MG+MSUM

DRAUGHT | Ana Likar: Figure 1.1 (other forms of unrest)
9. June – 18. September 2022
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The exhibition is part of the series Draught, presenting younger authors and fresh ideas.

Ana Likar
Figure 1.1 (other forms of unrest), 2022

video installation (video length: 8 hours)
In collaboration with Benjamin Nelson (Aviary, 2018, 6-channel sound installation)


Museum of Contemporary Ar Metelkova, +MSUM
Opening and presentation: Thursday 9. June 2022, 20:00, 
Duration: 9 June – 18 September 2022

Curator: Ana Mizerit.


Some birds change their habitats as the seasons change, and can only be found in certain areas during those times when conditions are best for them. While hundreds of years ago attempts at explaining their absences included such conclusions as that birds spend winters hibernating, submerged underwater, or even that they change into other species, it is now known that they fly for weeks on end, covering thousands of kilometers, to warmer climes. Some birds sleep during their flight with one eye open, others sleep in short intervals, their bodies adapting to not requiring prolonged sleep.

Jonathan Crary’s book 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep opens with a description of ornithological research and related experiments aimed at finding ways to adapt human sleep patterns with the aid of understanding avian mechanisms of coping with sleep deprivation, or, put differently, finding ways to make the absence of the need for sleep a human reality as well. In this, the apparently ahistorical, essential, or natural role of sleep is replaced by a changeable and precarious position – the modes of sleep change relative to the conditions they exist in, and the space (or duration) of sleep can shrink.

Doing away with sleep would mean abolishing that part of life that is considered unproductive, and this could ultimately lead to equating unproductiveness with obsolescence. It would abolish a part of life that is primarily vulnerable, powerless, and inactive, that requires a safe haven and trust in another, and that is the direct antithesis of the vigilance of the nightguard and his uninterrupted actualization of power and control. Sleeping bodies are hard to instrumentalize, and the time spent sleeping cannot be capitalized – it is a retreat, suspension and break, all at the same time.

In her work Figure 1.1 (Other Forms of Unrest), the artist reflects on conditions that make sleep impossible, seeking parallels between sleep and the structural position of art and her own conditions of work. The video – with a duration as long as the opening hours of the museum – was filmed from the bird observatory in the Škocjanski zatok nature reserve just before dawn, when birdsong drowns out all other ambient sounds. While birds sporadically flit over the image, a port with cranes and transport containers slowly emerges on the horizon over the course of the eight hours. The only thing to break (and at the same time make) the prolonged duration of the video are the Figures, deriving their vocabulary and content from scientific literature on birds, their migrations, and sleeplessness. The sound of the video, however, is not the birdsong recorded in the nature reserve, but the synthetic birds of the musician Benjamin Nelson singing to one another through various active phases all day long.

 

 

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Ana Likar (1996) graduated in art from the University of Applied Arts Vienna (the Department of Site-Specific Art). Likar is an intermedia artist, always starting from issues related to the conditions of the production of narratives and images, and trying to address what remains hidden. The eroded ideas of progress, the ruins of modernity, the ideological loops in popular science discourses, and travel in time and space (the universe) are topics that often find form in her works in layering, (non)transparency, and repetitions. Likar has shown her work at several group and solo exhibitions in Vienna, Ljubljana, Belgrade, Moscow and Gyumri (Armenia).

 
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