Neven Korda: The Weight of an Apple

12 - 20 November 2013
Museum of Contemporary Art Metelkova, Maistrova 3 3

The installation by Neven Korda will be on view from Tuesday, 12 November 2013 at the seminar of the Museum of Contemporary Art Metelkova.

The Weight of an Apple is a conceptual work of socially critical autopoetics. This intermedia installation in the aesthetic field of aggregating, processing, and historizcizing information is represented in the form of video. Video, a technique blending various techniques, was used to create new totalities by breaking up, deconstructing, and manipulating (predominantly) fully formed self-sufficient structures, finite forms, and meanings; contemporary video creates new wholes by interconnecting, blurring, and voiding.

Neven Korda started his purely video practice at the turn of the millennium, amidst social defeatism, renewed talk of the end of history, and instrumentalization of art by the new political movements and NGOs in culture. Devising a program of worshipping the beautiful, the artist executed it in scenic performances, video installations, and performative wake-up calls. Using words of hope and sorrow, joy and fear, fleeting nostalgia and sensuous still lifes, he portrays the paradox of the person behind the camera, which consists in the fact that the space of the practice and use of art is shrinking despite the inflated volume of art in culture and generally the ubiquity of "culture" in present-day societies. Art has been instrumentalized to increasingly narrow elitism on the one hand, and on the other, to products for the masses. Cynicism continues strong on the two, now greatly diminished, poles, while in-between there's a growing field of void - a noisy silence.
Korda has come to the conclusion that the spaces of culture in Metelkova, and generally the spaces of the alternative margin, are paradoxically "consumption-oriented", rather than oriented to the "production that is consumed". Korda has collaborated with, and also initiated, platforms for electronic art makers, who bring together two fields of electronics in art: the gallery and workshop culture and the clubs and concerts culture. There is a two-way overflow over the tension limit between art and culture. (N.K.)