Aleksandra Domanović: From yu to me
5 – 24 June 2014
P74 Gallery, Trg Prekomorskih brigad 1, Ljubljana
You are cordially invited to the opening of the exhibition by Aleksandra Domanović at P74 Center and Gallery on Thursday, 5 June 2014 at 19h.
Aleksandra Domanović is one of the leading young artists recognised in the international space. In her work, she deals with the circulation and reception of information and images. In numerous projects making use of digital media, she takes on the role of a mediator through quotations, transformation and archiving. She is especially interested in how information/images change their meaning as they traverse different contexts and historical circumstances. Domanović is interested in how objects are re-entering, in new forms and formats, in distribution and circulation – from format to file, surface, studio, exhibition space, from camera, to Photoshop, website, Facebook, blog, and on and on. Instead of confronting the question of dematerialisation, the new generation of young new media creators deals more with the question of how objects in today’s society re-materialise. In short, the Internet is no longer a non-space, moreover, it is a tool and network which is both digital and material: it functions not only on the level of codes and algorithms, but is simultaneously urban, political, socio-economic, geographic, etc.
The widespread public use of the Internet began right in the time of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of socialism. The project From yu to me is an intimate meditation on technology and the birth of the Internet in Yugoslavia. The Internet domain .yu was first registered in 1989 and Yugoslavia was the first socialist country to begin using the Internet. The following year the country began to collapse.
In 2012 Domanović made an interview with Slovenian computer scientist Borka Jerman Blažić – who registered the domain .yu in 1989 and created the first Internet services in Yugoslavia – and with scientist Mirjana Tasić, who took over the administration of the domain in 1994. Despite the dramatic political and social changes occurring in Yugoslavia, the domain remained in use and was only discontinued in 2010, long after the breakup of Yugoslavia. The deactivation of the .yu domain can be understood as the definitive symbolic elimination of the country of Yugoslavia. The Museum of Yugoslav History in Belgrade acquired the domain as its first virtual artefact – an act that took place only a few months after New York’s MoMA acquired the @ symbol into its collection.
Aleksandra Domanović (b. 1981) lives in Berlin. She has presented her work at a number of exhibitions and biennial events. She has had solo exhibitions in Kunsthalle Basel; Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin; Villa du Parc, Annemasse; SPACE, London; Tanya Leighton, Berlin. In recent years she has participated in some of the most important group exhibitions: 12th Biennale de Lyon; ICP Trienale, New York (2013); In Practice: You never look at me from the place from which I see you, Sculpture Center, New York (2012); Les Cadeaux Du Présent, Centre d’art Neuchâtel, Switzerland (2011); based in Berlin, Neuer Berliner Kunstverein, Berlin (2011); and Free, New Museum, New York (2010). From 2006 to 2012 she was the editor of the web publication of contemporary arts vvork.com. In 2012 for the 4th Marrakech Biennale she was commissioned to create a large public sculpture.
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.