|
Uro¹ Acman
Museums
June
30 - July 15, 2009
You are
kindly invited to attend the opening of the
exhibition on Tuesday, 30 June
at 8 pm at
©kuc Gallery.
In a series
of photographs entitled Museums Uro¹ Acman documents
so-called hunting trophy rooms. Monumental and distant
photographs reveal an objective and cold picture, while the
bizarre motif functions as an ironic subtext, which gives
them an alienating effect. The artist began recording these
unusual places quite coincidentally. He says that when
seeing one of these 'private museums' for the first time, he
felt an odd fascination with the people who spend all their
free time arranging collections of stuffed animals. He came
to the conclusion that these rooms are almost sacred places
for them, which show their specific relationship to nature,
which they bring home in bits and pieces.
With regard
to form, the artist is interested in examining still-life,
which offers new meanings, something symbolic, only if the
gaze is directed to it. Therefore, photographs make us think
of the metaphorical meaning of the spaces portrayed, and
their cultural, social and ideological functions. The
large-format colour photographs, in the tradition of the
'post-Düsseldorf' school, pay much attention to details,
composition and light. The cold images of interiors filled
with hunting trophies, which the artist portrays with
restrained minimalism, act as a formal counterpoint to the
homey decor overload in the motif. Due to this contrast, the
viewer perceives them as distant and threatening.
One could
say that the polished and shiny 'after-images' create a
vacuum of a cold, floating simulacrum, and symbolise our
erroneous encounter with the real. Through shiny flatness
and seriality (a common form of artistic articulation in
post-modern photography) Acman's practice sees this
traumatic situation as an obsessive fixation on the object.
This extends the concept of paradox not only to the images
(with their effect and absence), but also to the viewers,
who can neither identify with the images (a prevailing
characteristic of modernistic aesthetic), nor distance
themselves from them. Some contemporary photography is
marked by the so-called allegoric split of the image, which
increasingly approaches cultural-political intervention.
Consequently, the status of the photographer/artist also
changes, becoming that of photographer/ethnographer. In this
context, the central focus of artistic examination is still
the bourgeois capitalist art system, with its excluding
definitions of art, artist, identity and community. This
second, embedded, meaning brings Acman close to
institutional criticism, as it questions the institution of
the museum in the modern age.
One of the
more general definitions of the museum is a place of memory,
where everything relevant, precious and significant is
collected. Museums are also graveyards of objects. What is
kept in a museum ceases to have any function in life, and is
therefore dead. Heaven for objects is not much different
from a vampire sepulchre, and this is in tune with the
general dynamics of the modern age, as already established
by Boris Groys. Acman's images of rooms where 'preserved'
animal bodies are kept can be understood as an allegory for
the contemporary museum, where the commodified art work
loses its emancipatory potential and functions only as a
dead relic of (art) history.
Acman's
Museums examine the ambiguous status of art work, which
in the post-modern age spans between discourse and
documentarism, nature and culture, and the avant-garde and
kitsch.
Curator:
Iztok Hotko
Uro¹ Acman was born in
1982 Slovenj Gradec. In 2003 he graduated in photography
from the FAMU in Prague. In 2008, he completed post-graduate
studies in visual communications and photography at École
cantonale d'art de Lausanne/ ECAL in Lausanne. He is
currently a student at Koper Faculty of Humanities. He has
exhibited at many solo and group exhibitions in Slovenia and
abroad.
For further
information contact curator Iztok Hotko on
iztok.hotko@gmail.com.
|
