27/08 2020
Artist Talks with Valentina Butumović and Igor Zenzerović on 11th Arteria Festival
On 11th Arteria – International Festival of Visual Arts in Novigrad, this year’s Summer Sessions residency artists Valentina Butumović and Igor Zenzerović gave artist talks. The event was held on 22th August.
Valentina Butumović (Pula, 1994) finished the Undergraduate program in Animation and New media at the Academy of Fine arts in Zagreb and is currently in her second year BA at New Media course. During her undergraduate study, she went to Litva for student exchange, where she studied intermedia photography at the Academy of Fine arts in Vilnius. She took part in several group exhibitions, and also one single exhibition in Lauba, Zagreb (Meteorology of the Body, 2019). Her work questions the intertwining of the human and non-human, and also cultural and political potential of transformation and material decay. Her artwork is often of procedural nature; a feedback loop between human, material, and microbiota creativity. She is currently interested in new materialism and ecology-related topics.
“Still life” project focuses on the reimagination of the still life genre as a vibrant space; a model of the metabolic system in which materials are in constant transformation of exploration of the human relationship with materiality and also with the interweaving of human/non-human. Exactly because of that, spontaneous fermentation is being used as the main strategic tool in the rethinking process of the perishable matter being the main characteristic of still life representation. By magnification of non-human activities, and by discovering its potential as a micropolitical act, spontaneous fermentation animates our perception of “inert” matter by transforming it into a platform of microbial activity that supports the transformation and creation of the symbiotic environment. Further, the urge for rethinking the prevailing anthropocentric narrative reflects in the project’s procedural nature, where material agents and microorganisms become coauthors of the installation. Destabilized space emerges out of this collaboration – a fluid – affirming space as a fertile ground for the reevaluation of materiality.
Igor Zenzerović (Pula, 1990) completed his primary and secondary education in Pula. He attended the Faculty in Rijeka, Zagreb, Vienna, and Ljubljana: law, cultural studies, comparative literature, and ethnology. For 20 years he preoccupied himself with art, started with experiments in sound, continued with text, and then performance. In the field of sound he authored and performed homage to John Cage (2011., MSUI Pula), Sound stair for eight performers (2012., Biennial Quadrianalle, MMSU Rijeka), Sounds in Poetry (Sound Poetry Collection, 2016). He writes poetry, several of which have been published in literary magazines, and together with Dario Vuger edits, writes and prints ‘the Clinic!’ a post-situationist fanzine. First performances are intertextual, banal, and auto-referential. Among recent, more mature works, the following works are deemed acceptable: Living Paintings (Rijeka, Zagreb, Vienna, 2010-2017), Performance at Midnight Renaming Square (Zagreb 2017) Antitheater in a House without a Roof – Abort(us) (2017., Pula), Aha -sphere (2018., Pula), Extreme reading of poetry (2019, Pula). He is the host and organizer of the Evening of Poetics, an experimental literary forum.
(A)Live! is a bio-performance and a new-media interactive installation that radicalizes, through the medium of the work of art, the practice of observation as a bio-political act. The work was created as a synthesis of questions concerning ‘gaze exposure’ by an artist and the long-standing refusal to record, categorize, and archive one’s own performances. (A)Live! is a tumultuous symbiosis of archiving transience woven from self-images and the singularity of ‘contact’ experience with the aura of art, that is always distant ‘here and now’. A slimy ethical space is woven with self-image parasitism and metabolic symbiosis.
