Exhibitions
Two Places
Blaž Janežič, Rudi Kotnik (in cooperation with Zvonka T. Simčič), Dušan Letnar, Jana Nakrst, Robert Novak, Simon Podgoršek, Aleš Senožetnik
Opening: 11 June at 8 pm
11–30 June 2014
Gallery of Kamnik Cultural Centre, Kamnik
WHERE: Fužine 10, Kamnik
We brought to the collective space of the club everything we are currently interested in and find suitable to be addressed collectively. The first question turns out to be the crucial one: what is the common denominator? What will we dissect the ‘flesh’ with? And the answer is not the title of the workshop or even the project topic.
The real issues are the consequences; of what will be lost by giving it a name, and the way that title will direct our decisions, impose itself and haunt us as an annoying topic. This is the reason I joined the collective; I executed all the tasks that I regularly undertook for the collective and at the same time I constantly pushed away the definition of a common denominator – the project title. However, delaying the denomination of the common in a community put me in the role of a denominator, becoming evident when somebody brought in a selection of photographs to review. He put a USB key in a computer and opened the folder list. One of the folders had my name. How did my folder end up on his key? What of that which belongs to me is in the possession of his memory? How many folders are there on other’s USB keys?
I don’t claim any of them and yet they all bear my signature. The common denominator was formed when we started meeting to realise a project that I would manage and direct. I entered this agreement without any definition and with an understanding that the subject of this collective work should be identified through the process and the topic articulated through the realisation. And so this very retroactivity – that may see the concept emerge at the end – is a key topic that I strive to deliver all the time: act backwards, describe the obvious and try to emphasise what remains; the redundancy that looks like it has been here all the time, has only just showed up. The difference between articulation and representation, between what is told and what is seen can be reflected backwards. Hence the aim of the work is its articulation and identification of that which remains unarticulated. The title comes at the end, the subject of creation is developed through the creative process, usually as something that we never anticipated but allowed the possibility – through the creative process – for it to “emerge”.
Two Places is a project about places of interest, places where we end up, places where we get away to or places that we end up at when we get away. It turns out we are interested in particular places in the world where we can take pictures and simultaneously we are interested in places that we create by taking pictures. In any case it turns out that the place we end up at is not one but two. Through photography we confronted two places, two extremes, a contradiction formed through a relation and reduction to a common denominator: we got two places for one, two extremes of the same. Every artist span around their denominator and explored its dimensions, borders and everything that is behind what is limited. The range of places and extremes is very diverse: on one hand the social spaces of the Bistrica basin; the nearby forest; night walks through Kamnik and other places along the way; macro shots and the disparity between staged exteriors and advertising interiors of Duplica, or the tension between two irreducible media – sound and image. The collective products are the two places of our collaboration, the first being our meetings and the second our exhibiting. We may observe them separately but nevertheless produce the second, the absent, in a completely arbitrary form.
Peter Rauch
