In the exhibition Bone of Contention, artist Sara Rman starts with remnants that were created as failed attempts during the preparation of works from an earlier production.
They are torn from the original contexts of the test material and placed in the gallery space. The artist’s focus on alternative dimensions and the very materiality of the photographic medium dictate her process of making the works, which leads to a state of hyperproduction due to extensive testing. This forces the artist into making a distinction between useful and useless material – what is useful, when and for what? Is certain material really useless or just unsuitable for a certain place and time?
The product and its use(lessness) thus serve as a bone of contention in the artist’s creative process. The test material needs an intervention that determines its usefulness. If the newly created work meets the artist’s criteria, it becomes a work of art, otherwise it remains in limbo – somewhere between potentially useful and discarded. This leads to the question of what to do so that the remnants become a complete work again. As an answer, the artist offers a frame element that transforms the test material into an exhibit. The supporting element of the shell emphasizes the content of the work by using complementary aesthetics and materials, and the artist also enhances their relationship by using artificial intelligence in certain works. If the structure of the frame first serves as support for the aesthetics and content of the work, now the aesthetics of the content itself is dictated by the appearance of the frame. Thus, both parts – the shell and the image – are transformed into a completed whole and become “useful” as a work of art again.
Sara Rman (1992, Ljubljana) is active in various arts and crafts fields. She uses photography as a tool of expression through which she explores the concepts of identity, the dimensions of the field of freedom and raw aesthetics. She is interested in boundaries, reaching and exceeding them, blending, obscuring and overlapping. She approaches her work comprehensively and methodologically, not through a formalistic view of the medium and its specifics. The process is therefore of key importance to her and usually also dictates the final format, which is often interactive and installation-oriented. In her photographic opus, she most often questions the indexicality of this medium, its alternative functions beyond exclusively image-forming capabilities and arbitrariness.
Curator: Olja Simčič Jerele
Free admission.
6. 8.–31. 8. 2024
Organisation: DobraVaga / Kino Šiška.
