Vesna Bukovec

Clarity is everything right now

Year: 2010
Type: solo exhibition (video, prints)

Exhibition title: Vesna Bukovec, Clarity is everything right now / Jasnost je v tem trenutku zelo pomembna
Location: KAPSULA, Podhod Ajdovščina 1, 1000 Ljubljana
Date: October 14 – 28, 2010

The soft, unbroken line of the drawings in the series Their True Nature, by Vesna Bukovec, complements the texts and heightens the tension in the meaning of the words and the lines of the letters. The drawings are restrained and quiet, but in a certain way also very precise and demanding, for they require a special attitude of the viewer. But the drawings are not directly connected with the meaning of the texts in any way we usually expect, namely, that the picture illustrates the writing or that the writing explains the picture. The texts use the third person singular instead of the second-person direct address customary in horoscopes. As a result, we find ourselves in an ambivalent position: on the one hand, we are looking at drawings that are not signs from the zodiac, and on the other, at texts, and are unable to come fully to terms with either. We want the texts to describe the drawings even though we realize that the drawings do not illustrate them. These works’ humorous, even absurd, character, which reminds us of fables, pulls us into a spiral of meanings that volley back and forth from picture to text, and the resulting vortex causes a change in our viewpoint because of the moral that is absent.

The drawings are accompanied by the minute-long video Personal Advice, which presents the text of Bukovec’s horoscope in English. The text has been translated from English into Slovene and back again by the Google Translate program and is also read out loud by computer software. Although it distances itself in this way from the original, it nevertheless preserves some of the characteristic features of personality tests and motivational methodologies.

Excerpt from the text by Jernej Kožar
[full text (eng) / besedilo (slo)]

www.zavod-parasite.si
www.kapsula.si