Memory of Violence – Dreams of the Future, Slo authors

Nataša Berk
Dada or Dadaism is a European form of artistic anarchy. The Dadaists expressed disbelief about the value system of bourgeois art, which is based on personal taste.
Traditional artistic esthetics was attacked by means of irrational standpoints, thereby provoking the existing conservative self-complacency. Dadaism created an atmosphere in which art is alive in the “spontaneous” moment, with an aim to paralyze tradition and shatter the established values. Dadaism claims that everything is anti-art. But the provocative, negatively oriented creative perspective has influenced the creation of artworks, which opened the gateway both to the development of 20th century art, as well as the contemporary art of the present moment.

100 years later...

Dada is here and now. Dada is everywhere. At the end of all beginnings, of all the different art genres and movements, producing art is fundamental. Art offers answers to the posed questions and asks new, as yet unspoken questions! Art is a provocation! Art documents history and changes the present! Dada is the future!

Nataša Berk was born in 1978 in Böblingen, Germany. In 2005 she graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna. As a citizen of the world, she now lives and works everywhere. We can describe Berk as an ironically-provocative existentialist avantgardist with an abstract instinct. Typically unbound by genres, she works in various art disciplines. Another important part of her artistic expression is her work as a performance artist.

Boris Beja
Dormitory, Galerija Ravne, 2014 (installation, ready-made, object, screen printing, textiles)
The vacant hospital beds are a ready-made, and point to the problem under consideration by means of an image that is not there. Through the absence, we can sense the presence, and it appears as if someone has just got up, left, died and disappeared from the space, while we as viewers have missed out on this performative act. Psychologically, the work includes the human body, and could therefore also be advocated as a collective figurative sculpture; however, it is not a depiction of man, because it does not include a depiction of the body: instead, the so-called sculpture has been stripped of the manifestation of the body. The image of an empty bed in itself creates and mandates visible that which it is missing, which is its primary function, and to which it can be associated with. And in that same bed, taken out of the context of a neurological clinic, many bodies or subjects have lied, leaving behind their traces, their information, their pain, their own presence, which is anonymous in this case, a property of the state, a property of the people, shifted to a new thinking context with a reference to reality and the time context that has passed by, yet remains caught inside these objects.

Boris Beja was born in Trbovlje in 1986. A graduate of the Faculty of Natural Sciences and Engineering (graphic technology) and the Academy of Fine Arts and Design (sculpting), Beja was awarded the Prešeren Award for Students in the category of sculpting. His work is a combination of various fine arts' practices into an estheticized, yet at the same time very straightforward address; a social critique exposing the symptoms of present-day society. Beja has exhibited in numerous group and solo exhibitions home and abroad. Since 2014 he acts as assistant art manager at the Škuc Gallery. Boris Beja lives and works in Ljubljana.

DK
The exhibition Testimonies presents the most recent artistic production of DK, an artist and photographer, who has been active on Ljubljana’s underground art scene for more than 20 years. Although his new works in terms of form and content somewhat digress from his mode of ex-pression and anticipate an apparent break with his previous aesthetic, they clearly show gradual conceptual pursuit of distinctive artistic tendencies. The same as the majority of ‘artists-in-search’, DK is also subject to constant creative mutations and the implementation of new referential im-pulses. With utter sensibility he follows the flows of quickly changing social realities that – like it or not – every individ-ual is subject to. He intervenes by way of uncompromising comments in a form of precisely designed visual meta-phors.
In the series War we witness traces of the actual maelstrom of war – portraits of people and of deconstructed spaces and ruins – the reality that used to be utterly different from what we now see in the photographs.

DK (born in 1970) is a member of Ljubljana-based multimedia artistic and production group Strip Core. His artistic practice mostly revolves around photography which helps him to create specific compositions that through selected visual metaphors provide intimate and socially engaged comments on now and here. Indeed, they are his response to current social and political reality. In his artistic career he exhibited his works in various contexts and venues both locally and internationally.