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.