Photo: Bosa Rosa
14 December 2023 – 4 January 2024
P74 Gallery
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You are cordially invited to attend the opening of the exhibition Into Other Form by Bosa Rosa on Thursday, 14 December 2023, between 7pm and 9pm at the P74 Gallery in Ljubljana.
The exhibition will be on view till 4 January 2024 at the usual opening hours of the Gallery (monday to friday, 12.00 to 18.00, extra viewings upon individual arrangement).
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In recent years, there has been a distinct increase in interest in the spiritual, transcendent, and even occult, which is not surprising given the global crisis and the existential hardships of individuals. Technological development has made it possible for previously difficult-to-access knowledge to become something that (at least in appearance) everyone can access. Still, it is unsurprising that we also witness a market of the transcendent and consumption of the spiritual. The individualised and deregulated »New Age« religion of the 21st century has become an industry dominated by the values of novelty, rapid changes, individualism, and consumer choice. It has become a refuge for many individuals who need a patch for the insecurity and pressures of contemporary society. The project Into Other Form (2023) began primarily as a research of self-care and knowing oneself through others.
The project crosses several fields and is based on processuality. In the current phase, it manifests itself in the layout as an interactive installation designed according to the P74 Gallery space. The installation serves as a platform for connecting the artist’s and her colleagues’ interests. The key meeting point is connecting the »New Age« industry with artificial intelligence or new technologies. Instead of (merely) individual experience and choice, which through advertising campaigns have become primarily ways of expanding one’s individuality, the author wants to focus on collective experience. She focuses on the body and movement and asks where the self ends and the other begins, or »Where is the boundary between you and me?«. The central part of the installation is a video projection that creates different forms conditioned by the participants’ movements. Using the open AI sensor »Kinect«, the camera detects various selected points on the body and transforms them into a real-time video depending on how the transfer of the information is programmed. It thereby detects and reacts to any person moving in the room. The artist has also researched the recording of dance and movement (mainly historically), and this software appears to be useful for the possibilities of movement. This time, however, she especially wants the awareness of one’s body and self to become a matter of duality and plurality – the interaction of bodies that become aware.
The video content is transformed, condensed and dissolved by the presence of people, like an atmosphere between visitors. The shapes, i.e. the flow of colours and design surfaces, are deliberately programmed so that soft transitions and forms that create a specific mood can be observed on the projection. Thus, the project becomes an ambience built on the integrity of passing through space, interspace, and non-space. It is a conception of time and gesture that creates form. It is a construct of boundaries between depth, void, and surface. The otherness that is not there that is becoming and remaining. Knowledge and care, closeness and plurality, in another form. At the crossroads from the intimate to the universal, the project takes new-age spirituality and the flood of contents with the theme of working on oneself for a broader theme but transforms it when it focuses on the unmediated, physical proximity of the other. It strives for the transformation that occurs when the need for constant improvement and constant change is abandoned. It does not want to be a mirror but an extension of the individual’s movement through space and time. In short, the basic principle of the project is metamorphosis, the transition from one form to another, the merging of forms and phenomena expressed in fluidity dictated by changes over time and, crucially, by the presence of the human body.
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The exhibition is part of the Open Term for a Young Intermedia Artist series that the P.A.R.A.S.I.T.E. Institute has been running since 2016. It represents the first solo presentation of a young artist in Ljubljana.
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Bosa Rosa is a pseudonym used by the artist Zala Klančnik Žabkar (1995, Slovenj Gradec). She has studied at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Ljubljana, majoring in painting, video and new media, and at the AVA Academy of Visual Arts. She is an interdisciplinary artist who works with video, drawing, painting, photography, installation, performance and computer 2D and 3D graphics. In her artistic practice, she explores the dimensions of corporality and the possibilities of embodiment within virtual and real space and connects with colleagues from other fields. Her work has been presented in the solo exhibition Intus at the Media Nox Gallery in Maribor (2023) and in the group exhibitions at the 5th Triennial of Young Artists PREMIERE 2022 at the Center for Contemporary Arts Celje and Melting at the Alkatraz Gallery (2022). She has participated in projects at the former Autonomous Factory Rog, Red Dawns Festival, Lighting Guerrilla Festival, Floating Castle Festival and on Radio Student.
