Tadej Vaukman: Spaghetti Boys
6 January 2016 – 28 January 2016
P74 Gallery, Trg Prekomorskih brigad 1, Ljubljana
You are cordially invited to the opening of the exhibition Spaghetti Boys by Tadej Vaukman on Wednesday, 6 January 2016 at 19.00 at the P74 Gallery in Ljubljana.
Tadej Vaukman, Spaghetti Boys, 2015
Tadej Vaukman began taking photos in a time when, as a member of various bands, he was travelling throughout Europe and started using a camera to document everything around him. The documentary approach has remained of key importance for his work, in this frame, he is primarily interested in the direct reality, banality and rawness of everyday life.
“I love the whole chaos in front of the camera, I love the truth, I love the simplicity and stupidity and I love beer. Who knows, maybe tomorrow I’ll ask you if you would love to jerk off a baseball bat or a dildo in front of me, I don’t know. I wanna see so much stuff, but I can’t see it anywhere. Things are getting boring for me. I have to spice up this shit. I wanna see people cry, I wanna see people being what they fucking are, I wanna see you when you are angry and happy. And I wanna make you feel good …” (Tadej Vaukman).
His most popular motifs are scenes from everyday life taken at parties, concerts, exhibitions, and as such he also documents the most typical things from his own daily life. Regardless of the choice of motif, his photography is always marked by an unmediated immediacy; he never attempts to comment upon, aestheticise or objectivify the events, in short, he doesn’t distance himself from them in any way, but instead remains stubbornly amid them with his camera – amid whatever would be bound to happen anyway.
On the basis of these items arose the exhibition entitled Spaghetti Boys, a result of several months that the artist spent documenting his life and the lives of a group of his friends. The artist’s starting point was the question: “What do the Spaghetti Boys do when they aren’t eating spaghetti?”
The exhibited works, of course, do not offer an unambiguous and definitive answer to the question, rather, they only open up an insight that activates the viewer’s curiosity and imagination, encouraging one to find the answer oneself.
In the technical sense Vaukman began documenting by using a classic VHS camera, the recordings that were created with it were the basis for the works presented in the exhibition.
The exhibition comprises three parts: videos made from field recordings upgraded with songs sung and played by the artist himself; photographs made from screenshots of the videos in digital format; and fanzines, as a collage of the printed photographs.
The artist embarked on the project mainly from his own interest in the connection between different media such as video, photographs and fanzines. In particular, how these media complete – or exclude – one another, that is, how it is possible with their help to express the same content in different ways. To summarize, as a photographer, he is interested in how to “freeze the moments from life” that remain “captured on a film track” and then to connect those moments together into a new whole that will “come to live its own life” independent of the author. The exhibition as a rounded whole undoubtedly shows that the artist has succeeded in the project, at least from the standpoint of a consumer of art; how much has been lost (or even gained) through that process of “translating”, the spaghetti boys will have to say for themselves.
Mojca Grmek