Doxa, from the video and photographic series HI-RES done in collaboration with Maja Delak and Mala Kline, 2006/2007
exhibition catalog (3,1 MB)
Marina Gržinic / Aina Šmid
The Slovenian artist and theoretician Marina Gržinic, who together with Aina Šmid has realized an extensive oeuvre of video and film, is among the most important analysts of the post-Socialist situation in Europe and of the influence of global power systems on the transformation of Western life environments. Gržinic sees the former totalitarian power of Communism being supplanted by a West that under the pretense of democracy has itself seized power. In the wake of the Cold War and the expansion of the EU to the Black Sea coast, it has lost its former enemy to the east and must now in a quasi psychoanalytic manner search for the ‚Other‘ within itself. How can bipolar entities, which once pursued very separate existences, merge into a single system? Aspects of this inner division as demanded by the West become excessively apparent in the so-called plutonomies, countries in which the gap between rich and poor is continually growing and the capital market is concentrated in the hands of very few individuals. On the level of the general population, there is a spread of schizophrenic and affective disorders transferred from the collective to the individual. The picture of a woman cowering on the ground, with a helping hand reaching out in her direction, is a challenge to take reality into one’s own hand and to accent the individual in contrast with the collective, thus coming to grips with one’s own identity against an externally defined power.
