DIPLOMATIC ART: DIPLOMATIC ART 2015, 3rd event

DIPLOMATIC ART 2015, 2nd edition, at Bastionul Theresia (Muzeul Banatului), opening on November 25th - part 2.
Part 1 can be accessed here:
http://diplomatic-art.blogspot.ro/2015/12/diplomatic-art-2015-3rd-event-bastionul.html

Participating artists (with their works and concept presentations):

SUNIL PADWAL (India) http://www.sunilpadwal.com

In Intertwined Plasticity, Sunil Padwal reflects on the unsettling nature of contemporary urban life through a series of complex drawings merged with photographs. The artist suggests that not only are we unable to escape from the grip of our everyday reality, we have also become passive observers, unable to question our experiences. The drawings layer abstract lines and forms with simplified architectural imagery. This multiple layering recreates an environment under construction, partly built and partly destroyed where both the past and the future are equally struggling to emerge. Growing up in the dense and congested by-lanes of South Mumbai Padwal formed a deep connection to the streets, their objects, animals and social dramas as they unfolded in the streets. Padwal’s understanding of modernity as uncertainty and illusion is grounded in these experiences of the streets. The emotional pull of these experiences is reflected in the artist’s contemporary concerns and his relationship to the mundane objects and machines that formed a vital part of that milieu.

Sunil Padwal – Intertwined Plasticity, digital print, 21 x 29,7 cm, 2015

TONI PECORARO (Italia) http://www.tonipecoraro.it
“At a first, quick reading, it becomes clear that the main theme of Toni Pecoraro's entire artistic creation is represented by the labyrinth. This particular structure is so often depicted by the artist that it becomes his personal style, recognizable even without his signature. It is not the refined and complex engraving technique, a skillful combination of etching, aquatint and soft ground, or the bold manipulation of materials that leads us in giving a safe paternity to his works, but rather the predominant presence of the labyrinth (...).” (Remo Palmirani)

Toni Pecoraro – Labirintoegiziano,

etching, aquatint, soft-ground etching, 50 x 63,5 cm, 2009

KRISTINA PULEJKOVA (Macedonia) http://www.kristinapulejkova.com/

Bioluminescence is a work that looks at the luminous mechanisms of sea planktons, and humankind’s dependency of these lowest food chain level organisms.

Kristina Pulejkova – Bioluminescence,

Yarn, textile, EL Wire, batteries, mains, latex, 90 x 10 x 120 cm, 2015

RETI SAKS (Estonia) www.reti.ee

Digital world in my prints - Copperdisk is like a screen, very sensitive touchscreen. I project on it secretive words of computers and try to arrange them into an image. I acid-save them onto the metallic drive. Then the imprint is printed on the paper, and I sign it, with capslock. I also digit it, so I can upload it to my PC, to be sent to the cloud, so everybody else could see it. Sometimes I make selfies in intaglio, black and white, in landscape format, and send them off to the digital world, to take on life of their own. Printed image, classical intaglio, takes on the content and flare of the modern computer art and digital image gets deeply tainted by black paint. Digital art being back at the roots. And I have made a print of IT.

Reti Saks – Let it Go, dry point, 50,5 x 64,5 cm, 2014

LAURENT MIGNONNEAU (Fance) and CHRISTA SOMMERER (Austria) http://www.interface.ufg.ac.at/christa-laurent/

Portrait on the Fly consists of a series of interactive portraits, plotter drawings and video sequences of well-known media art experts.

Portrait on the Fly (Interactive Version) is composed of a monitor that shows a swarm of ten thousand flies. When a person positions himself in front of it, the insects try to detect his facial features. They then begin to arrange themselves so as to reproduce them, thereby creating a recognizable likeness of the individual. Posing in front of the monitor attracts the flies. Within seconds they invade the face, but even the slightest movement of the head or of parts of the face drives them off. The portraits are thus in constant flux, they construct and deconstruct. Portrait on the Fly is a commentary on our love for making pictures of ourselves (Selfie-Culture), it has to do with change, transience and impermanence.

Portrait on the Fly (Plotter Drawings) is a series of plotter drawings. Snapshots of the digital fly portraits are printed out as 1960s plotter-style drawings. Ephemeral moments of interaction are thereby secured in the form of graphical drawings. The first of them is an autoportrait of Sommerer & Mignonneau. The series include portraits of important media art experts, theorists and artists. The aim is to conserve original and precious images of the historic figures who are involved in media art – an ephemeral field that is obsessed with novelty and change.

Portrait on the Fly (Video Portraits) consists of short video sequences where the moving portrait of well known media art pioneers, scholars, artists, theorist, gallerist and organizers are turned into a swarm of flies. These video sequences include portraits by Christiane Paul, Sarah Diamond, Peter Weibel, Peter d’Agostino, Frieder Nake, Mark Wilson, Hans Dehlinger, Hannes Leopoldseder, Christine Schöpf, Edmond Couchot, Marie Hélène Tramus, Nina Czeglédy, Gerfried Stocker, Oliver Grau, Maurice Benayoun, Paul Thomas, Jill Scott, Paul Sermon, Simon Biggs, Greg Garvey, Jean-Luc Soret, Chu-Yin Chen, Dominique Moulon, Ellen Pau, Valérie Hasson-Benillouche, Wolf Lieser, Dierk Maass, Antoinette Airoldi, Anita Beckers, Georg Peithner-Lichtenfels, among many others. It is a growing personal archive of media art experts, who from Sommerer & Mignonneau’s personal point of view, significantly contribute to the development and acceptance of media art within contemporary art.

Laurent Mignonneau and Christa Sommerer – Portrait on the Fly

(Video Portraits), sequence, 2014/2015

JELENA SREDANOVIĆ (Serbia) http://jelenasredanovic.com/

Imprint of Nature - Have you ever looked for reflections in the window? How many times have you observed your face in the mirror or on the water surface? The title of the series in itself - Impressions of Nature - points to the conceptual reflection of my work, in which can be seen a focus on natural phenomena and changes in the submerged, transient. I take as my starting point a motif from reality, in this case the reflection of tree branches in puddles after a rainfall.(...) I create the subtle transparency of my prints by using a sensitive Japanese paper, which is part of this essentially poetic creative concept. The colors from nature are, as it were, shrouded in a veil of dream, while multilayered aspect of the impression is created not on the paper but in the viewer’s eye, through the optical interweaving of the colors. The “layers” are physically separate and can exist independently, but in their interaction with other layers they became part of a greater whole. In the careful process of stratification and combination, the impressions construct a common field, a world of mutual visual influences, through their “dialogic” relationship and visual exchange. My aim is to bring the contemporary man or woman, surrounded by the disturbing political happenings of the day and the endless commotion of traffic, back to the beginning for at least a moment, to harmony and the cosmic concord between humanity and nature.

Jelena Sredanović – Drops and shadows, woodcut, 70x100 cm, 2008

SUN YOUNG KANG (South Korea) http://sunyoungkang.com

Filtered Memories - This project, which represents traditional ancestral rite, is personally giving my father’s diary a rebirth and let his voice be heard visually and silently and evoking the spirit like what my ancestors and parents have done in their ancestral rites. Through my working process, I have been part of the circulation or replacement in the family. When lit, text casts shadows. Light creates shadow just as life creates death. My story is about the endless circulation of life. Death is not the end, but the other side of life and a part of it. The lost come back as a memory.

Sun Young Kang - Filtered Memories, Incense burning,

transfer print on Sekishu rolls (Japanes paper), variable size, 2007

BEATRIZ VALIENTE (Spain) http://www.beatrizvaliente.com/

I have been working over the years with different concepts on Nature and Landscape, through the experimentation with the different disciplines of drawing, painting, printmaking and sculpture. The series “New Species” started to take shape in my mind after seeing part of the collection of coral and marine forms at the Natural History Museum. This personal laboratory is shown as a taxidermy dissection (a dissection of species), created by multiple lines and cells representing the internal anatomy of organic formations growing in my mind as a studio of new imaginary collections between reality and dream.

Beatriz Valiente – New Specie II, watercolour, 70 x 50 cm, 2015

LENKA VILHELMOVA (Czech Republic) http://www.vilhelmova.cz

Conceptual project called Way Home - time-lapse photographic material of imagination landscape - its annual variable form, accompanied by loose objects in the main forms of material from rubber trees. Time as a phenomenon, linear dimension, the present becomes the past, and the future presence.

Lenka Vilhelmova – Way Home (Head),

Polyester-Giesharz, gumtree, 24 x 25 x 19 cm, 2015

ZSOLT ASZTALOS (Hungary) http://asztaloszsolt.com/

My story - my version: „Storytelling is the philosophy of the things that have happened.” – wrote Egon Friedell. Every story is born to an individual, however much the writer struggles to achieve scientific objectivity. The memories of the past are like separate musical notes, which we make into a melody in a certain era and put down in a sheet of music. Each era has its own melody. Each historical memory is waiting to be conceived by the future, so that a reality is formed. The way of thinking about the past or a canon can be formed or changed, as it is not exclusively about the original truth but about ourselves.