P74 Gallery ARCHIVE PAGE

20 December 2013 – 7 January 2014
P74 Gallery, Trg Prekomorskih brigad 1, Ljubljana

You are kindly invited to the opening of the exhibition “Scratch the surface” by Tomaž Furlan at P74 Gallery on Friday, 20 December 2013 at 19h.

Curated by: Barbara Sterle Vurnik

Please join us for a pre-opening discussion with Barbara Sterle Vurnik and Tomaž Furlan on Friday, 20 December 2013 at 18:30h.

The machine as a manufacturer of nonsense
Barbara Sterle Vurnik

Tomaž Furlan deals specifically with the uncompromising disclosure of the pathological conditions of contemporary society and its behaviour. Consequently, all of these bizarre machines of his are also nonsensical and self-serving. He creates these machines in the outpouring of experiences and findings from observing our society, and uses them to caricature society itself. Indeed Furlan uses the concept of the machine as a metaphor, but it is also an innovative creative field for constructing and manufacturing still new, and yet unseen, forms of machines. In their function and composition, Furlan’s machines are driven to the extreme possible, absurd limits. And with this, the artist focuses on the elements that define this key set of nonsense: a monotonous and infinitely-many repetition of one and the same order of different tasks and movements, where it is impossible to perceive any final logical goal. When Furlan invents, he applies new machines to the condition where an individual makes use of them and seeks new forms of substitutes for one’s work, and with this falls under an even greater burden of one’s own doing. The management of these machines becomes all the more unproductive, taking even more of one’s time, making one even more tired, and entrenching one even more in the repetitive system of everyday life.

Tomaž Furlan attempts to comment as authentically as possible on the fact that the individual is evermore becoming a machine and at the same time crossing into some new slave relationship. A slave relationship with oneself, with one’s own demands, with which life becomes only more of a production “per se”. Almost like in the 1927 expressionist film Metropolis by Fritz Lang, in the sense of the dull and tiresome atmosphere of the simple human in a class-divided society. As if we have returned to some old, worn out social structure, only now, we are becoming victims of ourselves.

The art of machines is an inexhaustible source. If Da Vinci explored the limits of human possibilities, if the Constructivists praised the future, aesthetics and the function of the machine, and if contemporary arts often sees here a new medium, then Furlan’s machine is defined as an exclamation, a critical commentary that society has contributed in its drive for replacing human work with different devices (whether they be mechanical or digital) to the edge where it posits the question: in all of our aspirations towards robotisation, does a person now only become an android? What can we say is even the purpose of a machine, if it should make a person’s life easier, but in reality only makes it more difficult?

Tomaž Furlan is the recipient of the OHO Award 2012. Given each year by P74 Gallery to a young, progressive visual artist, the award is intended to evaluate and encourage young innovative creators and their artistic production. The exhibition by Tomaž Furlan is the combined result of the artist’s previous investigations and of his several month residency this year in New York, which, along with this solo exhibition at P74 Gallery, he received as part of the OHO Award.

The programme of the P.A.R.A.S.I.T.E. Institute is supported by the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Slovenia and by the Municipality of Ljubljana, Department for Culture.