Aquart - sopart

Vlado Repnik Gotvan’s newest project is focused on further development of his interdisciplinary studies wherein he tries to unlock the questions of time, memory, body, transitory nature of human existence, obliteration, etc…. His project, which one could define as a collective gesture or a joint venture of involvement and co-participation, could at the same be seen as a theatre play, an exhibition, a performance, an interactive installation, lays bare some of the most relevant questions concerning the placement of human body in a technological environment. Repnik’s piece is represented through a form of a huge transparent cube with an installed water heater inside of it, which generates steam and constantly blurs viewers’ vision of what is happening inside the box. The cube is a space in which bodies sweat, lose balance and fall because of the movement of the cube. A part of the project is intended for the spectators who enter the cube and adapt to the technological environment. Repnik himself within the cube enacts the performance in which he paints the dewy walls of the cube. The continually produced vapours keep erasing the images that Repnik is drawing and the spectator must retrace them time and again in her memory.

Repnik radically demonstrates that transitoriness is a characteristic not only of language and performing arts but also of visual arts. The outside of the cube functions as a lighthouse of sorts: it reflects the light and the images projected onto it, it returns the memories back to the place where they came from – to the gaze of the spectator. The spectator is thus put into the position of someone who projects something onto the artwork and the artist, but who in turn encounters precisely that which emanates from her gaze – the gaze itself. Aquart opens up one of the key questions of contemporary art – the question of positioning. The art of the twenty-first century cannot be positioned unproblematically within a certain field, discipline, territory or stylistic formation. The positioning of art nowadays needs to be understood in terms of transitions between liminal spaces. The materials, the methods of work and the logic of performance used in Aquart are manifestations of such transitions with all their pertaining intervals and pauses.

By Vlado G. Repnik
Collaborators: Robert Klančnik, Stefan Doepner, Igor Štromajer, Janko Mandić, Gorazd Borucky and Lana Katarina Gotvan with friends.
Opening steam: June 3, 2005 at The Rotovž Exhibition Salon in Maribor