Staš Kleindienst: First Decade / Second Decade / Third Decade
Painting, alkyd on canvas, 2013 / 2013 / 2014
First Decade is a part of a painting trilogy (the ‘Decades’) dealing with different states of exception that are formed in order to control and exploit social, political or economic spaces. The first painting focuses on the discourse of security as a guise for military interventions that in turn provide a territory for neo-colonial exploitation and produce physical violence as well as condition for dependency of the colonized on western financial institutions.
Second Decade focuses on the state of exception that is deriving from economic crisis, which, through the discourse of collective saving, produces conditions for radical pauperization of social space and rights on one hand, while on the other, similar to third world neo-colonization, it makes conditions for economic interventions from financial centers.
Third Decade leads the ‘Decades’ trilogy into a dystopian scenario of a state of exception that affects the human mind directly and forces it to act accordingly with the regime’s interpretation of freedom. The social space is de-historicized and de-politicized, making conditions for apolitical self to impose his own individual demand on the declarative level, leaving no space for collective effort that could, in turn, produce social antagonism. The painting as such relates to the declarative and apolitical space of today’s social media.
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Staš Kleindienst (born 1979) finished his MA in fine art in 2009 at the Academy of Fine Art and Design in Ljubljana. His work addresses the issue of origin, representation, and naturalization of power and authority. In this context he is also interested in mechanisms behind the contemporary art system, especially the aspect of creating value and positioning of the artworks into historical contexts and discourses. He works mainly in painting, drawing and video. In 2014 he won the OHO Group Award, the main national visual arts award for young visual artists. He lives and works in Ljubljana, Slovenia.
Artist's web page: staskle.tumblr.com
