It could be claimed that body entered a new millennium as something which is closest to us and yet not clear and inapprehensible. If art withdrew from personal stories related to artist’s body over past years, today we can witness and learn small intimist interventions in artists’ quotidian life.

Addressing oneself in the broadest sense of the word, dealing with one’s own handicaps, weaknesses and most various human defects places an artist side by side to an ordinary man. It even seems that artists wilfully withdraw from their "heroism" – from an era when, in particular in body art, they pushed the lines by radical interventions. Today’s artist is socially unprivileged individual who needs to fight for his equal rights in the society.

At first sight, the video works by selected artists might seem rather ordinary until they are related and read as entity which allows us comprehend their communication. What artists communicate is a complete lack of power in today’s society, their inability to change systems we have been totally suppressed by… The artists no longer urge us to interpret their works as artworks because they are mere reflections of everyday life. We have selected the subject of pain due to its omnipresence in our lives, as well as because it is useful or even necessary in order to survive. Due to a variety of psychological factors, every single individual’s experience of pain is different. The pain has always been part of art therefore we wondered how this phenomenon is dealt by contemporary young artists.

Some of selected artists deal with exclusively physical pain. This notion is in particular close to Ana Grobler who in Migraine confronts the issue of disease, as well as Nataša Skušek with a video presenting pain experienced by women while breastfeeding. Ana Čigon, Špela Pavli, Maja Hodošček, Nika Autor and Tomaž Furlan illustrate the helplessness of an entrapped individual who "fights" the sense of enervation day after day. These works address the psychological pain – the feelings of uselessness, inefficiency of individual and his/her wrong decisions made on a daily basis. Sašo Vrabič deals with a family tragedy which touched the whole world. Parents having to face a loss and resorting in their pain to any available modern communication channel to "reach" their child and by doing so transmitting their emotional state to the four corners of the world and thereby triggering a collective global mourning. In her work, Maša Jazbec addresses specific female "bleeding" and tests the limits of her perseverance though body art.

The way of shooting and the use of video by selected artists is of particular interest mainly due to intense "vivisection" of reality which is free of any superfluous "ornaments" and editing. The selection was focused on pain experienced by artists in the broadest sense of the word. We were in particular interested in experiences that artists want to share with the rest of us. Pain presented is both physical and psychological; it is strong and by way of video recording transmitted to the onlooker.
— Metka Zupanič (Kolektiva Institute)