Marek Kvetan Loading

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  Loading Marek Kvetan

  November 9 - December 22, 2017

  The word "súsek" speaks little in Slovakia. At one time, it belonged to every household. The young girls carefully prepared the equipment. With love and expectation they sew and embroider. And they were dreaming. From time to time, the lid lifted. They picked the contents before they touched very carefully with their hand, enjoying their treasures. They hid their case to a safe space. Súsek. Hardwood, without a single wedge or other piece of metal. An archaic shape unfolding from antiquity. Richly decorated with a geometrically ornamented geometric ornament, rarely a figure or a plant motif. Engraved year of marriage. For life. Often the most precious piece of new-wife furniture. Safe for the most valuable. Size was a matter of social status. But the time has changed. The cases have been emptied. They were still serving grain. It last remnants were finished by the mice. And then, somewhere, they wait until the wilderness or rot, or in the best case they will fall in dust in the ethnographic collection of a museum, or nostalgically to impose as an impractical interior decoration.

  Or not. Several kilometers of optical cables, 15,400 light-years in Slavonic colors, revive the original ornament in the modern arrangement. As in the new arrangement, the folklore musical tradition is alive, two times: first in the form of new modifications in the compositions of professionals, which later become the matrix for experimental electro-acoustic compositions. Here even the musical-visual. But we still hear unique folk instruments. Voices and motifs come to life, intertwine, and they hurt and go out. Even they are not totally alien to the little human imperfection. Only the tooth of time has not yet fretted them.

  The work is a counterpart to the author's older work Carpet (several variants have been created). Rolled plastic IKEA rug, Oriental motif, roughly stained with colored bulbs, unlike fine optical tissue, the gut of exposed sections. And to that strange musical herb. Soft Versus Hard, Natural Versus Synthetic, Handheld Versus Machine Product, Old Authentic Versus New Syncretic. The artwork of the carpet refers back to the past as well as to the present. Ottomans Empire crossed the border of Slovakia, the boundary of the Christian and Muslim world. The chain, mostly just the ruins of the guard castles, reminds that even then the country had to be protected from the Muslim invasion. This richly decorated chest, made of hand-sculpted wood, survived the difficult times, packed with electronics, which features music that inspires archaic musical and visual motifs and instruments with a new one. All this refers to another, more open and self-confident, past, presence. And so the future.

  Marek Kvetan (*1976, Bratislava), a graduate of the Academy of Fine Arts in Bratislava, is a distinctive figure of Slovakia’s middle generation who has also established himself in Central Europe. Upon completion of his studies, he profiled himself as a multimedia artist in the field of digital media (manipulative photography, video-compressions, interactive installations, Mr. Bra project etc.). In the course of a decade we can see a certain retreat from his dematerialized positions and a stabilization of spatial and material outputs. In 2007, he began to intensively develop his post-conceptual thinking and focus on threshold 3D implementations and model situations. He vigorously formats moderate material inputs and achieves a saturated visual environment which triggers mental processes. He prefers a parallel construction of reality and analytical sequenced language while generating his own data formulas and situations.

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