin (DE), 2018).

Nika Oblak & Primož Novak
And Now for Something Completely Different 12

Exhibition
6–29 October 2021

Opening
WED, 6 October 2021 at 7 PM

Aksioma | Project Space, Ljubljana

The work by the duo Nika Oblak & Primož Novak entitled Infinity (digital) focuses on the influence of contemporary means of communication on one’s life. Their artistic practice over the past twenty years has continuously addressed the position of humans in the clenches of consumerist doctrines, media cacophony and popular culture. Along the same lines, in their latest work they have created a spatial video installation consisting of screens, cables and other heralds of everyday modern life.

Employing a good measure of humour and self-irony, the artists focus once again on the human being that is – no less than in the past – caught up in the absurdities of daily routines and subjected to the conventions of tradition and the patterns of dominant culture. Infinity (digital) shows the motif of running, symbolised by an ordinary man involved in the multilayered mechanisms of today’s neoliberal reality. The image of the protagonist running in an infinite and senseless loop from screen to screen can thus be seen as a manifestation of the myth of Sisyphus who, by means of divine punishment, was condemned to repeatedly roll a boulder up the same hillside. With this gesture, the artists point out people’s self-evident attitude to technological progress, show the imperative of adapting to all kinds of changes and call attention to the loosening of basic humanistic values. Even though, in the last few decades, society and technology have advanced to the degree that there is seemingly less and less monotonous work and jobs, the abundance of everything that is available in the material and virtual world can still make one feel caught in the metaphorical aimless run. Contemporary society worships constant fulfilment, whether through work or leisure activities. Subjected to all kinds of stimuli, people today are consequently overloaded with activity. Regardless of whether it relates to one’s job or one’s vacations and travels, activity is ever-present, such as on social media networks where there is a constant absorption of information.

That is why the video’s protagonist, dressed in casual clothes, who persistently and endlessly runs through the screens, can symbolise precisely this inevitable entrapment of individuals in the shackles of prescribed lifestyles and activities, which they cannot resist – at least not without the risk of extreme social deviation or ostracisation, The monumental, white, spaceless environment of the video, into which the runner moves in an even straight line, metaphorically suggests the self-evident fact that an individual is always subordinate to the collective – that is, to society – and always has to adapt to it, for his or her own comfort. The infinity examined by the artists is highly abstract and formless. But, at the same time, it is very familiar since people are consciously or unconsciously prone to repeat patterns, which actually fulfil them and provide them with a feeling of security. The infinite run and its monotonous sound could thus be a lucid depiction of the artists’ relation to the world and their own position in it.

THE AUTHORS

Nika Oblak & Primož Novak have been working collectively since 2003. In their art practice they examine the influence of media and capital on contemporary society, dissecting its visual and linguistic structure. Oblak & Novak have exhibited worldwide, in venues like the Sharjah Biennial (AE), Japan Media Arts Festival, Tokyo (JP), Istanbul Biennial (TR), Biennale Cuvee, Linz (AT), Transmediale Berlin (DE), FILE Sao Paulo (BR), among others. They have received numerous grants and awards, including the CYNETART Award by the Trans-Media-Akademie Hellerau in Dresden (DE), an honorary mention of art critics at Biennale WRO, Wroclaw (PL), the White Aphroid Award for artistic achievement by MMC KIBLA, Maribor (SI) and a Rihard Jakopic honorable mention, awarded by the Slovenian Association of Fine Arts Societies, the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Ljubljana, Moderna galerija and the Slovene Association of Art Critics (SI).

RELATED EVENTS

Nika Oblak & Primož Novak
Infinity (digital)
Exhibition
17 September–18 October 2020
DLUL Gallery, Breg 22, Ljubljana

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Nika Oblak & Primož Novak
And Now for Something Completely Different 10
Exhibition
12 June–12 July 2019
Aksioma | Project Space, Ljubljana

This article is only available on Lulu.com

PostScript^UM #38

Primož Krašovec
Smetnjak vs. Ljubljana: Singularity of Humour and Politics Beyond Elections

The essay is a commentary of the last ten years of Smetnjak’s intellectually, politically and ethically outstanding production. Intellectually as a collection of theoretic – yet not academic – references, which makes them contemporary, to the point and intriguing and not a part of the canon established for the purpose of raising epigons of one ‘school’ or another. Politically as an exercise in thought, which does not assume fixed sides or viewpoints – not because it would be vague or opportunistic, but because it is too intense to be caught in the fixed positions of identity. Ethically as an attitude towards the world and oneself, refusing to accept the existing, but not being critical to it in a way that affirms the opposite (as this would presuppose criticism from a standpoint of a fixed identity), nor being outraged or judgemental (nonconformity not based on morality). The most important methods of Smetnjak’s operation are singular humour and not taking sides.

EN | 14.8 x 21 cm | 14 pp | COLOUR | soft cover | 2021
ISBN 978-961-95437-0-2 (Printed)
ISBN 978-961-95064-9-3 (Digital)

Tina Umer
Wish

Installation
22 May 2021
Central market, Ljubljana

Part of U30+ production programme for supporting young artists

In the current stage of the so-called platform economy, targeted advertising has become the main source of income for social networking platforms. User data are collected, their preferences and interests analized and turned into information that can be sold to the companies willing to reach them. This advertising mostly takes the form of moving or still images, but they are not pictures to be looked at: they are rather made to be clicked on. They are “operational images” (Harun Farocki), meant not to represent anything, but to trigger an action. Paradoxically, really looking at them can thus turn into a critical, subversive gesture in itself. Selected in the framework of the U30+ initiative, Tina Umer’s project Gone dives deep into this pool of images, selecting them, magnifying them, manipulating them by means of embroidery and textiles, and turning them into objects of aesthetic contemplation and critical thinking again.

THE AUTHOR

Tina Umer (1991) lives and works in Gothenburg (SE). She finished BA in Visual Communication at Academy of Fine Arts and Design, University of Ljubljana, and in 2019 MfA in Photography at Valand Academy, Gothenburg (SE). In her work she explores themes like personal symbolism, materiality, layers of the photographic medium and material culture, as well as the ways the online and offline realities meet. She uses digital and analogue photography, textile and installation. She participated in several group and solo exhibitions in Slovenia and abroad. Her dummy book Danish Mountains was shortlisted for the Nordic Dummy Award 2018. She was the Artist in Residence at Witte Rook in Breda, the Netherlands, 2020. She received grants from the Hasselblad foundation, Adlerbertrska foundation, AAA foundation and Municipality of Koper.

Price: 16,66€

This book is not only a guide to Clusterduck Collective’s latest work, “The Detective Wall”. It is also your key to the unsettling, nonsensical, but ultimately liberating parallel universe called the memesphere.

How does one make sense of a senseless world?
How can one represent the unrepresentable?
How would one map the unmappable?

Part of Clusterduck Collective’s new participative transmedia project, Meme Manifesto, the Wall is loaded with meanings, symbols, paintings and memetic fossils – joined together by a plot, but difficult to decipher. This book will guide you in the process, giving you precious hints.

Get ready to explore another dimension.
Get ready to get paranoid.
Get ready to get lost.

While opening and reading these pages, Clusterduck recommends great care and to proceed at your own risk. As Marc Tuters points out in his introduction to the Guide: “The cleverness of Clusterduck lies in the seriousness with which they approach an object that refuses to be taken seriously. It is this attitude that has permitted them to stare into the abyss on our behalf, and not to become monsters themselves.”

Let’s hope that his words are true.
Let’s hope it’s not a trap.
Let’s find out.

EN | 10.5 x 16.7 cm | 180 pp | colour | soft cover | 2021
ISBN 978-961-95064-7-9

Related event: Meme Manifesto