Photo: Jaka Babnik, Marko Batista
Museum of Contemporary Art Metelkova
+MSUM hosting Vitreous Sky within the Steklenik Gallery program
Marko Batista: Vitreous Sky
interactive sound installation
5. 5.–29. 5. 2022
Thursday, 5 May 2022
19.00 – exhibition opening
20.00 – live sound event
The multi-channel sound installation Vitreous Sky by the intermedia artist Marko Batista is a continuaton of the artist's unique artistic reflection and exploration of modern post-fact society in relation to technological progress, or simply the ties within the society-nature-technology, in the context of ecocritical discourse, environmental policies and pressing humanist concepts (nature, the Anthropocene, the capitalist colonial matrix, etc.). It is somewhat a continuance of the positions instituted by the artist in the Fluid Particles of Volcanic Ash (Gallery 001, 2017). Through this apocalyptic sound-and-space installation, the viewer - despite the absence of the Anthropocene - indirectly faces its presence through a devastated landscape with nothing but traces of a few surviving (post)humanoids.
The exhibition revolves around two precisely crafted interactive, hybrid, visual-sound objects - prototypes of a dystopian habitat of our futures, created by the artist to address the project on two intertwined levels, i.e., the symbolic and the practical level of artistic representation. The Vitreous Sky installation is a visual-and-sound composition. In the visual part composed of a two-part mimetic installation with a 3D printer-produced postnatural environment, the artist establishes a dialogue between urban and rural habitats. The sonic structure of the installation rests on the electrolysis of toxic compounds, which produce a sound within an extended electronic system in the process of self-oscillation and extraction. Its placement in the center gives matter agency, endowing the work with openness in becoming and space for surprise. With the selected elements, or better yet, matters and materialities, Marko Batista not only explores but always reflects, which allows him to move away from moralism and enter into open, always fluid, and changing spaces, over which even the artist himself does not have complete control.
Exhibition curators: Irena Pivka, Brane Zorman
More on Steklenik homepage.
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The Steklenik Gallery, produced by the Cona Institute, which established an art exhibition space in the Tivoli Greenhouse, no longer operates there as of February 2022. The gallery's future is about mobility and networking with partners who recognize the program's quality and want to present it to their audiences.
Cona Institute program is co-funded by City of Ljubljana, Dept. for Culture and Ministry of Culture RS.
