OR poiesis (a.k.a. Petra Kapš): Attraction. Petrification

OR poiesis (a.k.a. Petra Kapš): Attraction. Petrification
Intimate – cosmic dialogue of elements
29 April–28 May 2022
artKIT

You are cordially invited to the opening of the solo exhibition by OR poiesis entitled Attraction. Petrification Intimate – cosmic dialogue of elements, which will take place on Friday, 29 April 2022, at 6 p.m. at the artKIT gallery.

INVITATION (PDF)
ABOUT THE EXHIBITION (PDF)

How do the primordial, the eonian concrete reality, and the moving moment, the stone and the woman, meet?

Attraction. Petrification develops the theme of human-stone hybridity. It realizes its manifestation through several variations and media: performative video, abstract sound composition, and a series of prints of processual-performative images.

The artist explores human-stone hybridity – that strange otherness of radically intimate proximity – through performative collaboration with entities radically different from herself (or so it seems at first glance). The immobile stone entities, with their eonian persistence in a seemingly unchanging pose, emanate a field, a kind of tidal wave, which gently but persistently attracts much more malleable life forms. She uses the camera (sound, video, photography) to record what is happening: how her body reacts and behaves in a specific geological formation, how the subtle oscillations of the latter affect performative coexistence. The second axis cyclically unfolds in an intimate space. The creation of processual images with a scanner, mirror, stones and her own body follows the light of the lunation and the cycles of cosmic sequences in time (full/new moon), responding to each period's emotional states and creative moods as encouraged by the moonlight or its absence. The sound field – the connective tissue between the elements – invites you to the intermediate (sub)sound substrate of minerals and liquids, to a deep listening of the elements. Sound has direct access to the human interior and seeks resonant harmonies. In the process of creative encounter, the elements create new fields of synchronization, intermediate bodies blossom, and eavesdropping/appearances of subtle manifestations of ambient spirits, atmospheres with light and shadow emerge.

The inspiration for the exhibition Attraction. Petrification is the creative attraction between rocks and human. The artist draws attention to the intuition that human is not only close to animals and plants, but the closeness descends much deeper, into the inorganic, the mineral, and extends timelessly into the cosmic. The friendship between my hand and this stone enacts an ancient and undeniable eros, the affinity of matter with itself (David Abram, Becoming Animal; An Earthly Cosmology). The performative practice with the elements is based on processuality, on deepening and expanding the perceptual field. Attraction. Petrification offers a process of attunement with the elements, this time with rocks.

OR poiesis (a.k.a. Petra Kapš) is an artist and researcher in the field of bio- and geo-acoustics, hydroacoustics, auditory perception, interactive sound performance in concrete, acoustic space and digitally augmented reality, web transmission and art radio. Her work weaves between the art of sound, radio, space-time poetry, performance and photography. She extends the word, her primary medium, into the sonorous spheres of space-time poetry. She develops a performative practice of field recording, explores and enacts the possibilities of the author's radio space, and focuses on the aurality of spatialized memory and temporal wells. Alongside all digital dimensions, the physical presence of the body is central. Her sound works record solitudes. In recent years, she has made a significant contribution to the development of interactive, sonic and performative art practices. Her experimentation and development of location-based media in relation to the auditory sensory system and the development of topographic sound archives, articulating subtle interventions in public space, and exploring memory and remembering, highlighted through sound, sensation and perception, in the dynamic between the ancient and the contemporary, are important. She works in Slovenian and international environments. She is a founding member of CENSE (Central European Network for Sonic Ecologies) and a member of JATA C and the radio.earth collective. Selection of recent artworks: Corpi sonori, echi d’amore (Etherea Art Gallery, Palazzo Ducale di Genova); intimate radio & sound walk, XV Festival de Arte Sonoro TSONAMI, Čile; KAMIsTONE, SOUND EXPLICIT Festival; TERITORIJ (radio.earth, 27th International Festival of Computer Arts Maribor; B PETRIFIED, tidal love (sound gallery IGLOO, Czech Republic); SONIHANJA (Emanat, Maribor Minorite Monastery, Equrna Gallery Ljubljana, Dance Inn, Zagreb); YAMAMAYU (Tonšpur Pasaža, 26. International Festival of Computer Arts Maribor); Kamnolom KISETSU (Steklenik Gallery, Cona, Ljubljana); Spell of Silence (KIBLIX Festival, Maribor); Doors to Paradise, interventions in public space (Vienna, Budapest); Sound Wall (KIBLIX Festival, Maribor); Theorema (Škuc Gallery, Ljubljana).

< OR poiesis, Attraction. Petrification, 2022, collage.

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Production: Petra Kapš in collaboration with ACE KIBLA
The project is supported by the Municipality of Maribor and the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Slovenia.