LIGHTING GUERRILLA: SHADOWS AND REFLECTIONS

The festival’s programme is conceived with current times in mind, times which call for an in-depth examination of ourselves and our surroundings. Since ever, art has been a mirror reflection of the outside world, and this edition of the festival includes projects that reflect on the current situation, exploring its political or social implications while on the other hand employing distinctly subjective commentaries of personal and social realities. Allusions to recent and distant past saturate the present like shadows of ancient times, addressing visitors with stories and engaging emotions as well as minds.

The group show in the Match Gallery includes newly produced works by local artists who are joined by two guests from abroad. The interdisciplinary collective Stran22 presents their new installation Ambigram. The project, based on the camera obscura principle, with its very title implies a certain ambiguity of image which fractures and thus introduces the visitor to the world between the imaginary and the real.

The Hungarian artist Erik Mátrai’s project Turul recreates the mystical bird from Hungarian mythology. The project is an ironic and critical reaction to the pact between advanced technological tools of control and pre-modern political tendencies, which is crucial to the formation of the current social reality in many countries.

Dissociation by Ana Karlin stems from the research and thematisation of the human physical form as the key defining element of an individual’s identity. The artist manipulates the visitors’ reflection with light, creating new formal and conceptual layers of auto portrait in the process.

Similar emphases in exploring human physiognomy can be found in the project by the German artist Moritz Wehrmann. The project is titled Alter Ego and calls for two visitors, whose appearances are merged into one through self-observation, initiating a strange alienation in the process. The work provokes a feeling of loss of one’s own self (identity), loneliness and total empathy with the Other at the same time.

Andrej Štular and Janez Grošelj are authors of the project titled City - Sketch. They have conceived a spatial ambient filled with details. Static images are interrupted by a series of moving elements and technical mechanisms of all kinds, employing light, shadows and sounds to create the dynamic cacophony of a contemporary city.

Matjaž Brulc

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