Goran Bertok: Red in black

29. oktober – 14. november 2010
Curator: Miha Colner
KiBela / Kibla Maribor

The exhibition is part of the festival * Photonic Moments – Month of Photography 2010, which takes place between 21 October and 30 November 2010.

Red and black, a solo exhibition by Goran Bertok, displays an overview of his recent works of art, which were created and partly shown in the past six years. The photo series Visitors (2004), Post Mortem (2007), Red (2009) and the untitled Video trilogy (2008) present continued artistic explorations of the artist, who, for the past twenty years, has been applying his own conceptual premises to record and portray the human body, its fragility and transience, which eventually led to the very end, the physical death. In doing so, he is not merely interested in wider cultural and social aspects of the contemporary understanding of body and death, but rather in the very encounter with matter as the consequence of a discontinued life. Although in the spirit of the time, his photographic portraits of helpless bodies have become rather subversive, this is merely the expected collateral reaction of an individual integrated in the conventions of a given space and time. This is followed by unconscious referring to and interfering with the endless symbolism of the phenomenon of death, although the artist manages to avoid it by applying direct naturalism. However, the visual material on display is always provided a wider historical, social or intimate context by unconscious associations to the iconography of death as well as the fear of the obscure and unknown, which death certainly is.
Having in earlier periods been documenting and using staged mythological scenes of wounded bodies and unconventional sexual practices incorporating conscious pleasure-oriented self-harm, in 2004 Bertok made a radical leap forward in the exploration of the human body. His series Visitors hinted at guidelines of an artistic development that focuses on obsessive documentation and staging of body transience without any pathos or moralisations: after its physical death, the body merely remains a doomed dead piece of meat. Thus the motifs of burning corpses in abstracted spacelessness represent a naturalist, yet completely aestheticized document on the omnipresent cremating procedure, hidden carefully from the public eye. Old age, disease, death and facing death bodies are somehow placed on the edge of the contemporary society, which rather uses various channels to emphasise the imperative of health, youth and strength. Bertok approaches death from the perspective of life: he is intrigued by its mythology reflecting through history the notion of the so-called dignified death, he is fascinated by the psychological effects of the omnipresent fear of death and by the organic remnants of the once alive bodily system. He never idealizes death, as it always stands for fear, pain, agony and pain, he rather sees it as a consequence of life.
The series Post Mortem addresses what is accentuated in motifs portraying brutally real images of frozen bodies in the process of their inevitable biological decay being slowed down artificially. In the sterile mortuary environment, the artist focuses on details of body parts expressing imperfection, helplessness and extreme depersonalisation. Crooked fingers, wrinkled skin, yellow hue, darkened eye sockets, damaged texture of the skin and contracted faces relate to the iconographical motif Memento mori, the peculiar contemporary version of which manages to avoid any glorifications and moralisations. Placed in front of the viewer are explicit images of death as allowed by the medium of (colour) photography. Portraying the physical death of a creature that has only begun to live, the series Red takes a step further in the obsessive exploration of the depths of life and death. The photographs of a dead baby floating in the dark spacelessness can be read as rude images of the reality comprising pain, suffering and the feeling of transience and relentlessness, and at the same time as glorified and visually effective metaphors of the inevitable end. By means of the untitled Video trilogy, Bertok has integrated various levels of his own creativity and rounded up the current installation – reflecting the past black-and-white imaginarium and the reference to studio photography featuring live models. Positioned in an undefined space, the repetitive video works performatively display particular details of bodies wounded ritually.
Miha Colner

Curator: Miha Colner
29. oktober – 14. november 2010
Opening: 29. oktobra ob 20. uri
KiBela / Kibla Maribor

The exhibition is part of the festival * Photonic Moments – Month of Photography 2010, which takes place between 21 October and 30 November 2010.

Co-producer: *B51 Society*