Looking At Nothing – Desire In The Future in Mala Stanica

Looking At Nothing – Desire In The Future
The international group exhibition Looking At Nothing (Desire In The Future) is an exhibition realized in order to present in one space the video achievements from authors from our region who intensely and focused deal with the audiovisual, with the power of visual cultures and media and their influences, i.e. “the video as an opportunity for reconsidering and critique of one’s being” – Rosalind Krauss.
The exhibition consists of works by artists who in their visual aesthetic, poetic and artistic language and cultural sensibility have close or similar “tendencies” in terms of “video image,” i.e. recording of certain conditions and perceptions from the physical/creative reality and turning them into visual “muteness” and framed “silences” of the things themselves…
The exhibition Looking At Nothing (Desire In The Future) is consisted of works by the authors Ana Adamovic (Serbia), Tanja Deman (Croatia), Mirna Arsovska (Macedonia), Davor Sanvincenti (Croatia), Goran Skofic (Croatia) Tihomir Topuzovski (Macedonia), Vladimir Nikolic (Serbia), Marko Markovic (Croatia) and Aleksandar Spasoski (Macedonia).
Curator of the exhibition is the art historian Dejan Bugjevac.
Concerned are multimedia authors from the region, with significant creative activity and recognition on the international art scene in the last decade, who usually realize their concepts and constructions through media such as film, sound and video projections, photography, video installations and audiovisual performances.
These authors create aestheticized “conditions”, “movements”, “images” and “shots” beyond the usual dominant treatment of the visual language, which is usually filled with psychosocial sequences and informational content and messages from which the viewer in a pragmatic and highly aggressive manner should be relaxingly “upset.”
All videos at the exhibition are “emptied” from their original sound content and represent “pure” moving images and visual shapes and reflections, in which the viewer can enjoy in their sometimes seductive vibrating surfaces.
These works intertwine the personal (domestic) memory, the ambient poetics of repetition that thoroughly trivializes the idea of “thematic beginning and end” of the work, the static silence of the video image, the subtle aesthetics of the “unimportant” that requires activation of multiple senses… They are about tactile and slow “anachronistic” notations, that regardless of the ideas and concepts of the authors, at times act like aestheticisms of “some past and exhausted times, which perhaps have not occurred and that should occur.”
These artists in their videos deal with that residue/shortage/surplus that does not conquer, does not fascinate, does not dramatize and does not have pretensions, but allows a different “slowness” of reality and transience of things? A different reflection, which is neither nostalgic nor interpretative, but is different time-spatial approach versus the hysterical flow of time, which today more and more is exclusively connected to the concept of speed.
In this manner, these works allow us an opportunity for a different understanding of the visual space and of the things happening around us.
Dejan Bugjevac