Artist

Miroslav Prvulj (1979)

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Miroslav Prvulj and Snjezana Torbica: Digital Prints

Author: Ivana Benović (1983)

Function of one typical postmodern computer program like PhotoShop, in which one can modify photography, is the capability to modify reality in such a manner that the new produced version, as a final outcome of intervention, matches the idea of the one who controls the program. Surrealists were first to discover the potential of intervention on the photography as the only (at the time) medium that could literally imitate reality. They discovered the possibilities of language games and they created confusing effects that were in contradiction with what was expected of the media. PhotoShop is used today in advertising industry with ideas opposite to those of the surrealists - its goal is not to deconstruct reality but to create one simulated reality, as Baudrillard said, simulated, hyper-real world which is more beautiful than the Beautiful and more real than the Real. It is the world of mass consumption and domination of media images, the world which is shaped by postmodern consumer economy which imposes patterns to which we should adjust. In this world, woman is just an image from a magazine, she is a sexual object of male desire or a role model for other women. As a feminist, she is still fighting against the world imposed and shaped, as history teaches us, by those men. In this world, village does not exist because the rural economy is based on outdated model of production which satisfies needs and produces nothing new. Village exists only as ethno-village shaped by consumer politics of tourism and represented as idealistic mythical landscape of "untouched" nature and folk costumes which actually exist only in commercials and folklore ensembles.



Unexpected combinations are part of the interventions on Miroslav Prvulj's prints, such as transformation of furniture in a rural household into a musical instruments or corn that carries the architectural construction. Humor and parody represent critical response to questions concerning the place of village and rural production of "goods" in the postmodern world. In this case, the prints represent an image of a wider project of inclusion of village into cultural offer. Aim of this project is to extract village from its mythical existence on the level of nostalgia, because nostalgia is supported by those structures which pushed out the manufacture production of commodity and introduced us with the production of ideas and information. Neglected as a socially relevant unit, village is activated within the cultural offer. The artist puts himself in a role of an inter-mediator (tour guide) who takes his intimate interests - derived from his own background and reflection of self-identity - as artworks, transforming them into cultural-engaged work. By transferring functionality into domain of aesthetics, rural production is placed into cultural context, thus showing one possible future for its survival within the needs of modern world.



In addition to possibilities of PhotoShop, Snjezana Torbica is using yet another advantage of computer technology. This option is Ctrl+Alt+Delete, which restarts the condition that no longer works well. In other words, it is an option which enables process to start all over again. If history - one that is relevant for us and important only to us - is in fact our knowledge and perception of it, than we are talking about one possible version of history, which also allows the assumption (therefore the existence) of other possible histories. Snjezana Torbica restarts at the beginning of a such history, the history of which we do not have a clear idea, the one which begins there where structures based on a matriarchal social order still rule, and where woman is the primordial being connected by her senses to the natural elements that constitute the world. Her social role is not constructed in a relation to the opposite sex; she doesn't fight for her rights because her rights have never been taken; she is a powerful, self-sufficient being who, as such, is even more intimidating than Klimt's syphilitic famme fatale, because she doesn't count on the wellknown order of things. That is why there is this strange effect of pictures in which she exists. If the simulation, taking the character of reality, is actually hiding (by Baudrillard) that there is nothing behind it, what is than behind PhotoShop intervention which does not hide behind an image of reality?



Ivana Benovic

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