Activities of SCCA-Ljubljana collaborators
Neven Korda: KDOxx / Confessionf of a Videast
Video ambient and performance

Performance: Thursday, 17th November 2011, at 8 pm
Video ambience will be on display until the end of the evening.
Aksioma, Projct Space, Komenskega 18, Ljubljana

We are informing you about the project conducted by our associate in the field of video art and archives Neven Korda.

Performance Confessions of a Videast, with which Neven Korda is going to open his video ambience WHOxx, originates from a seemingly simple question What is video?, which the artist had posed to himself more than a decade ago. His answer is pithy: Video is light, which – through the medium – is converted back into light. In this case, however, the medium is not just the camera or the carrier of video image with material that has been shot in advance; rather, the medium is the visitor’s body, and the archive of this medium is memory, for the image does not exist until it is stored. Korda is interested not only in the use of his own video material, but also in video as ritual and event.

In the installation, Neven Korda explores perception that accompanies one’s entry into video space. He engages with the anthropology of video image as well as the archaeology of video image, insofar as every media projection can be understood as an archive of memories. The visitors’ actions transform the space because the cameras transmit them directly through electronic manipulation and the shaping of electrical signal.

The artist treats space as a social political arena, which he transposes to video not only to show the feedback and the endless loop of public activity, but also to give space to the specific aesthetics of the medium of video, which – like the identity of contemporary individuals – is integrated into the generative processes of constant repetition and reinterpretation of existing statements.

With its multiplicity of transformations, video ambience WHOxx provokes, simulates and parodies contemporary identity, which seems to have an unlimited number of choices, while in fact it anticipates precisely determined modes of conduct, which is why breakdowns and errors in this uniform system appear not only as aesthetic but also political statements. The amazement of the visitor, confronted with his/her live video mirror image, is not unlike the amazement of the child in the mirror phase, when one’s subjectivity is first constituted. The visitor also realises that s/he can manipulate space, however, not completely, for some elements of the installation stick to their own rhythm, doubling, feedback and other electronic effects. Through spatial immersion in video ambience, the viewer becomes a part of space; s/he starts absorbing light and the cameras start absorbing the light of the body.

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Neven Korda is a videast and a multimedia artist with a lasting artistic practice. He explores the issue of the essence of video as artistic expression and video as a medium. He speaks about the so-called pure video. He started using video in the early eighties, as a member of the theatre group FV 112/15, when affordable video equipment became available at the market. He is co-founder of FV Video, the independent video production which has brought to fruition several artistic, music and documentary video projects. Until the end of the eighties, he was a member of the group Borghesia; he did the visuals for their performances and concerts and he directed their video clips. He was a member of the artistic tandem ZANK with Zemira Alajbegović. In the nineties, he also worked as video editor, author of TV images, director and realiser of projects and TV shows. At the end of the millennium, he converted to research, practice and recording of pure video art.

Production: Aksioma - Institute for Contemporary Art, Ljubljana, 2011 (www.aksioma.org)

[Published November 18, 2011]