Matjaž Krivic - Welcome the Future

Matjaž Krivic: Welcome the Future*
Retrospective exhibition of photographs and multivisions by Matjaž Krivic in a cross section of fifteen years of his work: Kaliyuga – Urbanistan – Digging the future – Tribe – Anonymous Friends.

KIBLA PORTAL, Maribor, Slovenija
Exhibition opening: 30 December, 2015

About the exhibition

MATJAŽ KRIVIC is a globe-trotting photographer specializing in capturing the personality and grandeur of indigenous people and places. For 15 years he has covered the face of the earth in his intense, personal and aesthetically moving style that has won him several prestigious awards. He has made the road his home and most of the time you can find him traveling with his camera somewhere between Sahara and Himalaya.
Recently he has joined photo agency Getty Images.
In KIBLA PORTAL he exhibits works from three photography projects Urbanistan, Digging the Future and Tribe.

URBANISTAN
As soon as you hear the word Urbanistan your imagination is whisked off into the traffic mayhem of Calcutta, the tawdriness of the neon sex nightlife in Bangkok, the unbelievable structuralised yet frenzied Tokyo, the suffocating and dusty streets of the (hardly) living body of the decaying Cairo, the roundabout of the hedonistic and aggressive Rio, the unstoppable narcissistic Manhattan, the global supermarket of turbo consumerism.

However, Matjaž Krivic's Urbanistan is a miraculous anti-thesis to all this. It is a story from the other side – a story of the quiet loudness on the margins of total existential, religious, economic and geopolitical chaos. A story that speaks of the indestructible spirit and the eternal search of inspiration that enables survival. It is a story of individuals and social groups who, putting aside the racket and general urban angst, keep searching for the core of existence in a different space and a different time. It is a story of survival through play, prayer, tradition, rituals, travels, socialising and especially, a special light, that the author of the exhibition sees and records so well.

Urbanistan is a space that allows you to take a breather from the city. Any city.

@lensCulture
https://www.instagram.com/lensculture/

Digging the Future: Life in the Burkina Faso artisanal Gold mines
Yakuba emerges from the 50m deep hole after another grueling 11 hour long workday underneath the panorama of eastern Burkina Faso. Unfortunately, he and his team did not manage to find any gold today … Last year his uncle and two of his friends died when a nearby mine collapsed. News? Not at all, it is a part of the everyday life in this part of the country.
What sort of a future is the barely sixteen year old Yakuba digging for himself, as he and his companions keep bringing bags full of stones from the depths of the shafts - some up to 60 meters deep and incredibly narrow - and as he breaths the black earth full of poisonous lead, day in, day out? Future? Anything that keeps him from thinking about today or tomorrow: while grinding the ore, the heavy metals attack his lungs, find their way into the soil and into his drinking water. The mercury and cyanide that he needs in order to extract the gold which then shine for the clients destroy his body and poison the soil he lives in forever.

About 15,000 miners work in the area just around Bani. A third of them are children. They are the children of the mines. Most of them have never been to school. For many of them, the mines are their only home. The International Labor Organisation considers mining one of the worst forms of child labor. This is because of the immediate risks and long-term health problems it poses with exposure to dust, toxic chemicals and heavy metals on top of back-breaking manual labor.

Tribe – Somewhere under the Rainbow
As far as new age social utopias go, it’s doesn’t get any more spectacular than the Rainbow Gathering. With members in the tens of thousands and a long spanning tradition in every imaginable alternative lifestyle, the Rainbow tribe certainly knows how to put together a happening. It began with the counter-culture “dropout” movement in the USA and a disappointed generation searching to start society from scratch by moving to remote rural areas, far from the reach of their corrupt industrial civilization (or Babylon as the Rastafarian fraction likes to refer to it). Temporary hippy villages started popping up all over the globe to accommodate the ever growing new age nomadic community, all the while maintaining an air of secrecy and mystique - locations and dates typically spread through word of mouth and are communicated in a romanticized tribal language of full moons, rivers and mountains. Rainbow gatherings soon developed their own ethos, rituals and fashion - the “Sioux chief meets Himalayan sadhu” image being the most popular. Although outside observers tend to dismiss the attempted split from mainstream society as nothing more than a holiday camping trip for hippies, there certainly are lessons to be learned from the Rainbow warriors. For starters, it is admirable how thousands of people manage to cohabit together peacefully for extended periods of time in extremely difficult circumstances (no electricity, no running water, no shops) without leaders, policemen or even organizers. There is no hierarchic structure, food is commonly distributed and every group action is decided upon through a process of consensus making called a “talking circle”. Not bad for a bunch of freaks. Despite these achievements in radical democracy, social relationships tend to replicate those back in Babylon, the predominantly white middle class community maintaining a conservative view on gender roles and even bursting into proud nationalist mode every now and then. Threading through the Rainbow family’s confusing culture codes can prove even more difficult a task than overcoming the rocky pathways to their remote camping grounds, but those willing to make the effort can be sure to find one of the most picturesque and surreal human settlements on the face of the planet.
Text by Miha Blazic – N’Toko

Matjaž Krivic has exhibited since 1999 in Slovenia and abroad, with solo exhibitions in Russia, China, Tibet, Croatia and Slovenia, and group exhibitions in Australia, USA, France, England, Ireland, Israel, Finland and Serbia. The works created during the extensive period of his travels have won him several prestigious awards.  
 
Matjaž Krivic has exhibited at the MMC KIBLA and Kibela Gallery on several occasions: in 2002 with Kaliyuga – a multivisionary project and exhibition, the following year with Mir (Peace), in 2005 with Tribe and in 2010 with Tales from a distant Earth. The photography exhibition Svetišča Zemlje (Earth Temples) adorned the promenade of the Maribor City Park in 2006, featuring sixty large-scale panoramic photographs on 27 panels, as well as projections of Krivic’s multivision Kaliyuga, Svetovi tišine (Silent Spaces) in Tribe.

www.krivic.com
https://www.instagram.com/krivicmatjaz/

KIBLA PORTAL, Valvasorjeva ulica 40, Maribor, Slovenia
Opening Hours Tuesday−Saturday: 16.00–20.00