Eva Lucija Kozak and Adrijan Praznik: Dezemberausstellung (16.12 – 23.12. 2015, top e.V., Toppalais, Berlin)

Eva Lucija Kozak’s and Adrijan Praznik’s exhibition Dezemberausstellung faces two very different art practices that together form an interesting comment about contemporary society.

INVITATON

TEXT DezemberausstellungEva Lucija Kozak’s and Adrijan Praznik’s exhibition Dezemberausstellung faces two very different art practices that together form an interesting comment about contemporary society. The artists are from Ljubljana, Slovenia. Currently they are involved in an artist-in-residence program of the Slovene Ministry of Culture run in Berlin.

Eva Lucija Kozak’s work is focused on an individual and his/hers identity changes. She discusses personal relationships in contemporary society especially the feelings of inadequacy, incompetence and alienation. Her works act as comments and consequences of critical recognition of social phenomena which are intensified and summarized in a kind of structured abstract. At the Dezemberausstellung Eva Lucija Kozak faces the viewer with various scenes of imaginary relationship that has no active other as well as she discusses the influence of instructions and recommendations about private decisions. Desire for personal contact, its development and the inability to establish interpersonal relationships link contradictions of narcissism, individualism and cooperation.

Praznik’s video installation One Size Fits All addresses the carrying role of institutional systems that are being taken over by corporate entities, increasingly able to control our everyday realities, perpetuating the existing relations of power. The corporate networks allow the accumulation of power by establishing relationships of inequality through the bureaucratic mechanisms upon which the individual is becoming increasingly dependent. The artist sees it like this: „In the so-called developed world, we no longer fight our battles in the fields. Our fights are taking place within institutions (in shopping malls, banks, health-care centres, etc.).“ One Size Fits All highlight the rise of various forms of violence as a symptom of contemporary society.