Zoran Srdić Janežič: Prašičji bog / God of pigs and
Jirži Kočica: Kaplja v oko / A drop to the eye
14. 11.2017
ACE KIBLA / Kiblix 2017

Zoran Srdić Janežič: God of Pigs

The art project CorporisAnimati is part of a bigger story Corpus Indeterminata, which explores the use of contemporary and traditional art media in connection to new technologies. In a contemporary sculpting fashion, the author uses casts from living human and animal bodies to highlight the presence or absence of the mass body rather than the expressive modeled form. He brings in the three-dimensional matrix of a pig’s body, connected to a human head via an AR code, to the physical space of the viewer, and juxtaposes it to the physical puppet. In the virtual space, we will thus come across a number of virtual piglet doubles with human heads, which were created using 3D scanning. The project is concerned with the relation between worth and value: the human body is a value, and the animal one has a certain worth. To a human, a pig can be an animal, or food, or material for a statue; human fat was considered aesthetic in the arts, unwanted in cosmetic industry, and symbolic in showing off plenitude. New expressive means enable new relations between real, virtual bodies and robots, and at the same time, by joining the human and the animal into a hybrid body, establish a new non-anthropocentric system of values.


Zoran Srdić Janežič (1974) is a sculptor and visual artist, employed as a creator of puppets at the Ljubljana Puppet Theatre. His work includes: performing, sculpturing, drawing, printmaking and book design. Primarily interested in humor, which he uses to point out neuralgic points in our everyday life and global trends, he often applies theoretical concepts of contemporary philosophers in the field of visual art. He uses traditional sculpturing materials in a non-traditional way (or the other way around) and employs various means for different purposes: video, animation, 3D print, AR code, nanotechnology and other forms of new media. His work has been exhibited in over 20 solo and numerous group exhibitions in Slovenia. With fellow artists he founded The Gulag Institute for Contemporary Art and Cultures.

 

Jirži Kočica: Drop to the Eye

Point to the Eye: a Drop Into the Horizon

Nano-portrait (synthesized from DNA) and a consideration about the philosophical premises of postmodernism and contemporary art

The art project Point to the Eye: a Drop Into the Horizon was conceived by sculptors Zoran Srdić Janežič and Jiri Kočica, and with the help of scientists from the National Institute of Chemistry Slovenija, prof. dr. Roman Jerala and PhD candidate Vid Kočar, Laboratory for Biotechnology L12. The help of Rado Markovič in the philosophical part of the project is gratefully acknowledged.

The project was curated by Jože Slaček from Kulturni inkubator and was made possible with the support the European Capital of Culture, Maribor, Slovenia, 2012. The materials were proofread by Jana Putrle Srdić.

The project’s aim is to connect artistic, scientific and philosophical ways of thinking. Arthur Danto stated in his writings that when conceptualism started, art became a form of philosophy… Approximately sixty years before Danto, Walter Benjamin said that art liberated itself from the traditional religious function – first with l’art pour l’art and after that with politics which replaced the religious core of art…  Hannah Arendt considered politics as the ultimate consequence of philosophy. Therefore, when we talk about contemporary art, which is bound with science, we have to rethink its connection to philosophy, which once filled the niche of science, but is separate today. However, since according to Benjamin art is involved in politics and plays an influential role in contemporary society, we also must be aware of the connection between philosophy and politics.
How do we see the perspective of philosophy and art?

Where is the vanishing point of the postmodern multi-perspective?