Bloom

3.9.2022

at Kino Šiška

In the summer months, JAŠA was at work on a new project, BLOOM, which is a commemoration of his work in the last decade. BLOOM consists of several segments with its climax culminating on September 3 at Kino Šiška. There, JAŠA populated the entire venue with live events. The program will include dramaturgically related performances, installations and musical performances. Ahead of the event, JAŠA adapted the venue through various artistic interventions, thus enabling visitors to fully immerse themselves in his work.

Most of the content from international projects JAŠA has realized in different parts of the world. At Kino Šiška, re-enacted elements from past works, characterized by interdisciplinary experimentation with techniques and media, were placed in new interactions, developed with new content, and assembled into a cohesive and complex symbolic order, subject to the demanding technical placement of static and kinetic elements. Each element of this structure can be thought of as an independent work within the framework of a particular medium or genre, and their interaction and intersection create a situation of uniqueness and unrepeatability in relation to time and space.

KATEDRALA HALL

10.00–11.00 intro

11.00–14.00 Making It, final individual presentations by participants in the international workshop

14.00–16.00 Walk-in installation BLOOM1

16.00–17.00 B.side Utter Main Session – Junzi Live

17.00–20.00 Walk-in installation BLOOM2 

20.00–21.00 BLOOM side A – concert – KALU & JAŠA

21.30–22.00 BLOOM side B – concert – Bowrain 

KOMUNA HALL

11.00–14.00 Walk-in installation BLOOM3 

14.00–15.00 B.side Utter warm up Session - Junzi Live

15.00–16.30 Bloom - original score

16.30–18.00 Walk-in installation BLOOM4

18.00–19.00 Debris - Live JAŠA

19.00–20.00 Walk-in installation BLOOM5 

23.00–00.00 Walk-in installation BLOOM6 

00.00–02.00 After DJ sets

UPPER LOBBY

11.00–20.00 DEBRIS live sessions (Mario Babojelić & JAŠA)

TERRACE – UNNAME

11.00–12.00 individual performances and situations UNNAME

14.00–15.00 individual performances and situations UNNAME

16.00–17.00 group performances and situations UNNAME

PRODUCERS

Agencija Glasilka, We.are Institute

PARTNERS

CUK Kino Šiška, KiD Pina, Kamizdat, ŠKUC

SUPPORTERS

City of Ljubljana, Triglav

Triglav Insurance

Project segments:

BLOOM album release

JAŠA has always included sound and music in his multimedia projects as an integral part of the overall experience of a work of art. In doing so, he mainly collaborates with the excellent musicians KALU (Luka Uršič) and Bowrain (Tine Grgurevič). A selection of songs and sound installations from this decade-long and extremely fruitful collaboration was published as a new complete album by the Kamizdat label on 24 June in the form of an art book with a USB stick.

The album is a synthesis of ten years of collaboration and association with various artists. It is the fruit of a creative process in which each of those involved faced overcoming their own limitations. An eclectic, polystylistic album was created as a result. Through its sound and music, originally created for art projects, it represents an independent, complete whole, on which loud and intimate tones, instrumental and vocal pieces coexist. -JAŠA 

UNNAME

15. 8.–30. 9. 2022, public spatial installation, Kino Šiška

In front of the Kino Šiška building, where the main event of the project will take place, JAŠA will set up the UNNAME public installation in early August.

UNNAME is the absence of a monument. What we see is merely its structure. This represents the effort of the collective, which is the driver of social progress. The binder of this load-bearing construction is constructive dialogue. The emptiness reverses the perspective and thus the load-bearing structure becomes a monument and a tribute to the unstoppable force of collective action. -JAŠA 

Making It: The Artist's Survival Workshop

21. 8.–3. 9., international workshop, Kino Šiška

As part of the project, JAŠA will lead an international workshop for young artists from all over Europe. The workshop is based on the manual Making It: The Artist's Survival Guide, which he published with Pulitzer Prize finalist Noah Charney in 2021 via the American publishing house, Rowman & Littlefield. After intensive collective and individual work, the participants will be involved in the final event, the BLOOM project at Kino Šiška, where they will present their work to the public.

"Making It: The Artist Survival Guide is a book every true artist cannot but love. It is, of course, impossible to condense the complex process of creativity into the form of 'making it' guides which provide ready-made formulas for success, love life, getting friends, etc. – but for this very reason one should do it. This book gives you the freedom to follow its proposals or to mock them – to mock the rules, the rules should be there. If you do not need a 'making it' guide for your work, you are not an original creative genius, you are an idiot." -Slavoj Žižek

 *

I now disappear

open the window, open the door

so I escape, suck out the fog, the mist in my head

blow off the dust from my lips

.

Installation photos by Nina Shen-Poblete

"Lingering Cut" is a body of new work by JAŠA, commissioned to inaugurate a season of new live-art programs in 2021 called "Lake Lazarillo". Conceived as a complex, multi-dimensional and multi-layered work that unfolds over time, "Lingering Cut" encompasses moving images, site-specific installations, durational and light & amp sound performances, along with an artist lecture held on multiple sites on Tontine Street and the Harbour Arm in June 2021.

Since his first intervention and performance at CT20 in 2017, Jaša’s work bracketed a period of social upheaval and the surge of far-right politics in the West. After the horrors of social distancing and months of isolation due to the pandemic, we re-emerge into a fractured world in which oppressive political alliances have tightened their grips on power. Jaša’s poetic gestures point to the realities in his home country in Slovenia and the urgency of creative resistance, more so than ever. As JAŠA explains, 

"The elements of the story have been spreading out like rooms of a memory palace. Now they are taking shape in real life. The result will be a Munch-like scream within the new normalities of the (post)-COVID societies and menacing options of post-Trump politics in Europe. An expression of a voice that says: 'we will all join the club of the silently screaming, our minds will melt into one loud cry of pure angst.' This will be integrated through the use of various media as 'interventions,' as I like to call them. All of it, the reality, is still made of the same fabric, but something inevitably and undoubtedly has changed under the surface."

‘Lake Lazarillo’ (Jun – Oct 2021) is a radical new programme of Live-Art commissions and a season of talks taking place in the public realms in Folkestone. 'Lazarillo' is a literary reference - to the Spanish picaresque, ‘Lazarillo de Tormes’, published anonymously in 1554. ‘Lazarillo’ refers to a wandering anti-hero; it encompasses the desire to escape and explore. 

Literary outsiders, or anti-heroes, have a long history in all cultures, and this common thread brings together artists from different nationalities to create visions that draw upon diverse cultural references, fictional and real, rhetorical and abstract, finding episodes of familiarity in an estranged landscape. Though the representation of human behaviour in picaresque is often grim, it mostly makes you laugh in bitter recognition.

‘Lake Lazarillo’ is a logical continuation of our picaresque journey, and its subversive echoes resonate as we left 2020 a sea of deafening voices. We enter 2021 with trepidation. Perhaps uncertainty is a virtue of exploration, and not a weakness. It is an opportunity to transcend the complexities and pluralities of current situations. 

Art, like literature, has the language and power we need. Through which, we re-discover kindred spirits who help us to make sense of the terrains – physical, political and psychological on which we stand. Researching for the project, I came across the Chinese author Xun Lu. In a preface he penned to a collection of short stories entitled ‘Na Han’ (translated literally as ‘Shout’ or ‘Call to Arms’) almost 100 years ago in 1922, he described such a sentiment: 

‘…if a man’s proposals meet with approval, it should encourage him; if they met with opposition, it should make him fight back but the real tragedy for him was to lift up his voice among the living and meet with no response, neither approval nor opposition, just as if he were left helpless in boundless desert.’

Lu was writing as a revolutionary with a desire to use art to cure and uplift the ‘human spirit’ at a time of deep crisis, and the anguish he felt when a lone voice is met with the apathy of the dispassionate crowd. A passionate outcry reduced to silence, rendered invisible. Edvard Munch’s haunting self-portrait, ‘The Spanish Influenza’ in 1919 also conjures up an image of chilling despair and peers into the darkest abyss of men. At around similar time, T S Eliot wrote the poem ‘Gerontion’, to convey the impossibility of finding meaning in one’s existence where all system of beliefs had collapsed. Alluding to the heroic failure of the first world war, it set the scene for a powerful vision of despair, where people sleepwalk through their daily lives and where life becomes mechanical and empty, where communications and meanings break down. In this vacuum, Eliot predicted the rise of fanatical ideologies and their power to galvanise a large number of believers to participate in the march of history, which ultimately led to catastrophic chaos and the building of a worse society. 

These dark visions of early 20th century is a nightmare of civilisation and its destruction of humanity, a world which we do not wish to return or repeat. They remind us that our own blindness to injustice had played a part in the blossoming of extreme violence and oppression. 

‘The very sense of loss keeps alive an expectation.’ [Berger] What we are experiencing now is a process of destruction and rebirth accelerated by the pandemic. Change is an inner process that unfolds over time, as we slowly readjust our understanding. We can only look forward, to what lies ahead, at the end of a disaster.

Nina Shen-Poblete

Below is the programme for the live-performance and site-specific installations. 

Below is the programme for the Live Performance & Site-specific Installation:

Live-performance Programme: [broadcast daily on social-media and website]

Mon 21 – Thu 24 June *: Daily performance inside 73 Tontine St, Folkestone (viewable from the street)

Mon 21 – Thu 24 June *: ‘Lingering Cut’ screenings on the Folkestone Harbour Screen (viewable on Folkestone Harbour Arm car park)

Thu 24 June / 6 - 7:30pm: ‘Angst’ Performance, 73 Tontine St, Folkestone (viewable from the street)

Fri 25 June / 5 – 9pm: ‘Lingering Cut’ Installation Opening, 73 Tontine St (Mill Bay entrance), Folkestone (max 6 ppl)

Fri 25 June / ­7 - 8pm: Artist Lecture, 73 Tontine St (Mill Bay entrance), Folkestone (an intimate evening with the artist - spaces are highly limited & booking is essential**)

Site-specific Installation:

Sat 26 June – Sun 25 July / Thu – Sun 11am – 5pm: Installation opens to the public (private tour with max of 6 ppl booking is essential**)

* Spontaneous actions without prescribed time or duration

** You can book via website www.hopprojects.org