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PRESENT STATE
Jasmina Cibic and Pete Moss.

‘Present State’ features new works by London based artists Jasmina Cibic and Pete Moss. Both artists’ practices foreground infiltration as an artistic strategy, creating photographic and video works which playfully re-configure existing apparatuses of authority in the creation of the artists’ own counter myths.

The images in this exhibition were captured in various sites and situations in Ljubljana, the capital of Slovenia. Slovenia is the economic front-runner of the countries that joined the European Union in 2004. It will be the first new member state to hold the Presidency of the Council of the European Union in the first half of 2008. It is also a country which is currently re-contextualising it’s political heritage, re-branding it’s past and present to embellish it’s position as a new capitalist democracy within the EU. In ‘Present State’ the artists use this fertile ground of national re-invention, specifically addressing the use of event, pose and uniform as evidence of authority.

Works by Jasmina Cibic focus on the primary site of international arrival and departure from the country’s capital, Joze Pucnik Ljubljana Airport. On the 11th and 12th of July this year, as part of her site specific intervention at the airport, Cibic got the Slovene Police Orchestra to perform a newly commissioned arrangement of Donna Summer’s “I Feel Love”. Her choice of song reflects the words of a new Slovenian national slogan, recently coined by a government think tank. Along with video documentation of one of these performances, Cibic exhibits a large scale photographic image of a uniformed brass band, flanking a red carpet entrance to a plane sitting on an one of the airport’s runways.

Pete Moss’s works create a photographic visual fantasy in which as he plays the role of journalist/television presenter, interviewing members of the Slovenian artist group ‘Passaporta’. In these scenes, photographed in a Slovenian television studio, the members of ‘Passaporta’, wear costumes combining military and airline uniform designs which were originally created for use in the group’s performances, photographic and video works. Emulating the camera angles used in classic TV studio programmes, Moss as “the interviewer “ re-configures Passaporta’s fictional world with his new meta-fiction.

Pete Moss completed an MA in Fine Art at Goldsmiths College London in 2007. He is currently exhibiting works from his project ‘Director’s Shots’ and their counterpoint ‘Location Shots’ in ‘Lens Eye View’ at Fifty Three gallery in London. Other recent exhibitions include: ‘Isabelle Huppert a Woman of Many Faces’ , PS1 Gallery, New York; ‘Summer Daze’ , South London Gallery, London; ‘Social Ocean’, Temporary Contemporary, London.

Slovenian born Jasmina Cibic has been living in London since 2003. She graduated with an A in Fine Art from Goldsmith College in 2006. Recent exhibitions include; ‘PILOT 3’, Venice, Italy; ‘Land(e)scape’, Künstlerhaus, Graz; ; ‘Visitour’, Galerija Ganes Pratt, Ljubljana (solo show). ‘Bad Girls & Bad Boys II’, City Museum, Ljubljana.

For more information and images contact the curator, Michelle Deignan: presentstate@michelledeignan.info

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Links:

www.michelledeignan.info
www.jasminacibic.org
petemoss.co.uk