Editor Lydia Pribisova, Flash Art The World’s Leading Art Magazine (Czech and Slovak Edition Vol.V- No.18, May-August, 2011) on I Fought the X and the X Won
The international exhibition of contemporary art I FOUGHT THE X AND THE X WON was held in April 2011 in the Museum of Art in Cluj. It was curated by Dr Raphael Vella from Malta, who together with artists Dionisis Christofilogiannis (from Greece) and Adrian Scicluna (from Malta), invited 22 artists from Malta, Romania, Slovak Republic, Albania, USA, Austria and Greece.
The title of the show sounds a little bit as moral imperative or a challenge to fight for our rights and it is talking about the possibility of substitution of variable entities and about different ways of interpretation of art works. It is trying to show us the categorization of artistic research and dividing the winners and the losers. It is a testimony of relationships of power in contemporary social and cultural reality. This kind of thinking is very close to the strategy of some of the present artists. The installation Still Fight (2007) of Michal Moravcik is dealing with the never ending fight, antagonism and resistance. It is referring to permanent hidden protest, it manifests the artist’s skeptic attitude toward the affirmations coming from medial and political ambient which are usually understood as facts without the critical analyses. The banal themes are often the food for politically manipulated mass media and in many cases are pretence for the hidden games of power. The similar position is given away also in the video showing the boxing woman of Austrian artist Katharina Swoboda Betty and the Camera (2011). The irony and relativity of establishment are characteristic also of the works of Albanian-American artist Helidon Gjergji, whose video The Blue Danube (2004) showed the endoscopic registration of the house-tube accompanied by the waltz-music of Strauss. Works of many artists as Adrian Scicluna, Siebren Versteeg, Dionisis Christofilogiannis, Eva Mitala and Petra Feriancová are focused on the questions of contemporary communication and its vanity, which is created by long distances, by translations and by different coding. Petra Feriancová in her sound collage Itinerario (2006) mixed two texts from two different books, which meet and communicate in some points, but in another they are flowing to be lost. The video and prints of Adrian Scicluna reflect contemporary internet-based communication, where the real present is substituted by the virtual present, which lead to the feelings of loneliness and dislocation. The main contribution of this exhibition was the confrontation of the artistic discourses from different countries and finding unexpected parallels. The show will be held again during the summer in the National Museum of Fine Art in Valetta, Malta.
Lydia Pribisova (Editor of Flash Art Magazine, Czech and Slovak Edition)