15/08 2020
Media Mediterranea 22 Festival | Opening
The Media Mediterranea Festival 22 with this year’s theme “Dear Frenemy” and in the Metamedia Association, started off with the opening exhibition of Golden Watermelon 4.0 on Thursday, 13 of August in SKUC, in Pula. The exhibition was the outcome of the open call for young emerging artists, with the jury made of Oleg Šuran, Marko Vojnić Gin, and Olga Majcen Linn, which decided the best piece is Anja Maleć’s, “Number blue”.
Director of Metamedia Association greeted numerous audience and thanked them for their support of the festival for more than two decades now.
-I am very happy that we kept the continuity for all these years and also by proposing our festival’s theme and by artist’s response, that we critically deliberate today’s key phenomena, especially in this period of pandemic. This exhibitions serves as an example of support for young and upcoming artists and also a chance for them to develop and present their work on this festival. This years selection is also excellent and I hope that you will enjoy in the exhibition, in Jurcan’s words.
Festival’s program coordinator, Ivana Nataša-Turković said that 19 authors applied to the competition and the members of the jury selected five of them who had fulfilled the criteria of the open call and fit in the theme of the festival.
– Selected authors are Ivana Bajcer, Helena Rubčić, Ivana Škvorčević, Dora Brkarić, and Anja Maleć, and also Valentina Butumović who had the opportunity to produce her work. Turković said that Butumovicć is last year’s winner of the Golden Watermelon and thanked the jury and selected authors. Afterwards, Jury’s member Oleg Šuran awarded Anja Maleć.
– I am sincerely taken back by this and didn’t expect to be awarded, since I never win anything – not even the lottery. This means a lot to me and thank you for believing in me and my work, and I wish you all good luck with the festival in the future, Maleć says.
NUMBER BLUE is a generative four-channel video installation that aims to question the future of e-citizens. The work can be seen as an avant-garde critique of surveillance capitalism. The focus of this work is on facial recognition and facial analysis technologies, and their implementation in everyday life. They are placed in the context of ethical witnessing, critique, and action. Thus, I am looking at the face as the asset or the biometric currency of a citizen. Facial recognition is in use for unlocking smartphones, for registering attendance in some schools, streamline security in public transit, but as well for the punishment of jaywalkers and for paying the bills (i.e., in China). If we are going toward the enrollment of facial currency, whose property are we going to become? What categories will define our value? And what about our privacy? This work can be perceived as an avant-garde critique of capitalism of surveillance.
Artist uses photos of her identification documents from countries she is a citizen of and country of residence. In each country, she
has a different ID number but the same face. The photos are connected to direct feed from stock movement data—this information she is
using to affect the image. With every stock movement, photos are manipulated and distorted. As time passes, her face will disappear, and with it, her value as an asset.
Anja Malec (b.1986) works in video, audio/visual performance, and installation, moving from the static object toward the interactive installations and engagement of the audience with work. The Internet and media culture define Malec’s art practice. Through artistic practice, she
explores the phenomenon of human flaws as a side effect of the digital lifestyle or the ones emphasized by digitalization. Further, in her body of work, she tries to break the dichotomy between art (the process of creative expression) and life (the consumer culture). She takes a creative and playful approach to represent this somewhat complex human state of mind.
Anja Malec graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb, Croatia, gained a BA in animation from Volda University College, Norway.
Festival’s program continues on Friday, 14th of August, in Community Center Rojc with the presentation of bio performance and interactive new media spatial installation “(A)Live!”, by Igor Zenzerović, placed in Living Room space at 20:30. At 21:30 in Dr. Inat Theatre, Marko Gutić Mižimakov will perform his recital/visual essay „Cruising the Manifold, Disoriented“, and at 22:30, in the backyard of Rojc, Alex Brajković will perform a multi-instrumental and electro-acoustic performance “Equilibrium 0.1” For our youngest, there is Mini Mediterranea – a workshop for children “A Symphony of diversity and unity” organized by DAI-SAI Association of Istrian Architects and Alex Brajković, starting at 19:00.
