Vikenti Komitski
30 Apr - 23 May 2015
VIKENTI KOMITSKI
Update
30 April – 23 May 2015
Vikenti Komitski is showing with Update his first solo exhibition in the Galerie Krinzinger/Galerie im Parterre. 2011 the Bulgarian Artist was part of the exhibition Zwischenlager in the Krinzinger Projekte curated by Rene Block and was invited for the artist in residence program in Vienna and Hungary. (Works from his residency in Hungary are currently exhibited at Krinzinger Projekte: Artist in Residence 2013/14, until May 2). In this exhibition there are besides the installation Still Walking also collages from the series Abject to be seen. In this show Vikenti Komitski is analyzing the social circumstances based on the circumstances of mass production.
“How to be late for the end of history?
While everybody seems to have agreed on the ridiculousness of Francis Fukuyama's thesis on the 'end of history', this exhibition once again takes the questions implicit to this diagnosis seriously. According to Fukuyama global capitalism puts an end to all possible antagonisms and by doing so to the very process of the dialectical becoming of history. If that's the case, what awaits us now is the endless repetition and remix of what has already been, a kind of eternal Déjà-vu of history's elements. We could expect nothing new within this horizon. No event to break the circle. The works in this exhibition are bringing up the question, what happens to the arts and the (art) history viewed from the post history point of view and are trying to evoke a kind of futuristic historicity, where the one-dimensional term of history becomes multidimensional, where the 'universal' history splits in so many singular histories. Updated histories. Haunted by the past's continuation within the present and the present's backlash on the past. Haunted by so many specters. Like in that W. Gibson novel where the dead continue to live the cyberspace, (art) history's images return to 'live' in a new context.
The key work (Still Walking) is an installation made of multiple plastic figures reminiscent to a series of sculptures from Alberto Giacometti. While my figures in appearance still resemble Giacometti's Walking Man, they differ completely in their own 'history', in the process of production they went through. Giacometti's Walking Man has thus been transposed from the realm of the artist as creator with his powerful form-giving craftsmanship to the most advanced, fully technological and automatic mode of production; from the individual to the faceless multiplicity; and finally from old-Europe to one of the new centers of the world, China. Giacometti's Walking Man return in this new context of mass-production as zombies, still walking, but as de-individualized, automatized shadows of a non-finite past haunting the present. Here the work of Giacometti is transformed into an ambiguous sign, hieroglyphic symbol or Emoji.”
Angelika Seppi, Vikenti Komitski
Vikenti Komitski was born in 1983 in Sofia, lives and works in Berlin. After his graduation at the Fine Art School in Sofia he studied at the National Academy of Fine Arts at the Sculpture Department. Besides solo exhibitions in Bulgaria his works were part of group shows like Places of Transition, Freiraum, Museumsquartier, Vienna, 2014, curated by Walter Seidl and Gulsen Bal and Balkon zum Balkan, Kunsthalle Baden Baden, 2014, curated by Ksenja Cocova.
Update
30 April – 23 May 2015
Vikenti Komitski is showing with Update his first solo exhibition in the Galerie Krinzinger/Galerie im Parterre. 2011 the Bulgarian Artist was part of the exhibition Zwischenlager in the Krinzinger Projekte curated by Rene Block and was invited for the artist in residence program in Vienna and Hungary. (Works from his residency in Hungary are currently exhibited at Krinzinger Projekte: Artist in Residence 2013/14, until May 2). In this exhibition there are besides the installation Still Walking also collages from the series Abject to be seen. In this show Vikenti Komitski is analyzing the social circumstances based on the circumstances of mass production.
“How to be late for the end of history?
While everybody seems to have agreed on the ridiculousness of Francis Fukuyama's thesis on the 'end of history', this exhibition once again takes the questions implicit to this diagnosis seriously. According to Fukuyama global capitalism puts an end to all possible antagonisms and by doing so to the very process of the dialectical becoming of history. If that's the case, what awaits us now is the endless repetition and remix of what has already been, a kind of eternal Déjà-vu of history's elements. We could expect nothing new within this horizon. No event to break the circle. The works in this exhibition are bringing up the question, what happens to the arts and the (art) history viewed from the post history point of view and are trying to evoke a kind of futuristic historicity, where the one-dimensional term of history becomes multidimensional, where the 'universal' history splits in so many singular histories. Updated histories. Haunted by the past's continuation within the present and the present's backlash on the past. Haunted by so many specters. Like in that W. Gibson novel where the dead continue to live the cyberspace, (art) history's images return to 'live' in a new context.
The key work (Still Walking) is an installation made of multiple plastic figures reminiscent to a series of sculptures from Alberto Giacometti. While my figures in appearance still resemble Giacometti's Walking Man, they differ completely in their own 'history', in the process of production they went through. Giacometti's Walking Man has thus been transposed from the realm of the artist as creator with his powerful form-giving craftsmanship to the most advanced, fully technological and automatic mode of production; from the individual to the faceless multiplicity; and finally from old-Europe to one of the new centers of the world, China. Giacometti's Walking Man return in this new context of mass-production as zombies, still walking, but as de-individualized, automatized shadows of a non-finite past haunting the present. Here the work of Giacometti is transformed into an ambiguous sign, hieroglyphic symbol or Emoji.”
Angelika Seppi, Vikenti Komitski
Vikenti Komitski was born in 1983 in Sofia, lives and works in Berlin. After his graduation at the Fine Art School in Sofia he studied at the National Academy of Fine Arts at the Sculpture Department. Besides solo exhibitions in Bulgaria his works were part of group shows like Places of Transition, Freiraum, Museumsquartier, Vienna, 2014, curated by Walter Seidl and Gulsen Bal and Balkon zum Balkan, Kunsthalle Baden Baden, 2014, curated by Ksenja Cocova.